Capenhurst Women's Peace Camp (1982-3) and after: local nuclear resistance, grassroots feminisms, and transnational solidarities.

Abstract

This article explores the local specificities of Capenhurst Women's Peace Camp, established in 1982 at British Nuclear Fuels Limited on the Wirral peninsula. Making the case for the camp's inclusion and centrality within histories of nuclear resistance, peace camps, and grassroots feminism, it argues for the value of localised examples to widen understandings of the multiple shifting and overlapping anti-nuclear cultures in 1980s Britain. Tracing Capenhurst's unique origins, motivations, forms of resistance, and networks of solidarity, this article contributes to knowledge of how different peace camps and protest groups articulated the nuclear threat in diverse and complex ways, often locating activism in spatially specific and tangible sites with potential for broad mobilisation. Focusing on smaller, localised actions, I argue, can reveal new and unexpected experiences of national and international issues, and can widen understandings of how and why activist movements operated on varying levels. Discussion of the camp's immediate aftermath beyond 1983 also widens our understanding of 1980s feminist anti-nuclear activism, exploring how activists adopted an ambitiously wide-ranging, global, and anti-racist outlook, forged through powerful and lasting translocal and transnational alliances.