Anti-Nuclear Women Project
I am currently researching women who campaigned against nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing from 1945 to the 1970s for my PhD thesis at Monash University.
This project explores women’s involvement in the Australian anti-nuclear movement from the 1940s to the 1970s. It seeks to understand who these women were, their motivations for joining the movement and the roles they played in it.
Many Australian women occupied key positions in the movement and were responsible for keeping the momentum of the movement going by organising protests and events, and educating the public about the dangers of nuclear fallout. Despite this leading role, women in the movement are overlooked in the scholarship, which focuses on the broader movement as a whole rather than the individuals involved. Moreover, the history of the anti-nuclear movement in Australia is similarly overlooked, often overshadowed by the prominent anti-Vietnam movement that dominated the peace movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.