Editor’s note: In honor of Women’s History Month, historian Jenny Thompson looks at Evanston women’s peace activism. Part 1 of her report, which covers the Cold War in the 1960s, is here. This is the concluding part 2, which focuses on opposition to the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War
The war in Vietnam expanded slowly and then seemingly all at once. What began as an advisory mission in the 1950s would turn into a full-scale military operation, ultimately involving 2.7 million American service members deployed in South Vietnam.
The war would cause deep divides in the Evanston community. Many supported the war but increasingly the anti-war movement grew as public opinion shifted against the war. In 1964 two-thirds of the American public reported that they paid “little or no attention to developments in South Vietnam.[2] A year later, 61% of Americans supported U.S. involvement in the war. By 1968, that percentage had plummeted to 35%.[3]
The anti-war movement was broad and diverse, encompassing women and men, faith leaders, church and synagogue members, students and many others – including, as the membership of Women Strike for Peace (WSP) had often been characterized, “housewives.”
“Plagued by images of traditional womanhood and the loyal subservient wife waiting at home for her husband,” observed historian Jerri Mauldin of the women who worked to end the war in Vietnam, “the women of the movement sought a unique voice calling for peace without the devaluation of women.”[4]
Not all the women who joined groups such as WSP (aka Women for Peace) took part in the growing anti-war movement. But, by the mid-1960s, as the war escalated, many women in the peace movement acknowledged that they played a critical role in calling for peace – to protect their sons, brothers and fathers; to safeguard the world as a whole and the world’s children; and to end the destruction of the war in Vietnam.
“No one is immune to the effects of the Viet Nam War,” as a 1966 ad from the Evanston Peace Center stated.
As early as 1965 – with the height of the anti-war movement still a few years away – many local women engaged in marches and acts of civil disobedience to protest the war. In December 1965, 100 WSP members gathered in downtown Chicago, demonstrating against U.S. policy in Vietnam “with songs and banners.” [5] Those downtown protests would continue over the years. For example, in 1967, a group of women picketed the armed forces induction center at 615 W. Van Buren St. in Chicago and attempted to enter the facility “to present signed statements of conscience in support of draft resistors.”[6]
“War is not peace. Tyranny is not freedom. Hate is not love. End the war in Vietnam.”
These were the statements that WSP members submitted as ads to be displayed on CTA trains beginning in 1966. For two years, the CTA refused to carry the ads. In 1968, following a suit brought by the Illinois ACLU, the CTA agreed to carry the ads.
These kinds of smaller-scale efforts led by women were happening across the country. And soon, women working to end the war in Vietnam would find a national voice.
The Jeannette Rankin Brigade
On Jan. 15, 1968, 5,000 women from states across the country (including 300 women from Evanston and the larger Chicago area) marched in Washington, D.C., demanding “that Congress immediately end the war in Vietnam and withdraw American troops.”[7]
It was the largest march led by women since the Woman Suffrage Procession in 1913.[8]
Evanston’s own Maya Friedler, director of the Evanston Peace Center, was there.[9] (Read about Friedler, who was a member of the steering committee of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade of Chicago, here.)
WSP members, along with members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, helped organize the “peace parade” and the women collectively dubbed themselves the “Rankin Brigade,” inspired and led by Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to serve in the U.S. Congress.
“Bringing the boys home is not enough,” Rankin declared that day. “This is a bad war, but it is war itself we must end. The war system of solving disputes is a habit we must break.” [10]
“Parades are fine,” Rankin told the marchers, “but now it’s time to organize and use women’s political power.”[11]
For many anti-war leaders and activists, protesting the war was connected to the struggles for civil, human and women’s rights. And now, various groups were visibly united.
“We want it to be known throughout this nation and the world that we are opposed to the senseless slaughter taking place in Vietnam and that we will no longer stand by idly and let it happen,” said Coretta Scott King, who took part in the Rankin Brigade. “We, the women of America, have the power to stop [it].”[12] King would soon form her own national organization, Campaign of Conscience, a “womanpower movement working for social justice and against the Vietnam War.”[13] (King was also a WSP member.)
Anti-war and peace efforts in Evanston were now taking various forms. Members of the Evanston Peace Center were focused not only on protesting the war, but also providing support for veterans and those subject to the draft. In 1969, members had begun visiting a nearby veterans hospital. They also started to provide draft counseling, which included advising people how to attain deferments.[14] (The Illinois Selective Service System was on record stating that it did not “advocate counseling.”[15])
The Peace Center’s director at the time, Evanston resident Dorothy McDade, acknowledged that some viewed draft counseling as controversial. “[S]ome people come in here and think we’re doing something illegal,” McDade said. “We feel, however, that it should be a community service.”
As the number of American men called up by the U.S. government for military service grew, the number of men who were now coming into the center for counseling had “increased greatly.” “The whole atmosphere is one of anxiety,” McDade said.[16]
The atmosphere of anxiety
In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, anti-war marches, rallies, protests and acts of civil disobedience grew steadily across the country.
In the summer of 1969, when a petition calling for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam was presented to the City Council by the Peace Center, four council members signed it. Among them was Joan Connor, newly elected council member representing the city’s Third Ward.[17]
Connor also later supported granting a permit for a proposed anti-war march in Evanston. “The right to march in peaceful protest is the manifestation of the right to freedom of speech,” Connor said.
Organizers of the march, which included 14 local groups, including the Peace Center and North Shore Women for Peace, were refused a permit. Two council members objected to the march, stating that the groups’ request to march through the downtown Fountain Square area would be “disruptive and financially damaging to business men in the central business district.”[18]
Miriam Gordon Katz (1919- 2011), Peace Center member and chair of the North Shore Coalition Against the War in Vietnam, responded that “temporary interference with business is not as important as the interference with the lives of servicemen who are dying in Vietnam.”[19]
After some legal wrangling, the council granted the permit, but did not give the group permission to march through Fountain Square, as requested. [20]
At the time of the May 1969 anti-war march in Evanston, 31,379 American servicemen had been killed in Vietnam. Some local women were now taking more dramatic action to call attention to the war’s destruction.
The day before the march took place, Frances Mettling, head of the Peace Center and wife of a prominent Methodist minister, Carl Mettling, was busy staging a protest. Along with several others, including three local women, Beatrice Stuart, Mary Boyer and Rita Josephson, Mettling entered the Evanston Selective Service office at 912 Chicago Ave. They were planning a “sit-in” at the office as they read aloud “the entire list of war dead” over a 24-hour period. Police arrived at the scene and the group refused to leave. Along with several Northwestern University students who had joined the protest, Mettling and the others were arrested and charged with “criminal trespass.”[22]
The war continued to escalate and the protests also grew.
In May 1970, there was upheaval on Northwestern University’s campus in the wake of the bombing of Cambodia and the killing of students at Jackson State University and Kent State University.
Students joined a national strike, protesting en masse; some erected a barricade with lumber, street signs, benches and garbage cans and blockaded Sheridan Road.[23] The university considered calling National Guard troops to campus.
It was one young woman, 20-year-old Northwestern student, Eva Jefferson, who helped maintain peace. While serving as a liaison with the university administration and Evanston government officials, Paterson connected with and represented the students; “Listen people,” she told them, “nobody says you have to burn buildings. If you don’t believe in violence then don’t do it.” [24] Paterson kept the student protests from turning into “minor riots.” And she never “lost her cool.”[25]
“We were against the war,” Jefferson said later. “We loved our University. We wanted to take a stand against the lawlessness of the Nixon administration. We were appalled and frightened that students much like us were shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State. We did not want to create more violence.”[26]
Jefferson, dubbed the “peaceful warrior,” was catapulted into the national spotlight as she was credited with maintaining peace on a campus fraught with political unrest. All the while, she spoke out against the war. The Evanston Review featured her on its May 11, 1970, cover. Later she was featured on the covers of Ebony and Jet magazines and named one of Mademoiselle’s Ten Young Women of the Year, among other honors.[27]
The Northwestern protests deeply impacted many Evanston residents. “The kids knew immediately that they had to do something,” Pattsi Petrie told the Evanston Review. “It took us adults longer. We were upset, frustrated, but finally we did something too.”
In 1970, Petrie and her Hinman Avenue neighbors drew up a plan for “community action” to end the war. On the 1100 to 1200 blocks of Hinman, roughly 200 residents attained a permit to close the street for a block party and held a rally featuring speeches condemning the war. Roughly 60% of the residents signed a symbolic “declaration of independence,” seceding their neighborhood from the U.S. government for two hours in protest of the war.[28]
The neighbors also formed the Community Congress to End the War in Indochina to be held at the First Methodist Church. Petrie volunteered to field questions via telephone to help people understand the issues. Her “anti-war evangelism,” the Evanston Review wrote, “is low key and sandwiched between her many duties as wife of a N.U. professor and mother of three.”[29]
“I think the anger is just as great as last spring,” Petrie told the Evanston Review a year later in 1971, “but there’s somewhat more despair. We have to think of new ways to protest … I think everyone is just trying to decide to find out what direction to go.”[30]
For many women, especially in the wake of increasingly violent anti-war protests, maintaining peaceful forms of protest was essential. “This is not what we want for Mother’s Day,” read an ad placed by the North Shore WSP chapter.
From the personal to the political, women continued to create ways to speak out against the war. In 1971, the North Shore WSP chapter organized “Don’t Buy the War,” a protest against the war that called for boycotting any kind of “shopping on the 16th day of each month.” [31] Meanwhile Peace Center member Sandy Goldhehn organized a trip to Washington D.C. for members to discuss the war with their representatives.[32]
Women also continued to call attention to the war’s impact on children.
In 1972, the Peace Center planned to take part in Evanston’s Fourth of July parade, whose theme that year was Kids: America’s Greatest Resource. Their entry into the parade was a school bus “decorated with pictures of injured and bandaged Vietnamese children.” On the bus they posted signs that read “End the War,” “When is Vietnam’s Independence Day?” and “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.”[33]
Parade organizers told Peace Center members that political statements were not allowed in the parade and they could not enter the parade without altering their signs. But they refused. They started out on the parade route but parade officials halted the bus before a “squadron of Evanston police blocked it on the street and forced it out of the parade.”[34]
In the final years of the war, many women reported feeling sidelined from the anti-war movement in general. In a 2019 interview, Friedler, director of the Evanston Peace Center, recounted the sexism she increasingly faced in what had become a male-dominated movement. It was then that Friedler “switched,” she said, “to the women’s movement.”[35]
But, of course, in many ways the peace movement itself had always been a “women’s movement.”
The work for peace that women undertook, from the Cold War through the Vietnam War, was part of a larger process of revolutionary social change. The struggles to advance peace were also part of the work to advance women’s rights and civil rights, and together, these collective struggles produced myriad forms of “consciousness raising” and brought forth a renewed and strengthened “women’s liberation” movement.
The many ways that women engaged in the movements to end war have always been both collective and individual. From attending a HUAC hearing to marching in the streets to fielding telephone calls and teaching children, the efforts of women peace workers have been broad, brave and ultimately united by a common goal. “We must see that the youth of today shall have a chance to fulfill themselves without the devastation of war,” Peace Center director Jeanette Barza had written in 1964, “and that the children of our world shall have the opportunities to grow up in a world at peace.”[36]
And the work for peace continues.
Epilogue
In 1972, the Peace Center moved to 104 Chicago Ave. Its members continued their opposition to the war.[37]
The last U.S military unit withdrew from South Vietnam on March 29, 1973. “With the ending of our nation’s active military participation in the war in Vietnam,” a center spokesperson stated, “interest and activity in the Peace Center lessened.” But members reported that they were continuing their work and planning future activities. [38]
The Peace Center remained open until April 1976 – one year after the war was officially declared over on April 30, 1975, when the North Vietnamese took over Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.
Women for Peace continued to be active in post-Vietnam War peace campaigns.
Ultimately, more than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. Estimates vary, but as many as 2.5 million people from all countries involved in the war were killed as a result of the conflict.
Call for questions: Do you have a question related to Evanston history? If you are curious about a person, place or event, ask away by emailing Jenny Thompson. Formerly of the Evanston History Center, Thompson is an independent public historian and nonprofit consultant.
[1] The post is named in honor of William Benjamin Snell (1919-1943), the first Black Evanston resident to die in World War II. Post 7186, Veterans of Foreign Wars. https://www.vfw7186.org/who-was-t-sgt-william-snell
[2] William L. Lunch and Peter W. Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam.” The Western Political Quarterly 32, (1979): 21–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/447561
[3] William L. Lunch and Peter W. Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam.” The Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1979): 21–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/447561
[4] Jerri Mauldin, “The Vietnam War Peace Movement and the Role Women Played,” Georgetown University, 2002.
[5] “100 Women for Peace Protest Policy in Viet,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 23, 1965.
[6] “Women Pickets, Cops Scuffle,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 19, 1967.
[7] “Area Women Urge Peace,” Evanston Review, Feb. 22, 1968; James Yuenger, “Women Plan Viet Protest in Washington,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 14, 1968; “200 City Women to Join Viet Protest at Capitol,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 12, 1968; Betsy Bliss, “ ‘Brigade Here to Stay:’ Women Vow Peace Crusade,” Chicago Daily News, Jan. 16, 1968.
[8] Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin: America’s Conscience (Helena, Montana: Montana Historical Society Press, 2002), 209.
[9] “Politics for Peace Party Endorses Two,” Daily Herald, Feb. 25, 1968.
[10] Betsy Bliss, “ ‘Brigade Here to Stay’: Women Vow Peace Crusade,” Chicago Daily News, Jan. 16, 1968.
[11] Betsy Bliss, “ ‘Brigade Here to Stay’: Women Vow Peace Crusade,” Chicago Daily News, Jan. 16, 1968.
[12] Marya McQuirter, “15 jan 1968 & anti-war march,” DC 1968 Project, Jan. 15, 2018. https://www.dc1968project.com/blog/2018/1/15/15-jan-1968-anti-war–march
[13] Judith Martin, “Coretta King Launches Conscience Campaign,” Times Colonist, June 22, 1968.
[14] George Harmon, “Holidays Tone Down War Protest,” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 12, 1969.
[15] Allen Schaeffer, “The Draft: Conflict Moves From Swamps of Vietnam to Suburbia’s Living Rooms and Draft Boards,” Evanston Review, Sept. 25, 1969.
[16] Allen Schaeffer, “The Draft: Conflict Moves From Swamps of Vietnam to Suburbia’s Living Rooms and Draft Boards,” Evanston Review, Sept. 25, 1969.
[17] “Anti-War Petition is Signed,” Evanston Review, July 17, 1969.
[18] “Evanston Ok’s Anti-Viet War Parade Permit,” Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1969.
[19] Hal Hollister, “Peace Marchers File Injunction Against City,” Evanston Review, May 22, 1969; Obituary, “Miriam Gordon Katz, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/chicagotribune/name/miriam-katz-obituary?id=2622392
[20] “Evanston Ok’s Anti-Viet War Parade Permit,” Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1969.
[21] “Evanston Viet Protest Peaceful,” Chicago Tribune, May 25 1969; “2,500 Marchers Protest War,” Evanston Review, May 26, 1969.
[22] Amy C. Schneidhorst, Building a Just and Secure World: Popular Front Women’s Struggle for Peace and Justice in Chicago During the 1960s (New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing, 2011), 154; “7 Held in Evanston Draft Board Protest,” Chicago Tribune, May 24, 1969. See also: Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993.
[23] Eventually, 33 Northwestern University students would be arrested for property damage and physical abuse. Bonita Harsh, “Northwestern Students On Trial.” Evanston Review. May 25, 1970, 3.
[24] Evanston Review, May 11, 1970.
[25] Evanston Review, May 11, 1970.
[26] Eva Jefferson Paterson, “Reflections of a Black Student Activist,” Northwestern Magazine, Spring 2018, https://magazine.northwestern.edu/features/reflections-of-a-black-student-activist-civil-rights-attorney-remembers-bursars-office-takeover/
[27] Later, Paterson would go on the David Frost television show and join several other college students for a live debate with Vice President Spiro Agnew. Helen H. King. “Eva Jefferson: Young Voice of Change,” Ebony, January 1971.
[28] Valerie Vondrak, “Evanston Residents Protest War,” Chicago Tribune. May 18, 1970; “Hinman Avenue Protest Takes Cue From the ‘Kids,’” Evanston Review, May 21, 1970.
[29] “Hinman Neighbors Listen, Call Community Congress,” Evanston Review, May 28, 1970.
[30] Wynne Delacoma, “Now It’s Quiet Anger, Despair,” Evanston Review, April 22, 1971.
[31] Wynne Delacoma, “Now It’s Quiet Anger, Despair,” Evanston Review, April 22, 1971.
[32] Wynne Delacoma, “Now It’s Quiet Anger, Despair,” Evanston Review, April 22, 1971.
[33] Steven Pratt, “Evanston Float Tiff Ends in Compromise,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1972.
[34] Steven Pratt, “Evanston Float Tiff Ends in Compromise,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1972; Sue Engel, “Barring of Float ‘To Be an Issue,’ ” Evanston Review, July 13, 1972.
[35] Julie Hamos, Interview with Maya Friedler, March 2019, The VFA Pioneer Histories Project, https://veteranfeministsofamerica.org/vfa-pioneer-histories-project-maya-friedler/interview-maya-friedler/
[36] Jeanette Barza, “Message of Memorial Day in Atom Age Must be Peace,” Evanston Review, June 4, 1964.
[37] “Peace Center Still Operating, Planning,” Evanston Review, July 3, 1975.
[38] “Peace Center Still Operating, Planning,” Evanston Review, July 3, 1975.