Hannah

“I would say I was raised very feminist. The family has a double-barreled surname because my folks hyphenated their names to negotiate the whole names and marriage thing. (Pro tip: don’t hyphenate – people will assume you’re really posh, and if both names are unusual you’ll spend the rest of your life spelling it out to people.)

“I always identified with feminism and was never scared of the word.  I was brought up to believe I could do anything I wanted and my mom made a point of giving me and my brother equal access to all types of toys – like having boy dolls as well as girl dolls. She also always named sexism where she saw it. This was a real gift because growing up I saw sexism as a bad thing and a lazy assumption, rather than just the status quo.

“As I’ve grown up I’ve realised retrospectively just how rad my mom was – she went to Greenham Common, she bought Spare Rib magazine, she had rainbow shoelaces (which I’ve stolen) – but also I’m profoundly grateful that she never ever let me become fucked up about food and body image, or to correlate body-image with self-worth. I really feel like I’ve dodged a massive bullet with that one and am a lot better off than many women because of it.

Love you, Mom (now quit pestering me about grandkids).”

Rai

“My Mum didn’t really raise me in a ‘feminist way’, but the cumulative actions of my parents together has helped to shape my views on the world and, more specifically the concept of equality.  As I understand it, my Mum took time off work to look after me when I was very little and after my brother was born too, but when he was old enough, Mum and Dad essentially swapped.  Mum went back to working in the City and Dad became a househusband right up until I was 12 years old.  Having a mother who worked full time in London and a stay-at-home dad is bound to have an effect (insert some philosophical/psychological insight into strong independent female figures and role models), but that wasn’t the only thing.

“My parents told me once that before they had me (their first child) they sat down and made the time to discuss and agree that there would be no greater importance placed on one parent or the other based on their gender.  So if Mum was looking after us and we did something naughty, there would be no ‘just you wait until your Father gets home!’ threat of punishment… you just got punished by whichever parent was there.  Or, indeed, my Grandma when we lived with her for a while (who is also a huge influence on my feminist tendencies).”

Viktoriya

“Let’s be clear on one thing: my mother (who is Bulgarian) is a farmer’s daughter. Whatever else she became later on, she can still kill and pluck a chicken, cure many common ailments with mysterious herbs, and pick tobacco leaves with her bare hands (no lie: she still has the scars). Of course, that’s not all she is. For one thing, when the local doctor decided to try bloodletting to cure my infant aunt’s colic, my mother snatched her from the doctor’s hands and ran away with her, reasoning that the doctor was a fool and that at nine years old she was clearly more qualified to treat her sister. (Who was fine, by the way, due in no small measure to my mother’s interference.) By the time my mother was thirteen, she had outgrown her local village school, and so she simply packed her bags and moved out of the family home to a nearby city to continue her education.

“At eighteen, when the rest of her friends were getting married and having children, she stayed resolutely single and enrolled at a university instead. A few years later she scandalised polite society by taking up with an older divorcee who – shockingly – was both Armenian and a dissident. When he set off to sea in that dreadfully romantic way that makes sense only in films, she ran the household, raised two children, led the local community group and dealt with the persistent interest of the secret police. She taught me to cook, and to sew, and to knit, and explained that while it was nice to see my father every once in a while, fundamentally I’d have to be prepared to run a household – a community – a country – all by myself.

(The one thing she ever forbade me to do was to become an accountant. Her reason? “Boring.”)

“In this different country, with Communism a fading memory from far away, my mother blends into the background, no different from any of the millions of women in our cities and villages. But when the light is right, and if you know how to look, she is still the twenty-year-old in the pictures: the one with the long hair and the wide smile, who shimmied down the side of a building to sneak away from the secret police and escape, laughing, on the back of her dissident lover’s motorcycle.

I think we can all be grateful she decided to be a mother, rather than an Evil Overlady.

As for the accountancy? I hate to say it, but I should have listened to my mother.”

Greenham Common was, by all accounts, something epic: a peaceful campaign of sustained, cooperative occupation by women against the bomb – and it worked. From 1981 to 2000 the camp, based around RAF Greenham Common military base in Berkshire, protested the presence of the (American) nuclear weapons held there – and eventually the weapons were removed.

Sidenote: on one occasion I went there in utero. How awesomecool is my momma?

Greenham Common had been an RAF base since 1941, and an American airbase since 1968. When the US moved 96 cruise missiles there in 1980, the protest began – forming properly in 1981. For years women, and their children too, lived in a makeshift camp in all weathers. Much like the Mothers of the Disappeared protest in South America, Greenham Common used the concept of maternal authority to lend weight to their campaign. The women of Greenham Common were not protesting just for themselves, but for everyone – for their children’s future, and for everyone else’s. They hammered this home with slogans like ‘when I grow up I want to be alive’ – and children’s clothes and children’s art were often part of the decorations tied along the fences.

Some children lived in the camp, too. I’m afraid this is where my statistics gets a bit fuzzy because over 19 years, and through different seasons, it probably changed more than a bit.

My mother reports the place was often a carnival:

…there were the usual collections of street performers and puppet shows to cheer us on… people on decorated bikes, that kind of thing … there was a lot of weaving things in the perimeter fence – rainbows, kid art, … the whole perimeter fence was very gorgeous. There were a lot of spiderwebs in the art. Spiderwebs were a big theme – I suppose the theme of weaving something, surrounding something.

Punks, too. Or Arachnes. Either way, I approve.

The women who lived there endured arrests, freezing and muddy conditions and the most rudimentary of provisions. Make no mistake – these were badass women. Muddy women, tired women, cold women, but strong, capable, mind-blowingly determined women, and women who were not afraid to use bolt cutters.

Nuclear weapons, they rightly argued, are not in anyone’s interest, and should not be anywhere. The protest was closely allied with CND, and it garnered respect and support from people of all walks of life. This Guardian video shows the mix and gives slightly more of an idea of what the protests were like than my second-generation verbal squeezing can do.

Over the ten main years of the protest many people came and went, but the backbone of it all were the base camps. There were nine of these, each based around a different set of gates to the base. Each base gained its own flavour and focus, with the Violet Gate formed of religious groups, the Blue Gate being much more new age, and the Green Gate being entirely women-only as a rule.

Personally I’m dubious about sticking a gender divide in an otherwise very uniting protest – but there were many places where men were welcome, too, and this simply was, from the start, a women’s movement. It was founded and organised by women’s groups (which in the 80s especially were fucking rad) – and women’s groups and unions around the country organised coaches to and from the big demos.

The campaign gained huge amounts of media attention in 1983 when around 70,000 protestors formed a human chain around the base, stopping movement in and out of it. (My mom was there!) With around 100 women being arrested for breaking in. (My mom didn’t do that bit.) The scale and success of the Greenham Common protest was widely credited with prompting similar actions elsewhere in Britain and Europe.

The base camp protestors were evicted on numerous occasions, but always returned before nightfall to set up camp again.

So – how did it all come to a close? In 1991 the weapons were removed – but many protestors stayed a further nine badass years until the final perimeter fences were removed and the Common was returned back to public land. Partly this was to make sure the land was returned, but partly, it seems, because a real community had formed and people were reluctant to leave it.

Above and beyond the call of duty – with rainbows and mud and sisterhood. I think I’m in love.

Further resources:

• There’s a great picture gallery over here titled ‘The Life and Times of CND’.
• Your Greenham – video footage and more, and Greenham WPC.
• The Women’s Library has lots of images and information.

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• Hannah Eiseman-Renyard runs the Whippersnapper Press, a web-publishing site for short, innovative and funny creative writing. She is twenty-five and lives in North London with her three grandchildren and thirty cats. Her turn-ons include moss, handicrafts and Bohemian clichés.