The Minneapolis protests recall a long lineage of women’s peace movements

This article The Minneapolis protests recall a long lineage of women’s peace movements was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Witnessing the powerful images of the protests in Minneapolis against state violence aimed at brown and Black neighbors during this intense winter of ICE escalation, I saw a beautiful sea of brave humanity. I also noticed a lot of women — singing, shouting their rage and putting their bodies on the line.

The media is noticing, too. Right-wing media is so incensed by white women showing interracial solidarity in this anti-violence movement that they’ve gone on a crusade against “organized gangs of wine moms.” They seem entirely flummoxed by white women identifying with mostly non-white people the Trump administration seeks to dehumanize and brutalize.

The partial but important victory of activists in massively reducing the presence of ICE, and the historic nomination of the people of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize, underscores a truth that historians of women and gender have long documented: Peace activism led or heavily powered by women has been foundational and transformative. 

It’s also often been unappreciated. The Nobel Peace Prize, first awarded in 1901, went to only three women before 1976, and only 20 women total. 

Some of what needs greater appreciation is the invisible labor that makes street protests effective. In her cogent article, Barbara Rodriguez reminds us of a historical pattern: Underneath the visibility of people gathering in the streets is the less-seen caregiving work so often organized by women. 

In Minneapolis this winter, it’s been the diaper runs, the gas cards, the GoFundMe accounts for families in crisis, including Renee Nicole Good’s family, and the procurement and distribution of protest supplies like hand warmers and whistles. It’s the circles of mothers, teachers and caregivers who stepped up for families afraid to leave their houses, fundraising for food and rent and escorting children to and from school when their parents couldn’t. It’s the kindness reflected in the last words of Alex Pretti, who was remembered for his ethic of care as a nurse: “Are you okay?” It’s caregiving that sustains resistance to injustice in the name of peace. 

Another reason that women’s peace work has gone unrecognized is the fact that women mostly have not sat at the tables where peace and war are decided. But as is true throughout women’s history, innovation flowed from lack of presence at the power tables. Women have brought sophistication, a multi-faceted approach and a critical vision to organizing against state violence. 

A tender vision

The original vision for Mother’s Day in the United States was a mother’s day of peace, proposed by Julia Ward Howe. Howe’s 1870 poem, “Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace” laid out her vision for mothers’ role in creating, or at least advocating for, a peaceful world, which she hoped would be celebrated each year. (The official U.S. Mother’s Day would lose its peace emphasis.)

Howe, a staunch abolitionist (and, ironically, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”), believed the essentially maternal and moral perspectives of women could and should influence the big moral questions that underlie the politics and wars devised by men.

She wrote at a time when popular discourse on women and motherhood was infused with uncritical sentimentality. But her poem always tugs at my own sentimental heart: “We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” By evoking what it means to be “tender” towards those who are not “us,” she links peace to bonds between mothers and sons, and by extension entire families, whom we will never know.   

Such tenderness exists today in Minneapolis, too, grounded in a clear moral vision. Emily, one of the organizers of a week of action in early March (after the demobilization of many ICE officers in the metro area), told the Pioneer Press: “What we don’t want to see is ICE leaving Minneapolis and taking their operations elsewhere to terrorize someone else’s community. … What we want to see is a national movement that can rise up and defend their neighbors wherever it’s needed next. We don’t just need ICE out of Minnesota; we need an end to ICE everywhere.”

The moral clarity, leadership and love went deeper in Howe’s poem, as she planted the visionary seeds of what would become the American women’s peace movement: “Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause,” she insisted. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.” In spite of women’s very limited public power, Howe sought to inspire mothers to refuse the violent ideas of what proving one’s manhood meant in a patriarchal and warlike culture, and to resist the claim of the state on the lives and souls of their sons.    

Howe lived through the carnage of the Civil War and wrote her poem in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. She went on to be a peace activist, advocating international cooperation and integrating pacifism into suffrage activism. She laid foundations for what would become the modern women’s peace movement.

Howe did not live long enough to ever cast a ballot. Her access to public spaces was limited by the gender restrictions of her time (though certainly wider than the Black women of her era). But her leveraging of women’s separateness from public spaces and decisions — and her insistence on the basic morality forged in intimate human bonds — would continue to animate the language of women peace activists over many decades. And as women’s access to education and public roles grew, so would the sophistication of their arguments. 

Linking peace and justice

“The new ideal of peace,” Jane Addams wrote in 1907, “demands that the people who desire it shall undertake the patient effort of securing justice in the industrial and social order.” Addams — the founder of the U.S. settlement house movement and a sociologist, suffragist, anti-child labor activist, ACLU cofounder and immigrant rights advocate — understood these linkages between peace among peoples, peace nurtured at home and social justice. Echoing Howe, she also argued in 1922 that “peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.”   

With suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, Addams co-founded the Women’s Peace Party in 1915 during World War I, and shepherded its evolution into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, in 1919. For over 100 years, WILPF has championed disarmament and diplomacy and dared to envision a world without war. Addams and Emily Green Balch, who led the organization in the 1930s, were two of the first three to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931 and 1946, respectively. WILPF resisted war and fascism during World War II, influenced the human rights framework of the early United Nations and went on to protest apartheid in South Africa, among other initiatives.

In 1961, American women formed Women Strike for Peace, or WSP. This housewife-driven movement, mostly comprised of white middle-class women, did not keep member lists so it could avoid the House Un-American Activities Committee. Members petitioned and organized a strike to oppose nuclear testing and the arms race. And they engaged in their own “feminine” political theater, showing up at congressional hearings with their babies and children, in white gloves, daring representatives to call them un-American. They rented a fallout shelter, took it to a shopping area and repurposed it into a “Peace Center,” where they distributed educational pamphlets. Later WSP would oppose the Vietnam War, and more women’s peace organizations would follow, like Code Pink, which formed to oppose the Iraq War and later became active in support of Palestine.

For most of the 20th century, white women were best positioned to raise the visibility of peace activism by leveraging ideas of white femininity as moral and maternal. But the activism of women of color, often more dangerous to undertake, continued apace. In the Vietnam War era, the women of color-led National Welfare Rights Organization and Third World Women’s Alliance protested the use of federal funds for violence against children overseas at the expense of domestic needs. And they criticized a nation that refused to support them in raising children and then drafted their sons to die.

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For women of color, the war has often been right here at home, through police brutality, resource deprivation and disproportionate vulnerability to incarceration — a reality that more white people understand today as we’ve watched the brutality of ICE’s state violence in Minneapolis in 2026, and the murder of George Floyd by an agent of the state in that same city in 2020. Of course, wartime violence — mass bombings, large deployments of troops, mass deployment of chemical weapons and utter destruction of cities — are different facets of state-sponsored violence than carceral racism or the ICE thuggery now being turned onto our neighbors here at home, though the distinctions are blurring in the second Trump presidency. Still, the violence, fear and disruption elicit similar kinds of resistance. 

As we face a resurgence of state violence at home, we can look to Black women’s history of resistance, from the anti-slavery work of Harriet Tubman to the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells to the anti-police violence work of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Ayọ Tometi. Rooted in Black activism (often women-led), the movement also reminds us that, for the people most victimized by state violence, a critical component of peace and justice activism is stubborn insistence that their lives matter. This is part of the work of artists and activist projects like Say Her Name, which challenges the erasure of violence against Black women. As the Somali-American poet Ifrah Mansour recently wrote, “We remind ourselves that we are worthy of peace, of belonging, of dignity.”  

Women activists who link peace and justice show us a broader view of resistance, of what it means to build peace from the ground up, through our hearts and our hands. Today’s anti-violence movements draw, too, on immigrant rights, Palestinian liberation and LGBTQ+ activism, insisting on new ways to build coalitions and imagine peace and justice.

Of course, effective resistance to state violence, whether in international arenas or at home, requires organized action in the streets and in the halls of power, as well as an understanding of the connections between injustice and state-sponsored violence. 

But it also requires social imagination, tactical and strategic innovation, the logistical labor of caregiving work, “world-mindedness” education, the reshaping of public memory and yes, the tender vision of human connections, that women are often acting and speaking to in this moment. It’s the kind of vision we see in the Singing Resistance in Minneapolis, in the way that, as Mansour says, “there’s something magical that’s also happening [in Minneapolis]. There is an eruption of kindness.”

Women get results

The good news is that women’s peace activism often gets results. Erica Chenoweth, an expert on mass mobilization and political transformation, has demonstrated this through research at Harvard University’s Nonviolent Action Lab. In the first multi-decade study of women’s participation in resistance movements across the globe, Chenoweth and their team looked at movements from between 1945 and 2014 and uncovered a powerful pattern. Nonviolent movements with significant participation by women — both at the frontlines and at the organizational level — have greater success in confronting oppressive governments. So, too, she noted, do campaigns with gender-inclusive ideologies.

As we talk about the potential of women’s transformational work, it’s important not to essentialize gender and suggest, as Howe did, that women are intrinsically nonviolent. Women have participated in violent movements (for example, towards independence from colonial powers or regime change), as well as nonviolent ones.

Still, Chenoweth’s research reminds us that women’s participation in resistance movements is generally correlated with nonviolent action. And they found that women-heavy movements are more likely to maintain nonviolent discipline, which helps preserve movement efficacy and public support. Such movements, too, are also more likely to “elicit loyalty shifts from security forces,” Chenoweth wrote. Think Singing Resistance and pleas with ICE officers to come home to their humanity. 

In some ways, early 21st century rigorous social science and 19th century poetic sentimentalism point in similar directions: Women’s leadership is crucial to successful nonviolent protests against war and occupation — and against militarization and oppressive governments at home. Though the sentimental essentializing of femininity makes us uncomfortable today, it had its place in creating a visionary underpinning for women-led or women-heavy peace activism in the decades before 1970s feminism. Its successors offered us something else: a more explicitly gender-equitable and gender-inclusive way to link peace movements to liberation for all of us. 

Memory and recognition matter, too, like the work of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation, which recognizes U.S. peace activists through its U.S. Peace Registry and U.S. Peace Prize and is working to create a national monument to peace activists. Linking memory to multi-faceted activism allows us to continue to imagine a world in which we honor peace builders at least as much as we honor warriors.

In this urgent historical moment, with state violence escalating at home and outright war overseas, an appreciation for the activists who have come before us can provide fuel, inspiration and wisdom. The tactics of women-led peace movements will be especially important as we work to shorten the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran and build conditions for more peace and justice on the other side of it.

This article The Minneapolis protests recall a long lineage of women’s peace movements was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/03/minneapolis-lineage-womens-peace-movements/