Poppies, peace movements and sex-strikes: an historical overview
- Maggie Hall
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
By Maggie Hall
Maggie is a retired teacher of speech and drama, a former
Chair of Brighton Humanists, a member of the Humanists UK Dialogue Network and a Humanists UK School Speaker. Here she takes a look at peace movements of both past and present.
Every November, alternative remembrance events featuring white poppies take place across the UK, thanks to the efforts of white poppy wearers and members of the Peace Pledge Union, which produces and distributes over 120,000 white poppies annually. These events include ceremonies, stalls, demonstrations, and vigils. In some places, alternative ceremonies are held to highlight the message of the white poppy—remembrance with a focus on peace. In others, white poppies are worn alongside red poppies in official remembrance services.
The National Alternative Remembrance Ceremony takes place every year on Remembrance Sunday in Tavistock Square, London. Following speeches, those attending observe two minutes silence and white poppy wreaths are laid on the Conscientious Objectors' Commemorative Stone, in memory of all victims of war, past and present.
The Peace Pledge Union was founded in 1934 and initiated by a campaign led by an Anglican priest, Dick Sheppard. Many well-known humanists were also founder members, including philosopher Bertrand Russell, playwright Laurence Housman, and novelists Aldous Huxley and Storm Jameson. The Labour politician George Lansbury was also a member, as was composer Benjamin Britten, who wrote: “The whole of my life has been devoted to a life of creation (being by profession a composer) and I cannot take part in acts of destruction.”
Just like the red poppies sold by the British Legion, the white poppy honours the many members of the armed forces who have fallen in war. It also commemorates the innumerable civilian victims of war whose lives have been lost through direct violence or as a result of war through injury, disease or starvation. This, of course, is still happening today in many regions of the world – notably Gaza, Ukraine and Yemen.
Peace advocates and peace movements in history
Several Enlightenment philosophers wrote about peace, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham – who, in 1789, proposed the formation of a peace association. The anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce, motivated by his Christian beliefs, opposed British involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars.
Since the second half of the 17th century, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, Quakers have refused to fight in wars. During the First World War however, many Quakers provided relief from suffering at the front by volunteering for the Friends Ambulance Unit and the Friends War Victims Relief Committee. Many male Quakers registered as conscientious objectors but their applications for exemption from conscription were often rejected. Conscientious objectors were frequently imprisoned as “soldiers absent without leave”.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), peace societies such as the New York Peace Society and the Massachusetts Peace Society (precursors of the American Peace Society) and the London Peace Society were established in 1815 and 1816. Earlier, during the wars, petitions calling for peace were submitted to Parliament and peace literature circulated, especially among reformers and religious dissenters. Some protests and criticism of war policy occurred during the premiership of William Pitt the Younger, who died in 1806.
Gandhi and non-violent protest
Mahatma Gandhi is best known for his involvement in India’s struggle for independence from British rule, eventually leading to Indian independence in 1947. He advocated a philosophy which stressed the importance of truth, non-violence (ahimsa), and self-discipline. His practice of non-violent protest influenced many peace campaigners in the following years – including Martin Luther King Jr. (campaign for Civil Rights in America in the 1950s and 60s) and Nelson Mandela (campaign against apartheid in South Africa).
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Non-violence became fundamental to many peace campaigns, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) founded in 1957. In 1958, it inaugurated the famous Aldermaston marches from the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston in Berkshire to Trafalgar Square in London. Canon John Collins was CND's original Chairman, philosopher Bertrand Russell was President and Peggy Duff was Organising Secretary. CND continues to campaign for the cancellation of Trident, the UK's nuclear weapons system, and for the abolition of other weapons of mass destruction, particularly chemical and biological weapons. It also campaigns for the closure of the nuclear power industry. Among its recent successes, CND highlights its role as one of the grassroots organisations that campaigned for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons – of which CND is part – won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for this work.
The role of women
The International Women's Congress for Peace and Freedom that took place in The Hague in 1915 led to the formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1919, making it one of the oldest extant women’s peace movements in the world. It has done some amazing work over the last 106 years and has a remarkable history. Women have always been fundamental to the campaign for peace. Outstanding in my memory is the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp which was initiated by a Welsh group called “Women for Life on Earth”. They arrived at the Greenham Common Airbase in Berkshire on 5th September 1981, having marched from Cardiff in protest at the decision to site 96 Cruise nuclear missiles there. Their original intention was to challenge the decision by debate. They delivered a letter to the Base Commander which included the statement “We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all life”. The letter was ignored, and so the women set up a camp outside the perimeter fence, setting off a remarkable period of non-violent direct action which lasted 19 years. It was supported by women from all over the UK and abroad until, following the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the last missiles left the base in 1991. The camp was only dismantled in 2000, after protesters won the right to house a memorial on the site.
Northern Ireland
Several peace movements were formed during the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. The best known was the Community of Peace People. It was founded in 1976, originally as Women for Peace, by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan. This was after Corrigan’s sister, Anne Maguire, and her three children had been run over in Belfast by an out-of-control car being driven by a member of the Provisional IRA who had been shot by British soldiers. Anne survived, but the children, aged eight, two and six weeks, all died. Betty Williams was a witness to the incident and, appalled by such senseless loss of life, began a petition and organised a march of women pushing baby buggies. A Dublin journalist, Ciaran McKeown, joined them and the three women organised many more marches across Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain. Williams and Corrigan were accused by conspiracy theorists of being political stooges funded by the IRA or Sinn Fein, and they and their supporters were assaulted and pelted with rocks during some of the marches. In 1977 they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Internal disagreements resulted in a decline in momentum by 1980, leading to the dissolution of many local groups, but the central organisation persisted. Today, the Peace People continue to promote peace and nonviolence through various initiatives and programmes.
Women’s anti-war activism may go back to antiquity. The Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote his well-known comedy, Lysistrata, in 411 BCE. His female protagonist, Lysistrata, being thoroughly fed up with the 27-year Peloponnesian War against Sparta, which had already been going for 20 years when the play was first performed, convinces her fellow women of Greece to cease having sex with their husbands until the men negotiate peace and end the war. Lysistrata is, of course, a fictional character, but she may have been modelled loosely on an Athenian woman named Lysimache, a name that means “the dissolver of battle”. Lysimache was a priestess in Athens at the time Lysistrata was produced, and known to be an opponent of the Peloponnesian War.
Sex-strikes
Women of the Iroquois Confederacy are believed to have boycotted lovemaking and childbearing in the 1600s in order to persuade their men to put an end to inter-tribal warfare. This, along with other actions which restricted the supply of resources such as corn and moccasins, is believed to have resulted in the men capitulating and granting the women veto power concerning all wars. In Liberia in 2003, a group of women included a sex strike as part of their activism demanding an end to the vicious civil war there. And in 2011 Filipino women withheld sex from their husbands to enforce a stop to clan fighting in the village of Dado as well as among other rural villages, and to open up the roads to the market that were blocked by the violence. Male aggressors of the world, take note!
Peace movements today
The Network for Peace lists 50 peace organisations that are active today, including WILPF, CND, Quakers, the Campaign against the Arms Trade and many more (see links below).
References and further reading
This article is an expanded version of the one published in Humanistically Speaking in 2021.
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