Initially ending or preventing war was the primary goal of these protests, but in the nuclear era, it became evident that weapons had the power to devastate environments and populations leading to expansion of concerns.
[6] Emily Greene Balch, Chrystal Macmillan, Cornelia Ramondt-Hirschmann, and Rosika Schwimmer visited neutral countries and Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, Aletta Jacobs, and Mien van Wulfften Palthe traveled to warring nations, with the goal of persuading heads of state to form a neutral mediating body for solving international disputes.
[13] The president did not meet with them, but the activists met with Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,[32] and Congressmen Edwin B. Dooley and Robert R. Barry, both of New York.
[37] Thérèse Casgrain became president of the organization in 1962 and led the campaign to try to persuade Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and his government to forgo acquiring nuclear weapons.
[14][15] Casgrain chartered a train for 300 to 400 activists, their children, and a few male supporters to travel from Montreal to Ottawa to urge the government to work towards ending the arms race and Cold War militarization.
Diefenbaker refused to call for the Canadian Armed Forces to be mobilized to support the US,[43] but the crisis spurred cabinet talks about whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.
Around 300 women from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden rode the train to attend planned rallies in Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Kalinin, and Smolensk to protest the arms race.
[51][52][18] The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that the protesters would be the first Western peace demonstrators to be officially welcomed and permitted to tour the Soviet Union.
[50] The approved messages called for actions by all Cold War adversaries to work for peace, supporting neither NATO nor Warsaw Pact allies.
[18] Eva Nordland [no], a Norwegian who was one of the organizers of the trip, reiterated that the focus was not on geopolitical divisions, but rather to raise awareness that backing the use of nuclear weapons was supporting human extinction.
"[54][55] The women began their march on Kirov Street in central Leningrad and traversed some 3,000 miles, calling for an end to nuclear proliferation and international cooperation.
[17] In actuality, the protesters did little demonstrating, as the Soviet-organized event had the women spending time traveling long distances by train and attending a series of sight-seeing tours.
[56] Despite the restrictions, Danielle Grünberg, national coordinator of the British Women's Peace Alliance; Cees van der Vel, a Dutch journalist; and Jean Stead, a reporter for The Guardian, met with members of the Group to Establish Trust between the USSR and the USA, including Olga Lvovna Medvedkova and her husband Yuri Medvedkov [ru].
[18] In 1983, an activist organization called Women For Survival, hosted a peace camp at Pine Gap,[59] a joint Australian-US base near Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory of Australia, which was created to track nuclear research and testing, as well as adherence to arms control treaties.
According activist Gail Green the purpose of allowing US warships to dock was to give the US a "vantage point from which to spy on and attack the Soviet Union".
[20] Opposition members of Parliament questioned why the Labour government had granted permission to the women to set up the camp and expressed their outrage on radio broadcasts.
[20] These media reports led to a variety of attacks on the women, including verbal assaults, tires being slashed, car windows being broken, and fires being lit in the scrub surrounding the camp.
[65] Although invited to meet with the women on 3 December, both the base commander and US naval attaché failed to show up for the 10 a.m. appointment,[65] to discuss ending the Australian-US military alliance, end the exploitation of women by military personnel, protect the environment, and pledge to support peace initiatives, a nuclear-free world, and redirection of defense spending to social and environmental programs.
[69] The largest protest, held on 6 December and called "Break the Sound Barrier", was an attempt to breach the gate that halted entry to the causeway.
[86] According to the report written by Tamara Dragadze, the train left Tbilisi on 20 September 1993, during the battle for Sukhumi, Abkhazia's capital, with several thousand women, but inflated numbers make estimating the participants difficult.
[91] However, by the time the train reached Ochamchire in Abkhazia, ethnic Georgian refugees were fleeing in large numbers from Sukhumi and the participants lost hope in their mission.
[22] This was particularly important because WILPF had organized the train to build networks with Eastern European women and marginalized communities from the Global South,[103] including participants from Angola, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Sudan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
[107] In Kyiv the agenda topic was on disarmament and environmental issues,[94] which was illustrated when they met with officials who told the activists that there was "not a plot of ground in Ukraine that [had] not been contaminated" by the Chernobyl accident.
[124] At the Kibera station, a delegation of Sudanese refugees and Nubi women asked to share their stories and were invited to board the train as passengers.
[138] The exhausted travelers took a day of rest at Mafikeng on 25 August and the arrival and torch passing ceremony there was hosted by First Lady of South Africa Zanele Mbeki.
[141] The outcome of the summit was to include women's empowerment and ensure Indigenous people's participation in the implementation and decision-making processes in order to reach the United Nations' developmental goals.
She was joined by attorney Michal Barak, daughter of former president of the Supreme Court of Israel Aharon Barak; Saviona Rotlevy [he], retired judge of the Tel Aviv District Court; and Michal Shamir, head of the Art, Society and Culture School, at Sapir Academic College in forming the organization Women Wage Peace a month after the war began.
They traveled to Sderot, near the border with Gaza,[144] where they hosted a conference at Sapir College to urge the government and politicians to develop a peace plan which would integrate the principals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and involve women at all levels of the peace-making negotiations.
They took part in a demonstration calling for leaders to unite Jewish and Arab citizens, of all ages and religious or secular beliefs, to making permanent peace in the region.
Recognizing that separations in society were caused by socio-economic and gendered divides, they pressed for the inclusion of women in establishing policies driving political and security for the country.