By Susan L. Smith
On August 20, 1988, over one hundred peace activists, environmentalists, and concerned citizens from Alberta and Saskatchewan gathered at Suffield, a military research facility in southern Alberta. The protest was led by the Alberta Branch of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace.[1] The Voice of Women was an organization of peace activists founded in 1960 to demonstrate women’s discontent with Cold War politics and the nuclear arms race. However, in the 1960s and 1980s, women in Alberta expanded their peace activism to include opposition to Canadian chemical weapons research. Peace activists played an important role in the history of Western Canadian women’s political activism.
Women’s opposition to military research at Suffield was part of the long history of women’s international peace and disarmament efforts. For example, during the First World War, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was founded by women from warring and neutral nations in order to halt the war. Several decades later, women’s opposition to the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union led to the creation of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace by a group of women in Toronto. Women from across Canada soon organized local branches of the Voice of Women, including one in Alberta, which existed from 1960 to 1994. Continue reading