Dagmar Wilson, founder of women's peace group, dies at 94

Dagmar Wilson helped start Women Strike for Peace with a
telephone tree and mimeographed calls for a protest.
(Washington Post)
 
By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Sunday, January 23, 2011; 8:44 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/
01/23/AR2011012304127.html

When the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race accelerated half a
century ago, a concerned Georgetown mother of three named
Dagmar Wilson took a page out of the PTA playbook. She
started a telephone tree, urging her friends to call their
friends to marshal support for a one-day demonstration in
support of peace and disarmament.

Less than two months later, on Nov. 1, 1961, a loose
network of 50,000 mothers, grandmothers and other women
left their kitchens and their offices for demonstrations
in 60 cities across the country.

Calling on President John F. Kennedy to "End the arms race
- not the human race," the women won wide attention from
world leaders and the press. They built such a groundswell
of support for nonproliferation that Kennedy credited them
with helping to force the Cold War superpowers to
eventually sign a partial nuclear test-ban treaty.

Mrs. Wilson, who co-founded the Women Strike for Peace
movement that later grew to claim a half-million members,
died Jan. 6 at the Washington Home and Community Hospices.
She was 94 and had congestive heart failure.

She was a homemaker and successful children's book
illustrator when, spurred by news that the Soviet Union
planned to resume above-ground nuclear testing, she became
an activist. In late September 1961, she called everyone
she knew and then started sending mimeographed copies of a
call to strike on Nov. 1.

"I decided there are some things an individual can do. At
least we can make some noise and see," she once said.

for the rest of this obituary, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/
01/23/AR2011012304127.html

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