Poetry for Parliament: The Women’s Peace Write Campaign

In January 1985, a call went out for Canadian women writers to stand up for world peace and nuclear disarmament by sending literature to the government. Called the Women’s Peace Write / Rites des femmes pour la paix, the campaign was rooted in the conviction that women writers should mobilize their craft in opposition to nuclear weapons. Not long before, in 1983, Margaret Laurence, whose name is perhaps the first to spring to mind when considering connections between Canadian literature and antinuclear mobilization of this era, expressed a similar conviction (Gerry 218, 224–28; Stovel 325–27). In “My Final Hour,” Laurence unequivocally states, “the question of disarmament is the most pressing practical, moral, and spiritual issue of our times” (189). She goes on: “I believe that as a writer ... as an artist, if you will ... I have a responsibility, a moral responsibility, to work against the nuclear arms race” (195). For the contributors to the Women’s Peace Write, acting on this “moral responsibility” took the form of a concerted effort to send pro-peace literature in the mail weekly to all Members of Parliament while the House of Commons was in session over the course of an entire year. My essay aims to describe how this campaign came to be and to provide some literary analysis of its contents. How did this activist project emerge? What are the features of its literary corpus? Poetry for Parliament: The Women’s Peace Write Campaign