Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice.

 

“In the summer of 1983, a large number of women established the Seneca Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice near a nuclear weapons storage depot in Seneca County New York. There, women gathered to protest nuclear weapons and to critique the “patriarchal society” that created…those weapons.”

These are the opening sentences of Louise Krasniewicz’s book Nuclear Summer: the Clash of Communities at the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment. More specifically, as Krasniewicz documents, the protestors meant to stop the deployment of Pershing missiles to Europe.

I was part of that summer as a military police officer at Seneca Army Depot. I was also part of a unauthorized “welcome committee” soldiers who, with beer in hand, spent an afternoon at the encampment arguing the merits of a Mutually Assured Destruction strategy. Peace through strength we said. Peace through disarmament they said. No one’s positions were changed.

Ultimately, the Pershings were deployed. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union was no more by 1991.

What you see in this photo is the now abandoned farm house that was the Women’s Peace Encampment. Forty years on, no sign of that political effort remains. There is no placard, no marker. There is no hint of the role this bit of land played during one summer of one year of the nearly half a century of the Cold War. A friend tells me that not an oversight. She says the community wants to forget. They didn’t agree with the protestors and didn’t want them here. Seneca County doesn’t want a reminder so there shall be none. The event shall be forgotten. Except my those who lived it and who read Krasniewicz’s book.