Confessions of a Disgruntled Reader or, Giving Swerdlow a Second Chance

In Women Strike for Peace, Amy Swerdlow paints an in-depth and cohesive chronology of WSP women during the 1960s.  Swerdlow’s introduction, which I think is particularly poignant and primes the reader in crucial ways, positions Swerdlow as a movement insider, one who, as both scholar and former activist, wants to paint a complete picture of this women’s movement, which has currently been absent or glossed over in scholarly works.  Important to tell readers that she is indeed partly clouded by her personal memories in this telling of history, Swerdlow makes it immediately known that middle-class/upper-class white women were the foundation for the WSP and the peace movement. 

It was when I hit page 193 that I felt initially and immediately duped; it took Swerdlow 193 pages to (almost) explicitly acknowledge that these activist women were in part indebted to class privilege, what she calls their “affluence,” for their activist gains, public visibility, and continual funding.  Up until page 193, I had been writing dollar signs in the margins when it seemed to me that certain historical moments could not have been possible without significant funding.  To be clear, Swerdlow didn’t point out money, only I did.  Wait...was I, an undergraduate reader, smarter than Swerdlow?  Was I privy to class and she wasn't?  Seemed impossible... So when I hit page 193, I was weirdly satisfied that she had finally acknowledged class, but then angered that she didn’t add this explicitly to her well-formed Introduction to the book.  After pushing my initial gut reaction aside, and finishing the book, I found it within me to give Swerdlow a second chance and began to ponder possibilities for Swerdlow’s conscious authorial decision to veil class privilege in her historical telling.  What follows is a list of possibilities based on my reading of the book:

(1) Swerdlow doesn’t want readers to judge or pre-judge the women; they were judged enough during the time period in which they acted.  In many moments in the book, Swerdlow emphasizes how the patriarchal, capitalist driven U.S. society rendered women passive, unable to organize, and the media sought “any excuse to dismiss them as hysterical women” (196).  With class privilege comes certain ideological and structural judgment, bias, and preconceived notions that simply cannot be helped.  Perhaps Swerdlow knew the power these judgments would have over the reader’s reading of this history, and wanted to counteract the judgment of women at this time (although this judgment was more gender than economic/class based) by setting the stage in an awe-inspiring, positive way.  Once readers had 193 pages to get to know these women and grow that reader-movement affective connection, then Swerdlow could sneak in their “affluence.”  Readers, padded with the affective pull towards the women, would be less likely to discredit the women’s activism.

(2) The women have carefully constructed themselves as housewives with clear intents, which Swerdlow constantly reminds readers.  By maintaining the housewife/motherhood image, women did not threaten the social order, or even really question it, instead using it as a tool to advance their activism.  Specifically, Swerdlow points out that peace movement women would not “critique, discuss, or even name the economic system” (164).  Swerdlow speculates that this is because WSP women did not want to shake the “feminine” image that they worked so hard to construct, instead exhibiting “political caution” (164).  Swerdlow, as immediately asserting herself as part of this mentality, replicates this carefully constructed discourse of “depoliticized” motherhood/domesticity for the reader via the hiding—or at least not highlighting—the women’s monetary privilege (which presumably was almost wholly funded by their husbands.)  The movement, to the women, was not about highlighting their money/wealth/class specifically because that would suture them to a political, and thus threatening, identity instead of a domestic and traditionally subordinate, and thus unthreatening, identity.  In honoring the carefully constructed, mobilized, and carefully nurtured (180) characterization surrounding the WSP women, Swerdlow mirrors this construction, constantly drawing attention to the rhetoric of motherhood and consistently downplaying class status.

(3) The movement prided itself on a “nonhierarchical, loosely structured “unorganizational” format that allowed autonomy in each [local] chapter” (3).  In order to highlight and honor this open, “radical” structure of “equality,” perhaps Swerdlow did not want to acknowledge class privilege because this would highlight the (economic) power of some women in the movement over others, which cracks the foundation of the entire nonhierarchical movement itself.  Swerdlow takes careful care to describe in detail various moments in which the WSP women remained nameless and a collective solidarity—their media face Dagmar Wilson merely a speaker for the entire group—evidence that Swerdlow finds important the movement’s ability to try to make every woman’s actions matter.  Thus, by acknowledging that there was class privilege going on within this revolutionarily inclusive national collective, Swerdlow would have run the risk of contradicting the structure of the movement.

Okay, I’m still a little frustrated with Swerdlow’s keeping me, as a reader, in the dark about class privilege.  But it seems that in re-claiming and re-writing a history that has been sorely unacknowledged and misrepresented, a writer has to make critical decision in terms of framing history.  At least Swerdlow explicitly states her bias at the very beginning of her book, seemingly giving her free reign to write as she pleases, consciously constructing her authorship just as the WSP women consciously constructed their motherhood.