NM was involved in pacifist and later in anti-nuclear politics, participating in the Authors' World Peace Appeal during the Cold War in the 1950s, and heading political demonstrations against NATO installations in Strathclyde in the early 1960s. She became active in FREEZE , an international organisation lobbying governments against making a first strike, and lent support to the women at Greenham Common protesting against placement of Cruise missiles on British soil.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s MB became involved with several political causes. She joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and was arrested and roughed up by the police on a demonstration of a thousand people outside the airforce base at Ruislip. She sent a long letter to Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee on 8 July 1958 (later in the year CND was founded), asking them to clarify their position on nuclear disarmament. She was also elected to the general council of her union, the Association of Cine and Television Technicians , and she went as their delegate to the Women's Labour Party conference at Blackpool. She was, however, opposed to holding a separate women's conference, and believed that after forty years of suffrage women should feel free to speak while standing shoulder to shoulder with men. She also became a member of the Married Women's Association and the Six Point Group , which she later chaired. It is therefore a mistake to suppose that she did not belong to any explicitly feminist organisations or networks. She also made her feminist opinions plain in both her life and her writing. After her second marriage she became an increasingly active campaigner for women's rights, and an ally of Edith Summerskill in attempting divorce reform.

UKLG was opposed to nuclear armament and to the American war in Vietnam. In Portland, Oregon during the 1960s she helped organize and participate in non-violent demonstrations for these two causes: there was a peace movement, and I was in it. In London at the end of that decade, with the war generating new horrors (forests and fields hit with defoliants, civilians bombed), Le Guin had less of an outlet for her activism, and began to broaden her opposition from one particular war to a whole mind-set of domination.

DL helped to organise the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march to the nuclear facility at Aldermaston, which took place on 4-7 April.

Her parents belonged to the educated, professional middle class, and were practising Christians within the Church of England , where (even to a teenager beginning to experience doubts) the services were beautiful with candlelight and music, incense and ceremony and stained glass, the incomparable rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.DL was also exposed to Judaism as a child. As an adult she formally converted to Christianity in 1984 and to Catholicism in 1990. She had early experience of various left-wing causes: seeing her father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini 's invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soapboxes protesting Britain's lack of support for Spain; my mother canvassing long before those events for the League of Nations Union ; and all three of them working on behalf of German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards.

View reference

qtd. in

Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.

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She herself began (unknown to her family) selling the Communist Daily Worker door to door at only about eleven. She grew up to be a committed internationalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear, and environmentalist campaigner.

Born to Fabian socialist parents, JD was a lifelong socialist herself, and became active in the British campaign against nuclear weapons.

PA is an ardent pacifist and socialist. She is a well-known activist who has been involved in efforts to bring about nuclear disarmament. She has also participated in anti-Vietnam war and other peace efforts, and has run for election on socialist tickets.

She has been a feminist from the time that the women's movement began, and also a passionate campaigner against war, particularly nuclear war. She writes of these forces of destruction as a third parent / a godfather at every baby's christening from the time that she was born, unconscious of all this, during the second world war. For some years she was a regular on the Easter marches of CND to the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. She calls herself anti-militarist, anti-establishment, out to change society and reshape the role of women.

By her late teens she herself was a socialist. She was a member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and later of the associated Committee of 100 .

By 1981 she became a committed anti-nuclear protester and CND member.

ZF sees information as critical to understanding and politically aware action, and her work highlights aspects of contemporary living and of women's experience in ways which inform judgement. She seeks to explores tensions between feminist awareness and practical survival in an exploitative society, and to raise awareness of socialist and anti-nuclear issues. She has supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and published polemics in support of that organization, of women's studies, and of the housing charity and pressure group Shelter .

Together GA and five other women created a feminist anti-nuclear group they named Sister Seven .

In the 1980s MR took up the struggle against Cruise nuclear missiles, joining protests at Greenham Common and elsewhere. She is still a republican in politics as well as a feminist.