The Women’s Pentagon Action Archive [anti-war, anti-nuclear, eco-feminism, prisons]

New York / Seneca, NY / Washington, D.C. / Arlington, VA: Women’s Pentagon Action, 1980-1983. 72 pamphlets, flyers, press packets, press releases, and holograph notepaper. Most very good to near fine. Item #10352

Small archive of flyers; pamphlets; broadsides; and handwritten, Xeroxed, and typeset documents related to the three largest demonstrations staged by the Women’s Pentagon Action, including primary source records from the imprisonment of WPA organizers in 1981. The archive was gathered contemporaneously by Maris Hearn, a lesbian-

feminist and New York member of the WPA who was imprisoned in 1981 for her participation in the organization’s direct action.

 

Women’s Pentagon Action was a decentralized, national feminist organization focused on anti-military, environmental, and social activism. The group organized two large demonstrations at the Pentagon in November 1980 and November 1981, smaller local autonomous actions, and the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice at the Seneca Falls Army Depot. All of these actions are vigorously documented this archive.

The archive includes extensive records of Women Pentagon Action demonstrations and events in New York and Washington D.C. between 1980 and 1983, including the first and second demonstrations at the Pentagon in 1981 and 1982, as well as coordinated actions in New York City. These records consist of internal communiques, press releases, flyers for public events and actions, several of which are in Spanish, internally-facing records produced by Hearn’s affinity group, and press about the actions from Gay Community News, off our backs, and other news sources. The collection also includes photo-mechanically reproduced contact sheets from a demonstration.

During the 1981 Women’s Pentagon Action, Hearn was among 43 women who were arrested and detained for throwing blood on the pillars of the Pentagon and tying shut several entrances; most of these women were held for at least 10 days, and some longer. Some of the women were given a bail of $1000 each. This archive includes records of the women’s time in prison--many of which are in holograph--and include poetry, along with typeset and Xeroxed statement from the detained group.

 

The Women’s Encampment, another large action organized by Women’s Pentagon Action, began in the summer of 1983 to protest the planned deployment of nuclear warheads from Seneca Army Depot to Europe.
This archive includes press releases, flyers, and pamphlets covering the initial planning and fundraising, the action itself, and its aftermath. Notably, the archive also includes a statement from the Waterloo Fifty-Four, a group of 54 women who were arrested in Waterloo, New York as they marched from Romulus to the Seneca Army Depot, as well as a carbon copy of a document from a visitation to the Onondaga County Jail during the group’s imprisonment. 

Organizers from Women’s Pentagon Action had notified the local sheriff of their intent to march, for which no permits were legally required. When a group of counter protesters blocked their path in Waterloo, the marchers sat down. The sheriff then arrested 54 of the marchers; nearly all of the 54 women refused to identify themselves, thus they were held on bail that they refused to post. The visitation form included in this archive records Hearn’s visit to one of the women, recorded as Jane Doe, who was detained at the Onondaga County Jail in Syracuse.

The collection also traces the WPA’s place in the broader New York lesbian-feminist movement, including flyers for fundraisers such as a Friday evening “Womyn’s Halloween Dance” in 1980 at Earl Hall at Columbia University - likely organized with Gay People at Columbia, the first gay student organization in the country, known for their Friday evening dances throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.

A small archive of eco-feminist anti-war demonstrations and prison organizing, with extensive records of the planning, execution, and aftermath of major national actions in the early 1980s, with documentation of the imprisonment of women demonstrators that contains substantial holograph.

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