Occupying Greenham Common

This piece about the women’s peace camp encircling a U.S. cruise missile base in England in the 1980s has a new introduction connecting that earlier, effective, long-term demonstration to the work of Occupy Wall Street. Greenham was a political location of extraordinary diversity and invention. It became women-only after the first nine months for a variety of reasons explored here in detail, including contradictory accounts mirroring the variety of feminist movement ideas. The camp became a place of protest for women with very different political aesthetics, strategies, fears, and wishes. At the camp fire, they discussed these differences, the prospects for nuclear disarmament, rival visions of the world they wanted, and the urgency of the ecological environment they were inventing right there on the muddy ground – plenty of plastic but no paper plates, no water, no toilets, no way to hide from the possible chaos of a World War Three.