Authors

Discussion

The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp holds an iconic place not only in the history of the British women’s movement, but also in the history of the international peace movement of the 1980s. In the scholarship on East Central Europe there has been growing interest in the global involvement of the Eastern Bloc countries in women’s activism, but a link to the Greenham Common protests has been only little explored. Czech and Soviet print media from the 1980s show that there was sustained and considerable coverage of the protests at the time also in the Eastern Bloc as well as in the Women of the Whole World, a journal of the Women's International Democratic Federation based in East Berlin. In the Czech Republic, there were also contacts between Greenham Common women and women from the dissident movement Charter 77. Although both the state and the dissent expressed interest in the Greenham Common Camp, it seems that both sides conceived of it solely as a part of the international peace movement, rather than as also a part of the women’s movement. I will look into the contextualisations of this feat of women’s activism and discuss both its instrumentalization by the state actors to support the Eastern Bloc’s peace agenda and its subversive potential for civic movements from below. I will also consider the interplay of the Cold War politics and the gender culture of late state socialism.