Participants recommended this @histassoc.bsky.social article: www.history.org.uk/publications...

But their vision of what 'really matters' to scholars seems to be a dematerialized, decontextualized, deinstitutionalized world of sans serif signifiers ready for (ugh) data viz. Meanwhile, paleographers are invited to stick around and refine the model to help ensure that their deskilling takes hold

Thank you! I’m always very happy to do a guest lecture if there’s a need for it - also available for funerals, birthdays, and Bar Mitzvahs

Thanks Hilde!

Thanks mate!

Thank you! WSP was fascinating, I think there’s so much more to say about it - hopefully others can take it on!

Thanks Malcolm

Not Just a Housewife: Women Strike for Peace and the Cold War Women’s Peace Movement is out now and available from University of Massachusetts Press, Waterstones, and probably anywhere else you like to get your books (maybe).

And it literally passes the smell test…

I have far too many people to thank for their patient support, indispensable advice, and generally life-affirming friendships. The acknowledgements section is incredibly long but by far the most important part of this book for me!

all of this, and more, forces a reconsideration of what maternal women’s peace activism was, and by extension, women’s peace movement history generally

For me, the highlights are capturing Alice Herz, and finally adding her back to the WSP story; reckoning with WSP’s associations with Black women peace activists; the activities of San Francisco WFP; and, for the first time, WSP’s experiences among the resurgence of antinuclear activity in the 1980s

Not Just a Housewife doesn’t just expand the story of WSP - it challenges traditional conceptions of maternal activist identity, the boundaries of peace and women’s issues, and the memory of Cold War-era social movement activism.

WSP was a much more radical, militant, and politically-charged group of people. It’s activities stretched further and impacted more than was recognised.

But to reckon with this complexity means challenging the very stories that WSP activists told about themselves.

However, maternal peace protest also drew criticism - Betty Friedan famously rebuked WSPers for maintaining that they were “just a housewife” and urged them instead to make their political stance “as citizens.”
As I show in the book, all of this history is, of course, much more complex!

Leveraging the moral authority of American motherhood to make a radical anti-militarist critique during the fraught years of the Cold War, WSP scored numerous successes and its activists were a constant feature of social movement activism from 1961-1990.