The welfare rights movement, led by the National Welfare Rights Organization, is one of the least-studied social movements of the 1960s and 70s. NWRO activists insisted on the right to decent clothing, heating in the middle of winter, and other basic needs—along with the right to conduct rent strikes. They fought against involuntary sterilization and advocated for a guaranteed adequate income for all. Yet despite the significance of their discourses and influence in the political debate over “welfare,” their critical narratives have been consistently overlooked.

When the NWRO folded in 1975, scholars have offered explanations for this outcome. Quoting the words of George Wiley, civil rights activist and executive director of the NWRO, Nick Cotz and May Lynn Cotz contended that poor women, like anyone else, had taken advantage of the minor perks of office, and the taste of power it offered. The NWRO eventually collapsed because these poor women were “merely interested in being leadership and maintaining their own position.” Guida West, on the other hand, argued that the demise of the NWRO was due to the contradictions and tensions that existed within the organization from the very beginning: while architects of the NWRO had set up a “new, nonpaternalistic model” that challenged the stereotypes of poor people as subordinates, middle-class, white male staff ended up dominating the movement activities of poor African American women.

Yet, how had these “tensions” surfaced in the early 1970s? Based on Wiley’s papers, NWRO archives, NWRO’s newsletters, and other primary documents, this article illustrates how the backlash against “welfare mothers,” hand in hand with anti-welfare ideology, led to shrinking donations and the contract funds to the NWRO, tightening finances. Politicians and the press came to represent welfare recipients—increasingly African American and unmarried/divorced—as unworthy of public support. Due to these financial difficulties, many organization personnel were eventually fired, exacerbating “tensions” among them, as well as those between the staff and the recipients. The demise of the NWRO cannot be fully understood without considering the changing political and social climate surrounding Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which became increasingly unpopular in the late 1960s with the rapid expansion of membership rolls and its payments.

Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of the NWRO, believed in “working together to do something about the problems that affect poor people across the country.” Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, calls for new imaginings of public safety, addressing the need for divestment from police, prisons, and surveillance, as well as investment in the communities that are most directly impacted by “the violence of poverty.” COVID-19 laid bare “the systemic inequalities within America,” from who dies and who receives good care, to who gets to work from home and who has to choose between making money and risking their health, says William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. Centering the voices of welfare recipients—who have long been silenced, both in the debate over “welfare” and the history of American social movements—would be one of the first steps necessary in untangling the connections between systemic racism and the “violence of poverty” in the U.S.

This article examines the development of Women Strike for Peace (hereafter referred to as WSP) in the 1960s and the early 1970s by focusing on their relationship with other social movements and on the political and social backgrounds of the WSP members. WSP was one of the most significant women’s antinuclear/antiwar movements in the US. This movement comprised mainly white, middle-class, and middle-aged women and was prevalent in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast areas of the US. WSP began in 1961 by demanding nuclear disarmament both in the US and the USSR. After the Test Ban Treaty between the US and the USSR in 1963, WSP gradually shifted its focus to protesting against the War in Vietnam.

Previous studies on WSP in the US have explored its activism from mainly the gender perspective. These studies have regarded WSP as a movement that successfully utilized the discourse of motherhood to obtain support from white middle-class women. Motherhood, however, was not the only driving force of WSP. In addition, WSP attempted to collaborate with racially and economically different groups, particularly in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. For a complete understanding of the WSP’s activism in the 1960s, it is indispensable to investigate the myriad forces that shaped WSP in this decade. Thus, I would like to argue that WSP repeatedly redefined its tactics and strategies according to the rapidly changing conditions in American society and politics during the 1960s.

This article particularly delineates two points. The first is the relationship between WSP and the other social movements in the 1960s. In the first half of the 1960s, WSP was reluctant to tackle social issues other than militarism.Within the context of the second half of the 1960s, WSP became to deal with broader social issues such as civil rights, student activism, and welfare rights. The WSP’s paradigm shift partly reflected contemporary social and political circumstances such as the spate of the race riots in the northern cities of the US and the intensifying governmental suppression of radical activists. The second point is the backgrounds of the WSP members who had long careers as activists. These middle-aged women were active in social movements before World War II for political and economic equality. Their political and social backgrounds also influenced the direction of WSP’s activism in the 1960s.

Through an examination of WSP’s relationship with other social movements and the political and social experiences of its members, this study will enable us to situate women’s peace movements not only in the scholarship of women’s history but also in the broader contexts of social movements in twentieth-century America and of the politics of the 1960s. In addition, this study will also shed new light on our image of the social movements of the 1960s wherein young college students frustrated by the conservative 1950s played a prominent role.