Women Activists: rewriting Greenham's history

The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp protest of the 1980s and 1990s has become synonymous with radical feminism. Given that many of the challenges raised and discourses employed were similar, it might appear as a relatively uncomplicated progression from Women's Liberation. From this perspective, the threat of nuclear war could be viewed as a stark indication of the persistence of male violence enabled by an unremittingly patriarchal world. The women's protest was therefore often described by those who took part as a direct challenge to the status quo, intended to bring about the cultural revolution required to overthrow it. This article examines two histories of the event published in the ‘post-feminist’ era of the mid 2000s. It will demonstrate how a shift in discourses since the end of the protest has enabled these emergent texts to challenge the previously dominant version of the Greenham peace camp. It will go on to suggest that this shift was necessary in order to communicate a new contemporary political message: a message that gains its authority by drawing on other ‘silent’ discourses from Greenham. It will compare this development to the post-suffrage period as observed by other historians. In so doing, it will once again reveal how closely the ‘present’ influences the reflections of the ‘past’, and how this affects the performances of participants in their autobiographical accounts.