CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Remembering the Anti-War Women of Waterloo

In the makeshift courtroom at the Seneca County Fairground @JEB. Joan E. Biron (from Prisons That Can Not Hold, by Barbara Deming with photo essay by Biron)

This Memorial Day, I found myself thinking about Waterloo. Not the Waterloo of Nelson vs. Napoleon, battleships, and London’s Trafalgar Square, but Waterloo, New York.

In 1966, Congress declared Waterloo the birthplace of Memorial Day, recognizing that 100 years earlier, the New York town’s residents closed their businesses, lowered their flags, and walked to the cemeteries to honor the Civil War dead. That origin story, while real, is contested. The fuller story of who first honored the dead — includes thousands of Black mourners in Charleston in 1865 whose ceremony, to dedicate the graves of hundreds of union war dead, was quietly erased from the record.

And when I think of Waterloo, I think of something else entirely: an anti-war protest in that same Finger Lakes village, that resulted in the mass arrest of 54 non-violent women, the governor declaring a state of emergency, and youngsters (like me) meeting people – and ideas – I will never forget.

Memory is always about the present. Who we choose to remember; who we choose to forget, they all make us who we are. This Memorial Day, I choose to remember the Waterloo 54.

I spent much of the summer of 1983 at the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, a women’s peace camp set up outside the Seneca Army Depot — a facility the military would neither confirm nor deny was storing nuclear weapons bound for Europe.

On July 30 of that summer, roughly seventy-five women from the Women’s Pentagon Action in New York set out to walk to the Encampment from Seneca Falls, site of the Women’s Rights Convention of July 1848.

Their intent, in the words of the statement they issued from jail, was “to honor the great defiant women in our past who resisted oppression and to bring their courageous spirit to the Encampment.” The women they honored included many from that part of the country: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from Seneca Falls, Harriet Tubman, who lived in a house near what was now the army........

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