Women's Pentagon Action: The Persistence of Radicalism and Direct‐Action Civil Disobedience in the Age of Reagan

Abstract

This article investigates the Women's Pentagon Action (WPA), a feminist antinuclear organization that was part of the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. The women involved in the WPA identified themselves as “ecofeminists.” They combined certain tenets of feminism and ecology to create a philosophy that identified women closely with nature and linked patriarchal oppression of women with destruction of the earth and degradation of the environment. Ecofeminists believed that because women had a unique connection to the natural world, they had an important responsibility to speak out against patriarchal domination and ecological destruction. Because they shared a closeness with nature and the environment, WPA activists believed they must work to protect the earth and prevent ecological destruction. WPA activists expressed a distinctly feminist critique of the cold war nuclear arms race and sought to preserve their vision of ecological activism. Their story, therefore, offers a bridge between Reagan‐era American feminism, environmental activism, and the major anti‐nuclear movement of the late twentieth century.