American mothers of nonviolence: Action and the politics of erasure in women's nonviolent activism

This chapter explores the historical relationship between and dynamics among feminists and nonviolent activists in the United States, surveying three waves of feminist nonviolent mobilization and interrogating the contributions to and erasure of feminist thinking from popular nonviolence histories. The US feminist and nonviolence movements were born of the same social heart among early, nonviolent abolitionists. It was from the experience of marginalization among nonviolent women abolitionists that the US suffrage movement was born, and again, following women's activism in the civil rights and antiwar movements, second-wave feminism. The chapter examines and discusses (1) a double-standard of gendered effectiveness and invisibility among nonviolent movements, (2) a radical-feminist challenge to patriarchal tendencies in nonviolent organizing, and (3) the feminist-led transformation from a nonviolence that glorifies "self-sacrifice" to a nonviolence that values self-protection, preservation, and health in the realization of collective social justice.