Piecing It Together now available on WRI's website

Piecing It Together: Feminism and Nonviolence – a germinal pamphlet from 1983 – is now online at http://wri-irg.org/pubs/Feminism_and_Nonviolence. The Feminism and Nonvio­lence Study Group was a British affiliate of WRI, usu­ally consisting of about eight women activists in a range of grass-roots movements. Some were mainly con­nec­ted with feminist move­ments, others had pacifist roots. As feminists, they wanted to go beyond equal rights to challenge all struc­tures of oppression – patriar­chy, capitalism, the state and beyond – and present a vision of non-hierarchical and inclusive communities. As nonviolent activists, they critiqued the over-emphasis on voluntary suffering and sacrifice in nonviolence ad­vo­cacy, and addressed eve­ry­day issues of domestic vio­lence, pornography and women's control of their lives.

The pamphlet came out just as the 1980s women's peace movement was mush­rooming. FSNV members had played their role in bring­ing that about, but were also critical of those who presented women as natural peacemakers.

Piecing It Together was the FSNV's third publication, the previous two mainly di­rected at feminists, one addres­sing issues of vio­lence and nonviolence more generally and the other cen­tring on the nuclear threat (especially nuclear energy).

Within WRI, the FSNV's has never been fully ack­now­ledged. The group was actually founded after the 1976 Women's Gathering in France, did most of the or­ga­nising work for the 1980 Women's Gathering Scot­land, and one helped pre­pare the 1987 Gathering in Ireland. Its members par­ticipated in three triennials (1975, 1979 and 1982), and for the 1985-86 Triennial, one of them wrote a back­ground paper proposing the formation of a permanent women's working group.

Oder at WRI's webshop: http://wri-irg.org/node/8421