War at a Peace Conference
On the last night of the Indochinese Women’s Conference (IWC) in Vancouver, North American women met for a “Criticism and Evaluation session of the Conference.”1 A guerrilla theater group set up a sign, announcing themselves as “C.U.R.S.E. (Canadian Union of Rabid Senseless Extremists),” and attempted to perform a skit to express their critique of the conference. The reaction of the audience reflected the tense atmosphere of the entire event:
Immediately a woman stood up grabbing away the sign. She demanded the C.U.R.S.E. women leave. Other women then came forward shoving and pushing, trying to get the guerilla theatre woman out of the meeting. the CURSE woman linked arms and refused to leave. At this point, a couple of woman [sic] began beating on one woman in the theatre group, the other woman; in the skit shouted “Don’t hit her she’s pregnant.” but the American women kept on slugging her shouting “She shouldn’t be here then.” The five CURSE woman then formed a circle so as to protect their pregnant sister.2
When the audience finally allowed the performance to take place, the skit featured a series of vignettes in the life of a woman. She experiences denigration in the male-dominated workplace, the double standard as well as sexual abuse in the home, and political repression as she protests for abortion. She is able to recover from each of these efforts to wound and humiliate her. She is not able to overcome the hostility that she faces from other women when she attends the IWC:
[First, the] heroine is stopped at [the] door by a stern-faced security guard demanding her revolutionary credentials. The security guard begrudgingly lets her pass. She is met by three women mechanically chanting “Off the Pig.” And raising their fists in synchronized time. She innocently offers her out [sic] out in friendship to a delegate wearing a sign saying “Third World.”
The chanting stops as the Third World delegate screams “Racist” and then hits her with a sign reading “Guilt.” Somewhat beaten, she timidly approaches the next delegate with “Gay Lib” on her T-shift, who says “Heterosexual!” Again she is clobbered with guilt. Beaten to her knees she crawls to the USA Women’s Lib delegate but, as she reaches out to touch her, she’s accused of being a “Liberal.” This final blow of guilt knocks her flat to the floor where she drags herself offstage, completely beaten.3
The North American and Southeast Asian women who gathered in Vancouver and Toronto in the spring of 1971 came with hopes for dialogue and political unity. However, volatile factionalism, particularly among North American women, exploded both during the organizing process and at the actual conference. The C.U.R.S.E. theatrical performance illuminated three axes of difference—race, sexuality, and nationality—which served as flashpoints of contention.
The conflicts that emerged at the 1971 IWCs illuminate the challenges of organizing international meetings for diverse constituencies. The selection of Canada as a site for the IWCs reflected a broader practice within the North American antiwar movement. During the course of the U.S. war in Vietnam, representatives from North Vietnam and from the resistance movement in South Vietnam could not enter the States. Canada, as an officially neutral party, not only provided refuge for U.S. draft dodgers but also served as a communication node that facilitated face-to-face contact between Southeast Asian anticolonial spokespersons and the North American antiwar movement.4
In fact, the idea of the 1971 IWCs emerged from a successful visit of Vietnamese women to Canada in 1969. This two-week visit, which took place during the hot month of July, was sponsored by Voice of Women (VOW) in collaboration with Women Strike for Peace (WSP). Through their organizational efforts, three Vietnamese women from North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Paris, along with two male interpreters, met with North American audiences throughout the entire continental expanse of Canada.5 The Vietnamese delegation arrived in Montreal, spent a day meeting with Canadian and American women on a farm just north of New Hampshire, participated in the Fourth of July protest at Niagara Falls, attended a discussion at the University of Toronto, met with a welcome delegation during a one-hour stopover in Winnipeg, visited wheat farmers in Regina, and participated in a two-day conference in Vancouver that drew three hundred people and a public meeting that attracted more than six hundred people before they finally toured the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa and engaged in an evaluation meeting on the entire visit. Despite the intensive schedule, the Vietnamese representatives were pleased with their reception and interactions with North Americans. They had wanted to reach a wide constituency. At a planning meeting held in Helsinki earlier that year, a VOW representative had the opportunity to converse with Phan Thi An, an officer within the Vietnam Women’s Union and a frequent correspondent with Western women’s organizations. The VOW member reported that the Vietnamese “are not interested in women only meetings and really want to meet workers, teachers, students and young people. Also she [Phan Thi An] asked for meetings with U.S. young men, draft resisters and deserters—as many as possible.”6
The emotional and political impact of the 1969 tour led the Vietnam Women’s Union to request a follow-up visit the next year. VOW organizers, exhausted by the effort of planning and hosting the delegation, requested more time to consider how a second visit could reap additional political benefits. Together, they decided to focus on reaching out to various female constituencies, particularly members of the women’s liberation (WL) movement and Third World women, as well as family members of American GIs and women who were not politically active. To involve these new groups, VOW and WSP had to expand beyond their traditional membership base of middle-aged, middle-class, white maternalist women.
These outreach efforts were somewhat hampered by VOW’s concerns about whether they could obtain entry visas for another delegation of Vietnamese visitors. Although Canada was officially a neutral country, the U.S. government still exerted political pressure on its northern neighbors. During the period between the 1969 and 1971 conferences, a group of Vietnamese representatives were denied the right of entry into Canada. They had planned to participate via closed-circuit television in the 1971 Winter Soldiers Investigation, a three-day conference sponsored by Vietnam Veterans against the War in Detroit. Fearing that the Canadian government would turn down future visa requests as well, VOW asked their cosponsors not to publicize the IWCs in mainstream or movement newspapers. VOW wanted to prevent widespread publicity, particularly in the United States, since that might lead the American government to intervene in the visa process. In the end, VOW succeeded in obtaining visas only “with every known string being pulled—formally and informally.”7 To minimize attention, IWC organizers primarily used personal contacts and correspondence to foster interest and recruit participants for the conferences. The blanket publicity muzzle proved impossible, though.
The old friends could most easily involve new friends. Maternalist peace activists already had collaborated with women’s liberation (WL) activists. However, the two groups still differed from one another in their goals, political beliefs, resources, and organizing styles. Although the old friends engaged in protest and civil disobedience, they tended to do so as “ladies,” with a sense of decorum. At times, they literally donned gloves and hats as part of their political performance of respectability. In contrast, the new friends tended to question all social hierarchies and norms, not just particular policies of the U.S. government. WSP and VOW had existing political networks at the local, national, and international levels. WL activists tended to be more loosely organized and primarily locally based. Recognizing the differences between old and new friends, North American and Vietnamese planners suggested dividing each conference into two sections. That way, old friends and new friends could each have greater control over the content and interactions within their portion of the meetings.
Involving Third World Women as a third cosponsor raised even greater challenges. Both old and new friends had worked with nonwhite women before. After all, both maternalist and WL activists had participated in and supported the civil rights movement. WSP also had significant contacts with black women in the welfare rights movement. Under the leadership of Marii Hasegawa, WILPF, which had the most elderly constituency, even engaged in discussions about black power and reparations for slavery. In fact, the WILPF newspaper featured sympathetic articles about Angela Davis. A Black Panther, a member of the Communist Party, and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, Davis was imprisoned and eventually acquitted for suspected involvement in a hostage situation and shooting of a judge. Her supporters argued that Davis’s treatment did not reflect actual criminal behavior on her part. Rather, her imprisonment, like that of other activists, constituted political harassment and persecution. Despite the connections that existed between the old friends, new friends, and women of color, the IWCs required an elevated degree of collaboration between women who developed their ideologies and identities in very different ways from one another.
Unlike the old and new friends, Third World women were not initially and consistently part of the organizing process. When WL representatives gathered in New York City in September 1970 to select delegates to attend a planning meeting in Budapest, they discussed ways to avoid the exclusivity that characterized previous international delegations, especially those sponsored by the old friends. Representatives in the past were often selected “through personal contacts, choosing known individuals rather than groups, choosing friends, etc.,” and they “felt it was of utmost importance to the success of the Canada conference to get away from this kind of elitism and to involve as many women as possible in the planning for the Conference . . . through broad, grass-roots representation and collective responsibility.”8
In order to involve Third World women, WL organizers decided to contact two groups: the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a New York–based African American and Puerto Rican organization that emerged from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and the Black Panthers, whose national headquarters was in Oakland, California.9 They invited these organizations to participate in planning the IWCs and specifically asked if they wanted to send representatives to Budapest with the financial support of WL groups. In a series of criticism/self-criticism statements following the conference, WL organizers acknowledged their good but misguided intentions in these efforts: “We knew early that we did not want to be put in the position of ‘choosing’ which third world women should go, be represented, etc. We even had trouble with our decision that we should contact the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Panthers for we felt that we were making the organizational choices for third world women.”10
The confusion of WL activists in deciding whom to contact among Third World women is understandable. Activists of color began calling themselves Third World people with increasing frequency during the late 1960s. Asserting solidarity with one another and with decolonizing nations was just one step in creating a new political identity. Activists of color, who tended to be more attuned to racial oppression, were likely to be based primarily in communities of their own racial background. In some locales, most notably in large metropolitan centers where concentrations of diverse populations resided, people of color also formed political coalitions with one another. Creating such alliances was a process. They had to develop relationships, identify commonalities of historical and contemporary experience, determine mutual goals, and provide support for one another. The fact that WL activists did not know whom to invite reflected their lack of substantive contacts among Third World activists, particularly at the national level. Like WL activists themselves, it was difficult to identify spokespersons for Third World women when the political category itself was in the process of being constructed.
Neither TWWA nor the Panthers sent representatives to the planning meeting for the IWC in Budapest. Members of TWWA did eventually participate in the organizing process, but they generally did so with other Third World women. As the WL activists noted, “[Initially] three or four third world women did attend New York planning meetings in the Fall. [However,] they finally stopped attending, probably because the WL women were struggling among themselves for the most part. [Instead] by December a number of third world groups were meeting separately and regularly in NYC. Sometimes third world representatives would come to the New York WL meetings.”11 Elaine Brown of the Black Panthers never responded to the letter sent to her. She had returned from visiting socialist Asia in the summer of 1970 to the volatile and contentious split between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Other Third World women, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco where women of color had previously collaborated with one another, began meeting on their own to discuss the conference.
On the West Coast, the political determination and organizational efforts of Third World women eventually resulted in a decision to divide the Vancouver conference into three, not just two, segments. Third World women from Los Angeles, led by Pat Sumi of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, demanded time in the conference schedule so they could engage with Indochinese delegates autonomously. As their statement explained, “since we have been denied an equal participation with white groups, we can only ask for equal but separate conferences. The possibility of a confrontation between Third World and white women’s groups at a joint conference would be disrespectful to the Indochinese women and would further reinforce the tensions that exist among North American women.”12 Their proposal received the support of white women from Los Angeles, who explained, “Why should Third World women unify with white women who claim to recognize the need of self-determination for the Indochinese, but who do not recognize the right of self-determination of all peoples in this country, as manifested in the ‘small’ way of planning a conference for people instead of with them.”13
There were similar suggestions for a separate conference for Third World women at the Toronto conference, but the effort did not appear to be as organized. Neither Third World women nor women’s liberationists on the East Coast formulated an identifiable position statement acknowledging the need for political autonomy. Organizers of the Vancouver and Toronto conferences did communicate with one another, particularly in regard to the timing of their respective conferences. Because of the uncertainty of obtaining entering visas for the Indochinese women, it was not clear if and when the delegation would actually arrive in Canada. Although the East Coast and West Coast planners developed contingency plans and shared proposed schedules with one another, the Toronto organizers did not duplicate the three-way separation of the Vancouver conference. Only afterward, in another criticism/self-criticism statement, did WL organizers on the East Coast recognize:
We didn’t know and didn’t consciously try to find out what third world women’s needs might have been with respect to the conference. On some levels we always saw the conference as “ours” with third world “participation.” . . . When we talked about joint sessions with the third world women we were mostly considering our interests—that is to force women’s movement women to see their racism, to learn from third world women, etc., etc. We seldom were conscious of whether a joint conference would in fact meet their needs; whether in fact they had a reason or need to meet with us. In addition, our vision of the potential of women from different race and class backgrounds coming together and struggling together in a sisterly way was far ahead of our practice and the practice of third world women. If we had considered all these factors and if we had had some real practice with third world women at the time the conference was initiated, we might have decided then that the most useful arrangement would be for separate conferences of third world and white women with the Indochinese—that separate conference would be O.K. politically.14
On the East Coast, where activists tried to work across racial lines, and even on the West Coast, where a degree of autonomy was validated, tensions surfaced concerning the content of the conferences and the security for the events. On the East Coast, an elaborate committee structure was established to allow for democratic and equal participation. However, the decisions of these committees tended to be overturned as new women joined. To counter their previous exclusion from the organizing process, women of color made demands for additional time with the Indochinese women and the opportunity to make public presentations about Third World women’s issues. So when Naomi Weisstein, a pioneer feminist scholar in psychology, and her Chicago Liberation Women’s Rock Band appeared in Toronto to perform as part of the Cultural Exchange Night, she was informed that there was no interest in white women’s culture.15 Instead, the “evening would consist of presentations about the third world struggle to the Indochinese.”16
Some WL activists attempted to challenge the efforts by Third World women to control the content of the conference. However, afflicted by a sense of white “guilt,” the new friends tended to avoid conflict with women of color. WL activists also recognized that their commitment to an egalitarian process bordered on anarchism. They realized afterward that the lack of organizational planning and political control made the conference experience less effective:
In the Women’s liberation workshops, questions were random; often the same question was asked three times in one day. . . . After the conference was over and WL learned about how the third world women had structured their workshops (they held caucuses to decide what they wanted to know, collected all the questions in the beginning, organized them into a building process) we realized how we had cheated ourselves through our own passivity and through our thinking that freedom was individual autonomy. The resulting chaos was not very fruitful.17
Differing concerns about security constituted another key source of racial conflict. Given the destructiveness of COINTELPRO in targeting organizations like the Black Panthers, Third World women tended to be highly sensitive about potential harassment of themselves as well as the Indochinese delegation.18 Angela Davis’s opening statement of solidarity for the conference, sent from the confines of her prison cell in California, underscored the urgency of this issue.
The potential for political harassment was heightened for Americans, especially women of color, when they crossed the border into Canada. All U.S. participants, regardless of race, were issued instructions to safely negotiate the crossing: “You should 1) be prepared to look as straight as possible (there is no way of getting around this) 2) have $15 to $20 per day for the length of time you are planning to stay. . . . 3) have good I.D. . . . 4) have no dope. People are often thoroughly searched, stripped, etc. 5) no literature, especially anything pertaining to border crossing.”19 To avoid invasive searches, detainment, or denial of entry, female political activists were advised to perform a normative, apolitical identity. Third World women received additional advice about getting into Canada and being safe there:
All of us from the U.S. and Hawaii are foreigners in a nation colonized and exploited by U.S. imperialism. . . . Since the Indochinese are not guests of the Canadian government, the Third World advance group decided that delegates themselves would take on the responsibility for the safety for the Indochinese friends with no dependency on the Vancouver or national Canadian pig forces. . . . If your delegation is fairly large, break down into brigades of ten women each. Each brigade should have a leader who will be responsible for getting everyone up on time, and keeping track of sisters so everyone is accounted for at all times. . . . Don’t go around by yourself. Always take someone with you. And don’t wear your delegate card as a badge. Cnada [sic] has a large group of fascist racists who may gather around the conference to hassle delegates, so be careful.20
These concerns reflected the experiences of women of color with state surveillance. Nina Genera, a Chicana antiwar activist from the Bay Area, recalled that she crossed the northern U.S. border for the first time to attend the conference. Born in Texas, she frequently traveled back and forth across the southern border. Each of these journeys raised anxiety, because, she said, “You never knew how INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] was going to react. . . . It did cross my mind when we crossed in to Canada and there was that fear factor.”21 Even after successfully negotiating the border crossing, women of color experienced continued scrutiny. An account in an Asian American women’s publication reported: “In Vancouver, we were reminded that racism is not confined to the United States. Throughout our stay there, the Third World candidates were followed whenever we traveled in our chartered buses. One night when we visited Chinatown, the delegates were harassed by Canadian police for charges such as jaywalking.”22
The call for heightened security shaped policies for all conference participants. Third World women “wanted no personal cameras at all” since photographs of conference attendees could be used to identify and target activists.23 They also warned white women that they “must be prepared for agents and provocaturs [sic] in our midst.” Finally, Third World women took their responsibilities on the security force seriously, too seriously for many of the other delegates. Naomi Weisstein recalled being body searched before her band was finally allowed to perform. She attempted to protest this action through humor. She recalled chanting, “Don’t touch me unless you love me.” Her efforts, though, were not well received.24 In Vancouver, the policies instituted regarding security led women’s liberation activists to “feel that in some ways the whole ‘show’ of security was a way for groups to flex their muscles and gain power positions at the conference. By the third day the disputes over security were becoming so divisive between the Third World and white women that it was decided (partly as a result of discussion with the Indochinese) that the security would be much relaxed. Immediately the tension was reduced.”25
The differences concerning workshop content and security were particularly intense between women of color and WL activists because the latter believed in the principle of involving everyone in planning the conference. While the old friends agreed to cosponsor the IWCs, WSP, VOW, and WILPF had less direct contact with large numbers of women of color. The maternalists insisted that their segment of the conferences be scheduled first.26 The old friends wanted to establish an orderly tone to the proceedings, before ceding control to the more radical women of color and WL activists. Even with reduced contact, the old friends expressed criticism of what they perceived as the militancy, arrogance, and dictatorial nature of Third World women’s authority.27 In turn, women of color criticized the manipulation that they perceived on the part of some white women who had “direct contact with the Indochinese women . . . [and] used this privilege as a source of power and status for their own groups. . . . Because we do not have the direct contacts ourselves, we have . . . been left dependent on the whim of groups who apparently disseminate information only if and when it is advantageous.”28
The women of color and the white women perceived one another as seeking to assert “control” and “power.” The tensions can be traced to profound differences between their histories of involvement in the conference planning as well as their diverse life experiences and political perspectives. Some women were able to engage in conversation across racial lines. Overall though, it was extremely difficult for larger groups and especially for those who were new to those encounters or unused to sharing authority to recognize and understand diverse political approaches. Instead, given the urgency of organizing and executing the conference, their tensions exploded into hostile and derogatory interactions.
Another set of volatile conflicts at the IWCs coalesced around sexuality, specifically whether lesbianism should be addressed at the antiwar gathering.29 Similar to the racial liberation movements, a sexual liberation movement emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.30 The debates concerning sexuality at the IWCs reveal the complex ways in which diverse women understood their relationship to colonialism and liberation.
In a memo issued to IWC attendees in Vancouver, members of the San Francisco branch of Radicalesbians criticized the organizers of the conference for dismissing the issue of lesbianism. The statement complained, “Lesbianism apparently is not seen as a primary or relevant subject at an Indochinese Women’s Conference.”31 The conflict over lesbianism reflected broader tensions within the women’s movement. In 1969, National Organization for Women president Betty Friedan infamously denounced lesbians as a “lavender menace” for providing “enemies with the ammunition to dismiss the women’s movement as a bunch of man-hating dykes.”32 In response to these charges, which were echoed in movement circles, lesbians critiqued gay baiting as a form of false consciousness. The group Radicalesbians initially formed in New York City in 1970 under the name Lavender Menace to appropriate Friedan’s derogatory term. Members authored the now-classic statement “Woman-Identified Woman,” which the San Francisco branch reproduced for IWC attendees in Vancouver. The West Coast Radicalesbians also quoted passages from the statement in its own memo for the conference. For the Radicalesbians, “lesbianism is not a sexual preference but a lifestyle in which women get their love, identity, and support from other women.”33 In other words, lesbianism represented the ultimate expression of a separatist women’s movement that sought to subvert male domination.34 The Radicalesbians argued that lesbianism was particularly appropriate to discuss at a conference devoted to anti-imperialism. Using the colonial analogy, they argued that women constituted the original colonized subjects under male domination. By extension, lesbians as women-identified women were anti-imperialists due to their efforts to obtain female liberation from male control.
The idea of women as colonized subjects was also articulated in the “Fourth World Manifesto,” a lengthy statement condemning IWC organizers as “an Imperialist Venture Against the Women’s Liberation Movement.”35 Issued by female activists based in Detroit, the thirty-one-page manifesto questioned the politics of conference organizers. It began by supporting the idea of global sisterhood, particularly the proposal for women “from all over the world getting together to overcome male imposed boundaries between us—territorial, national, imperialist or ideological barriers.”36 However, the authors criticized IWC organizers for describing themselves as “anti-imperialist” women seeking to involve women in autonomous women’s movements. In their eyes, “all women who fight against their own oppression (colonized status) as females under male domination are anti-imperialist by definition.” They charged that conference organizers, by using the anti-imperialist designation—a term commonly used within the New Left—were positioning themselves as the political vanguard. In reality, according to the manifesto writers, the organizers were “acting as colonial-native (female) administrators for the male defined Left in relationship to other women—in this case especially to Women’s Liberation women.”
Figure 15. “Out now!” The phrase has a double meaning. Published in the radical lesbian newsletter The Furies (June–July 1972, p. 12), the slogan proclaims the need to “come out” as a lesbian and for the United States to get out of Vietnam. Charlotte Bunch Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
The criticism that women active in the antiwar movement constituted “dupes” and “tools” of the male Left was a troubling one. Women in the peace movement had experienced both subtle and overt sexism. Being publicly shouted down and humiliated by male antiwar activists led some women to create alternative women-only political communities, ones that valued and respected their voices. Just as the Third World asserted its autonomy from the United States and the Soviet Union, women, described by the manifesto as the fourth world, sought self-determination and liberation. Within this framework, women who remained committed to antiwar activism could be interpreted as having false consciousness, of following the political leadership of sexist men. According to the “Fourth World Manifesto” authors, these women—the “dupes” of the male Left—were the ones promoting the IWCs.
Conference organizers, like Charlotte Bunch-Weeks, sought to refute these charges. After all, they were attempting to develop a feminist analysis about war and imperialism. Early on, the WL organizers recognized that not everyone who wanted to attend the IWCs could do so. The Canadians had limited housing and meeting space. Also, each attendee had to raise a set amount of funds to help equalize the transportation costs for all participants. That way, a conference delegate traveling from far away would pay the same amount as someone who lived close by. No limits were established for the number of old friends, who tended to have the necessary resources and contacts to attend. Also, all interested Third World women were encouraged to make the journey, with the offer of financial support if necessary. For the new friends, though, organizers decided to establish a quota system to ensure broad geographical representation. Cities with large activist communities, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC, received higher allocations. Even for these cities, though, not everyone who wanted to attend could do so, because other spots were reserved for participants from smaller towns and from the interior and southern states. For all these locations, decisions still needed to be made as to who would actually attend the IWCs. In general, the new friends encouraged local organizers to give preference to less active women or those with less experience participating in international gatherings.
Cognizant of the limited numbers who could attend the IWCs, the new friends decided to use the conference as a platform for political education. They encouraged American women to discuss and analyze why ending the Vietnam War should be a feminist priority, regardless of whether they traveled to Canada to meet Indochinese women. To assist in this process, the new friends authored and circulated various position papers. These essays articulated theories about the connections between military conflict, economics, and the status of women. The new friend organizers then encouraged local women’s groups to discuss, revise, and elaborate on these ideas. In other words, conference organizers encouraged organic and localized theorizing of political ideas. They also urged WL activists to hold public events, like the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the National Liberation Front in December 1970 or International Women’s Day in March 1971, to attract interest and promote discussion about women and war.
Despite these attempts to craft a feminist perspective about war, WL organizers had limited resources and ability to respond to their critics. Seeking to foster an egalitarian and democratic process, WL sponsors used a grassroots approach. They held planning meetings in New York City; Baltimore, Maryland; and Dayton, Ohio, to expand the regional reach of their political contacts. Those in more active locations, like Buffalo, Washington, DC, or Chicago, divided the responsibilities for planning the conference. Ideally, this type of decentralized yet coordinated structure would promote awareness about the conference and also foster the development of a national feminist antiwar movement. In reality, this fragmented structure allowed issues and concerns to slip through the cracks. Conference organizers received a copy of the “Fourth World Manifesto” during a regional meeting in February 1971. The Washington, DC, collective, in which Charlotte Bunch-Weeks participated, mailed copies of the statement to groups that could not attend the Dayton, Ohio, gathering. The DC collective also drafted a response but wanted to circulate it for discussion before sending it. WL activists in locations closest to Detroit, notably Cincinnati, Chicago, and Buffalo, declined to initiate conversation with the manifesto authors. In the end, only because Third World women on the East Coast repeatedly urged WL organizers to confront the issue did DC organizers finally get in touch with their critics in Detroit. After a failed attempt at a meeting, the original response letter was sent, six weeks after the new friends initially read the “Fourth World Manifesto” and just a couple of weeks before the conferences. In the meantime, misinformation about the organizers and the IWCs circulated within feminist networks.
The challenges that the new friends faced are understandable. They wanted to create a democratic movement that allowed for autonomy, particularly at the local level. Given the multiple demands on female activists, their varying understandings of the war, and their diverse organizing skills and approaches, it was difficult to create an efficient and accountable system. Ironically, these women who worked so hard to create a democratic movement were charged with elitism and with siding against feminist interests.
The criticism that IWC organizers ignored lesbianism replicated the “Fourth Manifesto” charge, namely that the conference planners suffered from false consciousness. Detractors charged that the promoters of the Canadian conferences unquestioningly accepted heteronormativity and prioritized the Vietnam War instead of understanding their own sexual liberation. Lesbian activists, in contrast, sought to assert their understanding of anticolonialism by inserting their agenda at the IWCs. To make an effective intervention, they called upon their supporters to disregard the quota system and attend the conference en masse.
Those who opposed addressing lesbianism at the conference ranged widely in their motivations. Some were no doubt fearful of lesbianism and dismissed the issue as irrelevant because of homophobia. The old friends who embraced their identities as housewives and mothers were not particularly inclined to discuss lesbianism, even though some later identified themselves as lesbians. The contingent of Third World women also tended to distance themselves from this issue. Although some women of color conference attendees were lesbians, the dominant perspective in these circles emphasized lesbianism and gender nonnormativity as white women’s issues.
The divide was clear to Maria Ramirez. A Chicana antiwar activist from the San Francisco Bay Area, Ramirez traveled to the Vancouver IWC with Nina Genera and several busloads of women. She also eventually visited the People’s Republic of China with Betita Martinez. Ramirez recalled that she and the other Mexican American women activists tended to be more traditional in their appearance. They experienced culture shock in being housed with WL activists in a large auditorium in Vancouver. While she and her Chicana friends were trying to put on makeup to get themselves “dolled up” for the conference, they saw “white” women sporting unshaved legs, fatigues, and combat boots.37 This dichotomy between “femme” and “butch” gender presentations did not necessarily distinguish heterosexuals and homosexuals. However, in Ramirez’s mind, these differences in body adornment were mapped onto racial divides.
Other Third World women did not comment on racialized, gendered, or sexual differences. Instead, they argued that lesbianism should not be a central issue for a conference focused on ending the war. In fact, they viewed the assertion of this topic as an expression of white women’s chauvinism. Judy Drummond, an antiwar activist who was involved with the San Francisco Bay Area Chicano movement and traced her ancestry to Native American communities in California, recalled, “Some of the radical lesbians just pissed me off. They pissed everybody off. . . . They had asked if the [Vietnamese] women had sex together in the fields. . . . And it was, like, how rude. I mean, you know, these women are fighting for their lives and you’re asking what we thought was a trivial question.”38 Drummond subsequently acknowledged that the question was not trivial, but at the conference, she and other women of color sought to silence these questions from radical lesbians. Drummond recalled that she did so at the request of the Indochinese female representatives, some of whom “walked off the stage . . . when they [the Radicalesbians] asked that question.” “You know, you don’t ask those kinds of questions to these women. It is sort of inappropriate. You need to think. . . . You have your own agenda but . . . we’re here for their agenda.” While the Radicalesbians regarded themselves as anti-imperialists, the Third World women from the United States and Indochina regarded debates about lesbianism as a form of white feminist imperialism.39
Even some self-identified lesbian antiwar activists had concerns about discussing sexuality at the conference. Charlotte Bunch-Weeks was in the process of coming out when she helped to organize the Toronto IWC. She recalled experiencing enormous pressure, particularly from her lover, Rita Mae Brown, to place lesbianism on the agenda. In fact, the year after the conference, Brown published a provocative essay titled “Hanoi to Hoboken, a Round Trip Ticket.”40 She questioned why activists had such “persistent enthusiasm for far away places and distant struggles with imperialism. . . . Why travel to Hanoi when you can go to Hoboken [New Jersey] and see the same show?” She responded by arguing that “visiting Hanoi or Havanna . . . is one way to legitimize our movement through participation in those areas that the white, middle class, male-left movement has designated as legitimate. It shows that women are reaching out beyond what the male left defines as ‘womens’ [sic] issues.’ ” As an alternative, Brown challenged women activists to focus their attention on the United States: “Here in Amerika many women are also fighting for their lives, there are no bombers but the struggle is just as relentless and deadly—we are the poor, the Black, the Latin and the Lesbian. We aren’t exotic and we aren’t remotely glamorous.”
Brown’s call to prioritize domestic and sexual oppression over the experiences of the Vietnamese directly criticized the efforts of her lover. Charlotte Bunch, who dropped the hyphenated portion of her last name after divorcing her husband, had traveled to North Vietnam and experienced the personal appeal by the Buddhist nun in Vinh. She had dedicated her political efforts to connecting women across geographical and cultural boundaries. Years later, Bunch recalled how difficult this time was for her: “I did not feel that it was the right time and place to try to raise lesbian feminism but I felt enormous guilt because I was just a new lesbian. . . . So what happened to me which I now understand . . . is that I got sick. . . . I couldn’t handle it. . . . I couldn’t see a way to make it better . . . and I just . . . withdrew from the process. . . . I felt very guilty about not going because I also felt like I should try and make it better, but I couldn’t see any way to make it better and so my whole body just collapsed.”41 The tensions that exploded at the IWC literally imploded in Bunch. Just as different factions at the conferences could not reconcile their different interpretations of anti-imperialism and their diverse political priorities, Bunch could not intellectually or emotionally process her own conflicting understandings of what constituted liberation.
In addition to the conflicts surrounding race and sexuality, nationality constituted a third flash point at the IWCs. Although the conferences were held in Vancouver and Toronto, Canadian organizers and attendees criticized their U.S. guests for their chauvinistic and imperialist behavior toward their hosts. Canadian female activists, irrespective of their racial backgrounds, tended to identify themselves as colonized subjects in relation to their neighbors to the south. Canadian women, particularly WL activists, claimed a status akin to women from Southeast Asia but not necessarily with Third World women from the United States.
Because the U.S. peace movement encouraged travel and relocation across the forty-ninth parallel, some of the Canadian organizers of the IWC were in fact former U.S. residents and veterans of the civil rights, New Left, and women’s movements in the States. Despite the existence of these international alliances and transnational connections, the Canadian organizers, particularly those who were identified as new friends, believed they were unequal partners in organizing the IWC. Fewer criticisms were raised by the old friends from Canada, most likely because VOW had worked closely with WSP. In contrast, the Canadian WL activists, especially those in Vancouver, who did not have a history of ongoing political partnerships with their U.S. “sisters,” expressed a sense of frustration and imposition.
Liz Breimberg was born in England and had participated in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement before migrating to Vancouver. She recalled that the West Coast IWC was held in
April of 1971 and we only heard of it in December of 1970. And we only heard of it by accident by a woman from . . . the United States, I think from California, [who] was up visiting someone here and came to one of our women’s caucus meetings. . . . [She] told us . . . that this was being organized by women in the United States and it was like we were just being used. . . . They never even bothered to let us know. . . . The conferences were to be for the Indochinese people to meet the . . . women from the United States who were involved in the women’s liberation movement. . . . I mean, we were treated as if we didn’t exist.42
The lack of communication resulted partly from the difficulties of organizing across regional and national boundaries. Conference planners had limited human and financial resources to coordinate the efforts of women from Southeast Asia, the United States, and Canada. Some of these political networks were being created as part of the conference organizing process. Even so, the execution of the conference did reveal power inequalities. Breimberg recalled that she and other WL activists in Vancouver became responsible for arranging the venue and housing for four hundred to five hundred delegates. They also assumed much of the financial cost associated with this process. In other words, they performed much of the so-called grunt work for the conference, even though they had limited input in the decision-making process.
Although Canadian women served as hosts for the IWC, their presence remained marginal. The delegate quota system, established to ensure broad geographical representation, gave decided preference to women from the United States. They received 80 percent of the approximately two hundred slots reserved for the new friends portion of the IWCs. That meant that only forty Canadian WL activists could attend each conference, and they also had to ensure geographic distribution among their delegates. As Breimberg emphasized, the IWCs were primarily intended for U.S., not Canadian, women. At the time, this disproportionate emphasis on U.S. women could not be widely discussed and criticized due to visa concerns. The Canadian government had previously denied the right of entry for the Winter Soldiers Investigation delegation based on the argument that these Vietnamese visitors intended to address a U.S., not Canadian, audience. So IWC organizers, saddled with logistical and financial burdens without representation, had to suffer their indignities quietly.
To add insult to injury, the female activists from south of the border did not always recognize that they had crossed into another country. Breimberg remembered, “One of the problems we had with the whole thing was the total chauvinism of the United States delegation. It was just absolutely astounding to the point where . . . when they spoke in the conference they would talk about this country as if this country was their country.”43 In contrast, Breimberg and her Canadian co-organizers became painfully aware of the forty-ninth parallel. They crossed over to the United States in February 1971 for a preconference planning meeting in Portland, Oregon. Because they brought activist literature with them, the border patrol ordered a strip search, which took place in front of a giant poster of President Nixon. This experience sparked their decision to issue detailed advice to American activists about how to cross the border.
Based on these preconference interactions, Canadian WL activists anticipated the need to educate their U.S. sisters and to curb their sense of entitlement. Toward that end, organizers authored a cartoon history of their nation that highlighted women’s issues. This forty-page publication, She Named It Canada: Because That’s What It Was Called, was not completed in time for the conference but was subsequently distributed within activist circles.44
As a result of the dynamics between white American and Canadian women, the latter identified themselves as colonized subjects. Both they and the Southeast Asian women suffered from imperialism. This analogy was particularly apt for activists who supported the French separatist movement based in Quebec. Initially, the IWCs were to take place in three cities: Toronto for East Coast participants, Vancouver for West Coast activists, and Montreal for those from the Midwest. Advocates for the last site noted the similarities between Quebec and Vietnam as colonies seeking self-determination and liberation; they also highlighted the significant population of Afro-Caribbeans in Montreal and emphasized a sense of racial comradery with the black liberation movement in the United States.45 In the end, the Montreal conference did not take place for a number of reasons. The U.S. WL activists made their initial contacts with English-speaking women in Montreal. Marlene Dixon, a former Chicago-based activist who subsequently taught at McGill University in Montreal, was a primary conduit for these efforts. Scholar Jill Vickers has argued that Dixon was a polarizing figure among Anglophone feminists, because she transplanted fractious forms of U.S.-based politics. In contrast, Vickers argues that Canadian feminists were less divisive. Although differences existed, there was a “willingness to engage in debate” across political differences with less suspicion and greater “belief in dialogue.”46 In addition, Dixon failed to fully involve French-speaking activists in Montreal, which led to their sense of marginalization. They subsequently decided not to participate in the IWC and instead focused on the Quebec movement for sovereignty. In 1970 the escalation of their protest efforts resulted in increased government repression and the imposition of martial law. In a letter that was published by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in late January 1971, women in the Front de Liberation Quebecois (FLQ) explained the political context: “Over 3000 [police] raids have been carried out, most of them in Montreal. Over 400 have been detained for questioning and about 100 are still in jail. People speaking sympathetically [toward the FLQ] are losing their lobs and/or being watched.”47 In this context, French-speaking organizers could not spare any additional resources or personnel to plan the conference. Also, the state of martial law raised concerns about security for the Vietnamese delegation.48 Interestingly, the announcement to cancel the Montreal conference emphasized the similarities between the political persecution of the FLQ and the sufferings of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. Instead of a full conference, a smaller gathering of approximately one hundred people attended a series of discussions and meetings in Montreal.49
Even as white Canadian women, English and French speaking, portrayed themselves as colonized subjects, women of color in Canada distinguished themselves from their white counterparts. Gerry Ambers, a Native Canadian or First Nations activist, recalled that she and other members of her community received a request from IWC organizers to cook for the Indochinese delegates.50 Ambers was practiced in international political solidarity. She became active during the 1960s, forming alliances between indigenous nations in both Canada and the United States. They collaborated with one another to obtain fishing rights for Native Americans in Washington State, to bring attention to the sexualized violence directed against indigenous women, and to reclaim native land. During the Vancouver IWC, the Indochinese delegates expressed a deep appreciation for the meals that Ambers and other First Nations women prepared. They served foods “traditional” to their community, such as salmon and other seafood. In Ambers’s mind, it was not just a coincidence that these items were familiar to and well liked by the Vietnamese. Their dietary similarities symbolized a deeper rapport between the First Nations and the Third World. In contrast, Ambers recalled that the white Canadian women offered unpalatable food, like raw carrot sticks. These items were both unfamiliar and difficult to digest, especially given the poor dental health of some of the Southeast Asian representatives who resided in rustic revolutionary base camps. Ambers also recalled that she and the white Canadian WL activists differed with one another as to who should be allowed to attend the conference. While Ambers and other indigenous women wanted to include First Nations men because of their mutual opposition to imperialism, the white women drew “a hard line at gender.”51 The differences between First Nations and white Canadian women suggest that the former did not readily accept the latter’s claim to being colonized subjects.
Although Canadian women of varying cultural and racial backgrounds identified with Indochinese women, they had mixed feelings about the Third World women from the United States. Some Canadian new friends thought of themselves as occupying a status similar to Third World U.S. women, since both groups suffered from the chauvinism and colonial mentality of the American WL movement. However, they also resented how Third World women questioned Canadian WL activists’ security measures and exacted demands. In an assessment of the Vancouver conference, one organizer expressed this sense of ambivalence: “The struggle of Third World women against racism, poverty and oppression could be directly related to the genocide in Vietnam. The attitudes they brought with them, their total disregard of our Canadian rights, and the imposition of their own realities on to the Conference were a great strain on the already taut fibre of our endurance and resources. . . . However, it was obvious that they did have a strong cohesive group of many racial origins.”52
Figure 16. Vietnamese woman with gun evokes indigenous female iconography. Georgia Straight, Special Supplement for the Vancouver Indochinese Women’s Conference, April 1971.
People of color in Canada also had complex relationships with women of color from the United States. In an article published in a Chinese Canadian newsletter, Peter Lee expressed his admiration for the Third World U.S. contingent, which included “Afro-Americans, Chicanos, Native and East Indians, Chinese and Japanese. There was noticeably more harmony among the members, a closer unity of purpose and thought in the third world group.” He also recalled the eloquence of “our Chicano sister from Mexico. Her speech was full of the vigor, strength and will of all the third world.”53 U.S. Third World women also expressed a sense of solidarity across national lines. Maria Ramirez recalled how touched she was to discover that First Nations women helped to organize the conference. Afterward, she tried to track down documentary evidence, “pictures or any articles,” so that their efforts could be included in the historical record.54 In contrast, some Canadians did not find evidence of Third World solidarity across the Americas. One white organizer recalled, “In Canada efforts were made to involve people of the ‘Third World,’ but . . . no such united group was found to exist.”55 This assessment likely reflected her lack of contact with such groups. It is also possible that racialized groups had not yet created a sense of political commonality. IWC organizers tended to find that Canadians of color identified with their particular communities rather than across racial or national boundaries.
Given these cumulative difficulties, Canadian organizers questioned whether they should in fact continue these international efforts with Americans. Even VOW expressed the opinion that “Canadian women and sensitive ex-Americans became very conscious of ‘American Imperialism,’ not only the usual kind but ‘of the Left.’ Our visitors from below the border tended not to remember that Canada is still—a separate country, and our hospitality and patience were often tested. Some of our people questioned the wisdom of trying to collaborate with Americans on any project at this time. Americans are unhappy, upset and disturbed by so many pressures and problems which only they can solve.”56 Rather than focusing their energies on providing a forum for American women, Canadian women wanted to prioritize the development of their own antiwar movement.
The North American activists who traveled to Vancouver and Toronto aspired to create an international community of women. However, the conference provided a setting for emerging political ideologies and factions to ferment and explode among women of varying backgrounds. In an assessment of the IWCs, one attendee reflected on the overall absence of “sisterhood at the conference”:
The thing which disturbed me most at the Conference was the attitude of distrust and alienation among women. Prior to the Conference, labels like “feminists,” “radical lesbians,” and “anti-imperialist women” (whatever that means—it seems to imply some women in the Women’s Movement are for imperialism?) were thrown around a lot, creating divisions before women even began to arrive. Women became catagories [sic], not people. What about a woman who might be a feminist or lesbian who was also “anti-imperialist?” The conference seemed designed to preclude such possibilities, and women began to polarize.57
Ironically, the desire of North Americans to espouse a sense of sisterhood with Indochinese women was greater than their ability to generate solidarity among themselves.
The conference occurred at a historical moment in which different strands of political ideologies and movements were just emerging. The birthing of these new formations involved painful acts of separation. Singer, lesbian feminist, and antiwar activist Holly Near did not attend the IWC. She participated in similarly contentious meetings, though, and offers an insightful analysis of the political process:
It’s a long journey to really learn how to do coalition politics. . . . Because we all began somewhere. . . . I was homophobic at the beginning and I needed to be brought along. I was not a feminist at the beginning; I needed to be brought along. And none of us came into this with all of our pieces of the puzzle put together. . . . I have been at conferences . . . when I first was discovering lesbianism and there was a huge amount of rage coming forward with what had happened to gay people and the oppression that had taken place. And when I first became a feminist and I started looking at statistics of abuse and my anger came in the room first and it was, it was dominating my thought process and so it made me insensitive to the fact that someone else might be walking in who lost a child to napalm and they would see my particular issue about talking about sexuality [as] really out of place in relationship to their loss. So, obviously losses, and grief, and oppression there—it shouldn’t be a competition but . . . I’ve learned over time that there is a time and a place to let someone else’s story, or pain, or loss, or horror take precedence over what might be on my plate at the moment. . . . I learned this from Dr. Bernice Johnson-Regan [civil rights activist and singer]—you don’t have to leave yourself at the door. You can bring your whole self in but you don’t necessarily have yourself be the center of attention.58
At the IWCs, the North American female activists had not yet learned how to bring their whole selves into the political tent while not demanding the center ring of attention.