Greenham Common Webs by Anna Feigenbaum
Guest: Anna Feigenbaum
Recorded : Wednesday 25th March 2026, online.
Published : Wednesday 16th April, 2026.
Recording language: English
Keywords
Greenham Common; feminist protest; anti-nuclear activism; web symbolism; material protest culture; creative resistance; nonviolent action; solidarity networks; ecofeminism; policing and surveillance; pre-digital activism; protest semiotics
Summary
In this episode, Sophia speaks with Anna Feigenbaum about the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a landmark anti-nuclear movement in the UK. Moving beyond the familiar CND symbol, they focus on the “web” as a distinctive sign emerging from the camp’s everyday practices. They explore how the military fence became a medium of protest, woven with objects and messages to form a living network of creativity, resistance, and solidarity. The conversation highlights the camp’s scale, its women-led dynamics, and the differentiated identities of its gates, alongside forms of nonviolent disruption shaped by persistence and everyday acts of nuisance. Greenham’s symbols from the web as a model of transnational solidarity to the feminist reclamation of the “witch”,also allows refelction on the shift from pre-digital collective action to today’s highly mediated protest cultures.
Sommaire
Dans cet épisode, Sophia s’entretient avec Anna Feigenbaum autour du camp de paix de Greenham Common, un mouvement antinucléaire majeur au Royaume-Uni. Au-delà du symbole bien connu du CND, la discussion se concentre sur la « toile » comme signe distinctif issu des pratiques quotidiennes du camp. Elles analysent comment la clôture militaire devient un support de protestation, tissé d’objets et de messages pour former un réseau vivant de créativité, de résistance et de solidarité. L’échange met en lumière l’ampleur du camp, sa dynamique largement féminine, ainsi que les identités différenciées de ses « gates », tout en examinant des formes d’action non violente fondées sur la persistance et des tactiques de nuisance au quotidien. Les symboles de Greenham — de la toile comme modèle de solidarité transnationale à la réappropriation féministe de la « sorcière » —ouvrent une réflexion sur le passage des formes d’action collective pré-numériques aux cultures protestataires contemporaines, fortement médiatisées.
Chapters (machine generated)
00:00 Introduction to Anna Feigenbaum and Greenham Common
02:59 The evolution of the Greenham Common movement
06:02 Gates and the symbolism of activism
09:03 Policing and its impacts
11:52 Creativity and women’s empowerment
15:05 Gender dynamics within the movement
17:58 The cultural and musical impact of Greenham
21:03 Conclusion and final reflections
22:37 Creative resistance and protest
25:00 The criminalisation of protest
28:04 The impact of media on protest
30:34 Differences between past and present movements
33:31 Symbolism and feminist identity
36:04 Media coverage and feminist solidarity
39:46 The return of witches and feminist culture
42:52 Archives and the memory of feminist movements
45:15 Solidarity beyond borders
Anna Feigenbaum is a writer, professor, and interdisciplinary scholar working at the University of Glasgow. Her research and practice explore culture, communication, and social movements. She has published widely on Greenham Common, documenting feminist peace activism, memory, and media. Her books include Protest Camps (Bloomsbury 2013, co-authored), and Tear Gas (Verso 2017).
Books: https://www.waterstones.com/author/anna-feigenbaum/1407924
Photographic credits of images used in this episode:
Getty Images (Greenham Common protest, women at fence)
Unknown photographer (Greenham Common protestors along fence line)
Press Association Images / PA Images (Greenham Common human chain, aerial view)
Unknown photographer (Greenham Common night protest on missile silo)
Lesley McIntyre (police confrontation; sit-in at fence)
Monica Sjöö (Women for Life on Earth march, 1982)
Raissa Page (rainbow web installation at fence)
The Women’s Library, London School of Economics (Greenham camp life photograph)
Unknown artist (Greenham Common “Women Come Together” web illustration, 1983)
Unknown maker (Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp banner)
Transcript (machine generated)
Sophia Burnett (00:47)
So hi Anna Feigenbaum. So I'm absolutely thrilled that you can come on today and talk about Greenham Common.
Anna Feigenbaum (00:56)
Great, thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.
Sophia Burnett (00:59)
So initially the sign that I was interested in exploring was, you know, the anti-nuclear sign that a lot of people know about Greenham Common. And in your response, you said that actually the sign that was perhaps more motivating, stimulating intellectually for you to explore was the sort of spider web.
non-violent webs that appeared all over Greenham Common.
Anna Baum (01:24)
Yeah, so the Greenham Common is associated with a number of different kinds of signs and symbols. And they did, of course, use, if you mean the P sign by the anti-nuclear sign, like the CNDs, anti-nuclear sign. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, they did have lots of that too, but we've seen that across a lot of movements. it historically is from a bit earlier than Greenham. So I was thinking about the web because it's something that was quite distinct.
Sophia Burnett (01:34)
The CND, yeah, the peace sign, yeah, there's a lot of, yeah.
Anna Baum (01:48)
to Greenham and it's something that really captured the way that as a social movement it grew over time because one of the things people don't realize is that while Greenham started in 1981, it actually the last women to leave left in 2001. So the camp actually had a really long and rich, know, varied population, but a long and rich history in it went through a lot of different changes. And so the web captures a lot of the different moments and different things about Greenham.
Greenham's politics that hopefully we'll dive into today.
Sophia Burnett (02:19)
Yeah, yeah, it's a good reminder actually that just how long it perdured could you would Greenham He died. I didn't realize it carried on so long. So, so that ended so recently. Of course my imagination of it is linked very strongly to the 80s. And so that has.
particular colour doesn't it I'm sure that the as you said the the type of woman the type of person the type of activist who went to Greenham Common in the 80s would be different now to the type of activist who would go in the early 2000s.
Anna Baum (02:59)
Yeah, I think it was kind of like stragglers that were left towards the end of the camp. The people who had really made their lives there, moved their caravan in, were just kind of set up. So I don't know how, the headcount was pretty small in the last few years. So yeah, was in that, the early 80s is really the kind of peak time. And one of the interesting things, and I don't know if you want us to just give the listeners a little bit of the background of how the protest camp started.
Sophia Burnett (03:27)
Absolutely, yes please.
Anna Baum (03:27)
Yeah, it might be
useful. So it was actually semi-accidental that there was a protest camp there. So a group of women had agreed to march from Cardiff in Wales to the nuclear military base in Newbury because they wanted to mark the sitting of US nuclear cruise missiles. It's a little too eerie how much this sounds like today, but they wanted to mark that the UK was being used as part of the kind of US war machine.
And so they went to this nuclear base to raise attention, get some media coverage of the sitting of these US nuclear cruise missiles. And the idea was that that base is closer to Russia. So this is in the Cold War kind of context. So when they got there, they just decided that they weren't going to leave. So the protest camp kind of started with people just bringing things in and starting to build there. And then it was the
military base had a nine mile perimeter fence, if I'm not mistaken on the number. And so there was lots of different gates all around this military base. And so it started quite small. This was just like, I think it was something like 30 or 35 women did the first march. And then people just started coming slowly, slowly. And then they started doing these bigger events. And at the peak, were, you know, dozens, hundreds of women at all of the different basic base encampments all around that.
fence and at the kind of peak of the big actions, you would have tens of thousands of people gathering at Greenham. So, and lots of visitors, you had people who were living there, you had people who would come for the weekend, you had people that would come just for the day. So you had this kind of really, what we talk about in social movement studies is a kind of convergent space or convergent center, like almost like a big kind of expo of activism going on.
So all kinds of things got done there and made there and that's where a lot of the signs come in.
Sophia Burnett (05:17)
Absolutely, and these different gates you're talking about, I seem to remember there were different colors, it was almost color coded as well, which I think is a wonderful form of sign symbolism. Like the colors representing difference, I forget exactly.
Anna Baum (05:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, was the colors of the rainbow. So there was a different, think they had a gate for every color of the rainbow. I know that the big ones were yellow, green, blue and indigo. And then the gates had different personalities and that they decided to do, which I think is a brilliant bit of politics, is they, think like one gate you were like allowed to express more religious stuff at. And then there was another gate that was, I think it was the blue one that was like a little more anarcho.
Sophia Burnett (05:41)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (06:01)
And so like, if you wanted certain kinds of self-expression, you could go to the gate that like best matched your self-expression. And so was a way of including everyone, but at the same time, kind of, I would imagine there were a lot of fights that went on in meetings over like what was allowed and not allowed as part of the protest. And so instead of having to make a decision, they're like, okay, we'll put you at this gate and you can be at this gate. And then I think the gates also like developed their own sort of microcultures because people, you know, were living there. And so.
they had different kinds of personalities, which I just find fascinating as a bit of collective living, you know.
Sophia Burnett (06:32)
Yeah.
Absolutely, as a sort of organic creation of different forms of activism as well. I may be mistaken, but the Blue Gates being associated with more direct action.
Anna Baum (06:42)
Mmm.
That rings a bell to me as well because it was kind of the more anarcho, ⁓ you know, gate. So there was a little bit more like direct action that was happening there. And then Yellow Gate was like that people came to. So I think Yellow Gate was a little bit more public facing, media savvy kind of welcoming the visitors. Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (06:57)
Yeah.
Yeah, with them.
Yeah, yeah,
Yeah, so you'd have this contingency at gates like the Blue Gate where you'd have this meeting of public and institutional bodies, you know, that the potential violence perhaps was greater at certain gates. I can imagine, you know, the Green Gate, which was linked to...
Anna Baum (07:25)
Hmm. Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (07:29)
ecology because you know we're very creative aren't we as human beings. was yeah that was effectively wonderful to learn about how the people that the populations are gradually increased and created these different spaces that were needed that were
I mean, I always wonder how, I suppose people have done studies about that as well, about the sort of the complexity of the organization of these things, how they come to emergence. But I mean, you know way more about this than I do, but I was wondering actually about, you've written about,
Anna Baum (07:59)
Mm-hmm.
Sophia Burnett (08:08)
levier d'état, why can I not think in English today? ⁓ You know the Foucaudian punier surveiller, all of these devices that the state has, in particular tear gas that you've written about, I think. ⁓
Anna Baum (08:12)
Thank you.
I have no
tear gas at Greenham.
Sophia Burnett (08:28)
Sorry?
Anna Baum (08:29)
There is not to your guess at Greenham.
Sophia Burnett (08:30)
No, right, okay, was that because it wasn't, it just didn't exist as a device at the time?
Anna Baum (08:38)
Tear gas is not as used. I don't know if you want to, this is going to be like a big digression, but yeah. So I don't know. You can always cut it out. It's okay. ⁓ Yeah, no, we can talk about it, but I'll just tell you what, then just like kind of interrupt if you want me to stop talking about tear gas. yeah, so it's not that it didn't exist in the 1980s in the UK, because the UK was one of the earlier producers of tear gas, but they were using it at that time.
Sophia Burnett (08:43)
Sorry, yes it is a bit, but I'm entrusted.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anna Baum (09:04)
was a little bit more, would be like individual officers and it wasn't regular, like it wasn't rolled out to the police until the 90s in the UK. So in France, I'm sure they would have been using it. People, love using tear gas on people in France and in the US, they would have been using it. But ⁓ it's just not very commonly used on protesters in the UK. Like it's actually just quite rare. If anything, it's like more of the spray that is used on individual situation and even that is much less than in other countries.
Sophia Burnett (09:19)
⁓ gosh.
Okay.
Anna Baum (09:32)
So it just has to do with there's different modes of policing and the UK does a lot more of containment and surveillance style policing. So it's just a different kind of like protester police interaction than you get in a more brutalist kind of French and US system of policing. Yeah, which has different historical roots. France is in fact the originator of tear gas, we think, we think.
Sophia Burnett (09:33)
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Wow, that's interesting.
really? How am I not surprised? Yeah.
Anna Baum (09:56)
Yeah, we think, historians think, yes. And it's because
you'll like this, this is a fun French fact. It's because the French are so good at building barricades, the French protesters, and the police needed ways to break through French barricades. So they experimented with tear gas. This is what we think, we haven't found earlier historical records. So they think that it was police experimenting with it the early
Sophia Burnett (10:16)
my gosh, we need a new version of Les Miserables, don't we?
Anna Baum (10:19)
And then in the war,
Sophia Burnett (10:20)
⁓ my gosh.
Anna Baum (10:21)
they developed it in the First World War. so the French were actually thought to be the first to use it in the First World War. And then the Germans caught up and retaliated and then it became global after that. Yeah. So not to say that the police weren't violent at Greenham, to bring it back to Greenham, but they did a lot of like destruction, like destruction of the camp, demoralizing of the women.
Sophia Burnett (10:29)
Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there were various gases floating around at that time. Yeah.
Hmm.
Anna Baum (10:46)
Occasionally, think people would get like pushed or shoved or maybe, you know, like with a billy club, but it was much more of a kind of psychological wearing down. It's the British policing way and making it really hard for them to live, you know, to stay there.
Sophia Burnett (10:54)
Right.
Yeah, yeah, like the material existence was just, yeah, just not possible.
Anna Baum (11:04)
Yeah, yeah, like destroying the camp. Yeah, yeah. And then they build
all these shelters and a kitchen and then the police, you know, the police or the bailiffs would come and just like knock it all down and ruin all of it. And then they'd have to rebuild. So it's kind of similar to the ways that refugee camps are sometimes policed. This kind of just moralization.
Sophia Burnett (11:14)
Wow.
Yes, it's like we're not saying this is over.
We're not categorically shutting it down, but we're going to a bit like the. What is it, the cat and mouse thing during the suffragette movement, you know, where they'd the the women would go on hunger strike and then get better and then be released and then be caught again. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like after four times, then yeah.
Anna Baum (11:36)
Mm.
Same again, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wearing down, yeah, yeah.
Using people as an example publicly, so, you know, to try to get other people not to go. So yeah, different kinds of policing tactic. And then one of the big things in both the, that's important, I think, for understanding the kind of policing or the violence agreement, but also its signs, was the role that this perimeter fence played.
Sophia Burnett (11:46)
God.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Anna Baum (12:06)
in the life of the camp because the perimeter fence was what would keep the soldiers, RF. Sometimes the police would be on the inside. the, you know, and obviously the kind of war machinery was all on the inside of the fence. And then the women's camps were on the outside of the fence. So the fence itself became a sign of Greenham, like a symbol of Greenham.
Sophia Burnett (12:07)
Right.
Hmm.
Anna Baum (12:27)
⁓ But then, and also this kind of, I talk about in my work that it was almost like a communication technology, like it mediated the communication between people on both sides of the fence. Also the women would climb over the fence to get into the camp, probably especially at Blue Gate. They would cut the fence. They would make sculptures out of bits of wire for the fence. They made like cooking grills out of bits of fence, know, hang their clothes on bits of fence.
Sophia Burnett (12:51)
Shhh!
Anna Baum (12:54)
And then they also use the fence as a canvas and they would decorate the fence. And that was one of the places where webs appeared among many other things. ⁓
Sophia Burnett (13:03)
And in some ways
from what you're saying, the web was, the fence was already a form of web because it has this duality of function and form. And it's wonderful to hear how they were using it. know, the, yeah.
Anna Baum (13:19)
Yeah, I mean, and if you think of things being like caught
in the web, like they were using the fact that you could stick things to the, you know, the open whole structure of this fence ⁓ to create, like to make protest art, to make signs, to put signs up, you know, to dry their clothes. So there was this, yeah, functionality of creativeness and expressiveness that was happening through that.
Sophia Burnett (13:31)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (13:45)
through the technology of the fence and the fence is this kind of poster board, you know, or exhibition wall for the camp.
Sophia Burnett (13:52)
Yeah, I mean, that sort of, I suppose it's a cliche to, and not true, you know, that women are these sort of sole detainers of sensibilities and creativity. But one can imagine quite a different set up with a fully male population with the fence, you know. ⁓
Anna Baum (14:10)
Mm-hmm. Yes, probably wouldn't
have been pinning baby clothes on it, you know, or doing your knitting, knitting into the, you know, these beautiful rainbow sculptures and often of webs. So one of ways of webbing was webbing the fence, so creating the kind, you know, like with yarn, like knitted webs around the fence.
Sophia Burnett (14:15)
Hahaha
wow.
right, right,
using it as a sort of matrix ⁓ to make the fantastic, like a loom, yes, yes, yes, like the functional. I love how women get very functional quite quickly. okay, what can this be?
Anna Baum (14:37)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like a loom. don't know. Yes.
Yeah, and I think that's to me, so
in the broader work that I do on protest camps, like this is one of my favorite things about them is like, you're living there, you're camping, right? And when we camp, we do, we turn all kinds of objects into other objects and we make do with very little and we get really creative in how we set up our home because we're living there. We're living there in the outside with a tent and a few objects. And so there's this, yeah, like level of creativity that has to...
come into just reproducing daily life. And then they're also protesting at the same time. So you get this creative artistic functional kind of thing going on, which is really, really neat to watch.
Sophia Burnett (15:25)
Yeah. And I wonder what the...
you know, the attitude of, because you were saying before, you know, this is a very, before the arrival of the protesters, this is a very testosterone heavy place. I'm probably using the use of hormones incorrectly, but the army personnel and you have,
Anna Baum (15:38)
Thank
Sophia Burnett (15:45)
police at the time, like in the 80s, I cannot imagine that the police force was very mixed in terms of gender. Right.
Anna Baum (15:52)
No, think it was almost all men. I think there was mostly.
And then the kinds of depictions you see, like the drawings that they did and the photographs that you can see in the archives, and the video, the few videos that exist. You, you, it's very much like that. Like, it's, very much that the soldiers are men, the police are men, the bailiffs are men. A lot of the journalists are men, not always. But there's, there's that kind of
Sophia Burnett (16:12)
Right?
Anna Baum (16:15)
Yeah, that kind of offset. there weren't because I think, I think men were occasionally allowed to come to the camp to visit her like for the big event days, but they weren't allowed to stay over though. I'm not sure exactly. I can't remember exactly what the rule was, or maybe they were allowed at like the yellow gate to visit only. So you also had what is a super, super rare, which is like a women's only space that went on for years, right?
Sophia Burnett (16:40)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (16:41)
And so all the time, yeah. Yes, yeah, not nuns. Very much not, very much not nuns. In fact, Greenham was known for a place that women came with husbands and left with girlfriends. So.
Sophia Burnett (16:42)
wasn't theological. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah there are some passages in my mother's book Yeah, let's say pages were turned rapidly.
Anna Baum (17:03)
Hahaha
by you so you didn't have to see what your mum was up to! amazing! i wanna know!
Sophia Burnett (17:06)
But yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I don't need to know that much detail.
No, I mean, I'll just talk about that very briefly because it's not the point, but it's sort of semi autobiographical. And what she brought to the character was actually kind of condi'd. She was working class from Liverpool, Liverpool 8. So she brought this very
Anna Baum (17:14)
that's fun. Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (17:36)
different mindset to a place where it was essentially very middle class women at that point when she joined. And so the class aspect was quite interesting as well. But yeah, this is just, yeah, a digression. But
Anna Baum (17:40)
Thank you.
Yeah.
yeah, so I think, but the fact that it was this very women's centered and sapphic, guess, for the words that they use then, the words we use now, of course, are not the same. And what we mean by women is not the same. So, but like, because it was this,
Sophia Burnett (18:02)
Yes!
Anna Baum (18:07)
you know, certain kind of energy and symbolism, you also saw a lot of the two women signs like the conjoined kind of Venus, is it Venus? signs. And you saw a few other kinds of, I guess what we'd say are lesbian or sapphic symbols. And you had just a lot of this kind of like, anarchic sexual energy. But there were also were lots of nuns there and other kinds of, you know, you know, that were
older people that were coming from different kinds of life, people from the unions, people from the CND or the larger anti-nuclear movement. So had all different kinds of intersections of people coming together. So there wasn't really like a kind of, I wouldn't say that the queer symbol like ideology was dominant, but it was very prevalent and sat alongside these other kinds of ecological, more religious, more anti-nuclear kinds of symbolism.
Sophia Burnett (18:57)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (18:57)
more used to seeing in a kind of peace movement or protest.
Sophia Burnett (19:01)
Mm-mm-mm. And probably sat alongside them in such a way that was quite, didn't need to be stated. So I can imagine that women who had perhaps thought outside the box when they got to Greenham, was for many of them the first time that they talked to other women. I mean, it's like, is it the, what test is it, Bechdel Yeah, yeah.
Anna Baum (19:19)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, but the back thing
with the two women talking to each other and there's not like a man in the scene. Yeah, Bechdel test Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (19:25)
Yeah, exactly.
So I can imagine that for most of the women who went, well, a lot of them, they were having conversations about, for the first time, about something other than their husbands, their sons, their daughters, their domestic obligations, but still taking care them.
Anna Baum (19:33)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or if they had had, yeah.
Yeah. Or if they, like I was just going to say, they had, maybe they had more women friends, but then they went into domestic life and then they came from domestic life back to this more women's only space. So yeah, you had all kinds of, know, yeah. Because I think the, there were of course a population of women who lived, you know, as dykes and lived.
Sophia Burnett (19:59)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (20:09)
queer lives already that came to Greenham. But there was many more that were, yeah, like you're saying, that were married, that had kids, that were young and in university and hadn't kind of started thinking about any of this stuff yet. And this was like a moment of awakening. Yeah, and the other thing I found really interesting, and if anyone listening wants to know lots of things about the gay women at Greenham, Sasha Rosenil has two books just on queer stuff at Greenham that are
Sophia Burnett (20:11)
Of course.
Anna Baum (20:36)
yeah, so they also like, they did all these songs, there's all these very gay songs that came out of Greenham and that people loved singing. I have a paper that's published on that, but that has some of the amazing kind of song lyrics in it. But yeah, so one of the other things that the women said was that a lot of them didn't know the functional skills. So things like, you know, how to fix stuff, how to use tools.
Sophia Burnett (20:48)
You
Anna Baum (20:58)
how to use a bolt cutter, how to use a hammer. Like these are things that they wouldn't normally have done because they would have turned to the men in their lives to do them. And all of a sudden it was women teaching women how to do all of this kind of like DIY functional stuff, which I also think is super cool. And something that just doesn't happen that much, you know, like even with as far as we've gotten, that's still something that's really rare, you know, that women teaching women these kinds of skills.
Sophia Burnett (20:58)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Absolutely, yes. don't think
we've moved the mark of the cursor very far, Yeah. And if anything, the men also have unlearned how to do those So now we're...
Anna Baum (21:28)
Yeah.
Which not to digress,
is a shame, real shame because they're struggling with what to hold onto with masculinity and DIY skills is like a positive, like why can't the manosphere be full of men teaching men how to do DIY?
Sophia Burnett (21:41)
I know.
But instead we have this sort of descent to equality, which isn't very good for anyone. Anyway. Yeah, to come back to the sign and the symbolic of the fence So you mentioned these webs that were
Anna Baum (21:51)
Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (22:05)
were knitted by, well, the few things I've seen about it. You shared a paper with me with some images, et cetera. And that was quite interesting because...
Anna Baum (22:14)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (22:20)
Yeah, the intervention of the police was, I don't know,
yeah, the fact that these, webs were quite annoying for that, it was difficult to remove them apparently.
Anna Baum (22:30)
yeah.
Yeah. mean, so I mean, causing a nuisance was one of the main sort of daily protest tactics of the women. And I think there was. And that's again, I think there's something quite British about that form of creative resistance, like because the police are not as heavy handed. What historically has happened in England is is that you can get away with a lot more sort of nuisance based creative or destructive.
tactics without the police, without putting your life in danger. And that's of course not going to be true for everyone who's embodied in every way. But for the most of the women who were there, the police wouldn't have wanted to be seen like beating someone to a pulp and they didn't use things like tear gas. they are water cannons or any of these other kinds of mass dispersal things. So that you could kind of just like be a nuisance until you got arrested or you got detained or they took something away from you.
Sophia Burnett (23:00)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Anna Baum (23:21)
And so there was a lot of that, like you were saying, the cat and mouse, there was a lot of this kind of chasing. And they actually described it often as a cat and mouse kind of game between the police. And probably some of that was boredom. you they were all day, like every day, you know, they needed stuff to yeah, I mean, and there were larger acts of...
Sophia Burnett (23:29)
Right.
Anna Baum (23:38)
I guess what the police would call vandalism where they broke in and would paint things or do things on the military base. There's a famous image of women dancing on the top of the missile silos, which is quite an amazing sign or symbol to have emerged out of Greenham. We still see that one come up sometimes. And they were doing something called the spiral dance, which comes from Starhawk's work, who was big in that.
Sophia Burnett (23:41)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (24:00)
I mean, she's still big, but was big in the 1980s and influential in these movements. And the spiral dance is a dance where everybody comes face to face with each other. So it's quite symbolic in itself. It's also a symbolic dance on this symbolic scene of dancing on top of the missile silos. And I love this as a kind of image of.
how we intervene in that sort of dominance of Imperial war technology. Like there's something so irreverent about that sort of interruption of that technology. Now you'd probably be shot if you broke into a military base and dance on top of silence. So this was a different time. I'm not suggesting that we dance on top of things in military base. Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (24:27)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, the people do this. ⁓
But effectively at that time that really, and that's what's why I'm so happy to have you today is that because we're at a time when I think it's important to remember that those times existed and it wasn't actually very long ago, that protest could take a creative form without
Anna Baum (25:00)
Mm-hmm.
Sophia Burnett (25:05)
endangering the person doing the creative protest, you know, that because I think it's good to keep in mind that it's not that long or go, we could perhaps go back to something. You know, I mean, I'm just being positive and utopian today.
Anna Baum (25:21)
Yeah, I mean, I
think what we have seen in the UK is an interesting, you know, case study for this because the UK tends to do, you know, surveillance, containment and legislation more than direct violence as its means of protest policing. And so what we've seen the last few years in the UK are very extreme laws coming out against protest. And that's where we're seeing like the criminalization of any
pro-Palestinian types of protests, anything. Anything they remotely consider to be like a direct action is like a jailable offense. And even though these cases are all being brought to court and the police of the state are losing the legal cases, but they're making the laws, they're putting the fear in there, changing the nature of what you can do in protest. And this has a whole history in the UK. In the 90s, they tried to make...
noise like sound illegal so that people don't have street parties and then now they're trying they again went with the decriminalization of certain kinds of sound and certain kinds of signs and that was a lot targeted against extinction rebellion and now against pro-palestinian demonstrators so it's yeah like it's it it it limits what then you feel as a protester you can you can do creatively as a form of protest expression ⁓ because of because yeah
Sophia Burnett (26:12)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anna Baum (26:38)
of the repercussions. mean, you know, even if you win your lawsuit, that's three years of your life, two or three years of your life that have been incredibly messed up, you know, and emotionally messed up. So it's not so simple. For the rest of us, it's nice to hear the victories of the cases, living through it is, you know, a really hard experience. Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (26:45)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely, especially if you're young, but I was thinking of the
young ladies who are the Extinction Rebellion for the Campbell Soup thing. Not the Campbell Soup, that's Warhol. I'm conflating two things. You threw the soup, yeah. I mean, that was disproportionate ⁓ justice.
Anna Baum (27:03)
Yeah.
The throw in the soup. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. then even,
and it's stuff even that like some of the groups that I was involved in in the early 2000s, like the stuff that we could do and not really worry about that sort of repercussion was so much greater than what's possible now. ⁓ And that is, yeah, it's a real shame because it's very hard to get the media to change the narrative or to cover issues in a different way. And if...
Sophia Burnett (27:24)
Mm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anna Baum (27:38)
recriminalizing
basic symbolic acts of protest, then we leave very little room for dissent and for democracy. ⁓
Sophia Burnett (27:45)
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, and I
think unfortunately, I don't know if you agree with this, that, you know, because these things were relayed in the media, and so people were able to see these forms of creative descent, you know, the embodiment and the recuperation of the public space, you know, in such a way that I...
I don't know, my sentiment today is that even the civilian public space, even when it's protesting, is policed in such a way that people, I don't know, I have the impression people are more sort of self-centring in the public space.
Anna Baum (28:24)
Yeah, yes, yes.
Yeah. And that I think there probably is an intersection there with the rise of social media as well. So, which is also, know, police and people also stop what they're saying, but that a lot of the kinds of expression that we would have had to do in public spaces together outside, you know, has moved into digital territory. And so the interaction between the digital and you know, and the street.
Sophia Burnett (28:32)
Of course.
Anna Baum (28:47)
could say, and the organizing, know, all the organizing we don't see in the closed rooms and the assembly halls, that social media has really changed the landscape of that. And one of the things that fascinated me about Greenham, you know, as someone who was only a young child when it was happening and lived in the US, not the UK, was when I accidentally actually found the Greenham archives, I wasn't looking for them. I was interested, though, in feminist activism before the internet.
And it was really fascinating to think about Greenum as kind of one of the last movements that happened before the start of the web. And so even in the nineties, we start to see a little bit of like nacent websites being used or like, know, ticker tape texting being used, whereas this was a period, mobile phones, you know, no, they didn't even, they had, sometimes they were using mimeographs and not even photocopiers for, for distributing or copying some of the
some of their leaflets. if you had to, maybe they had walkie talkies, but they would like bicycle around the gates of the camp, like send messages. Like they weren't just like, texting in real time. And it's just a completely changes like what communication was like and what, and probably part of the reason we have so much rich making is because people weren't on their phones making memes all the time. They were actually like making, you know.
Sophia Burnett (29:47)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes.
Well, they were, yeah, yeah, they were completely, they were integrated and it wasn't meta, was it? And they weren't also thinking about what they were sounding and looking like as they were doing it for sure, which I think probably takes, yeah, yeah, it could take the edge off what you're doing considerably.
Anna Baum (30:15)
Yes, that's really interesting. That's really interesting. Other than maybe to each other. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that you're not going to be recorded in the same way. mean, likewise, you're not able to record the police or the violence in the same way. it does have, you know, effects on both sides. But yeah, I think probably particularly for young people, you know, and I think if we think about the exploration, like the self-explorations that people were doing at the camp, then
knowing that that wasn't all going to be documented on social media. So you could have, you know, you could explore outside your marriage, your new found sapphic, you know, existence without thinking that it was going to be documented all over, you know, so that probably that was probably a big change in, in what in how people act.
Sophia Burnett (31:01)
Yes, and just have the time, suppose
it's such social media is such a time sink that of course, if something, a version of Greenham existed today, of course activists, the women would be on their phones doing a mix of diverse things and not having those conversations because I think, aside from the sort of sapphic explorations,
Anna Baum (31:08)
Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (31:29)
There were conversations about quite simply their lack of agency or their situation in their real lives back home.
Anna Baum (31:35)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that were quite transformative for them. Yeah, and all these skills of self discovery, talking about politics with other women, I really like your idea of thinking about it as a Bechdel test, but for real life, these would have been, maybe they would have talked about environmentalism and nuclear disarmament with their husbands or maybe with some coworkers, but not in groups of women like this. And I think that is a really powerful thing. And I think, we haven't really had, it's been a long, because
Sophia Burnett (31:40)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (32:04)
single gendered spaces are different in the world that we're in now and they have different politics. because we don't have as many of them, and certainly not at that scale, we don't really know what would it look like if we had something like that now. It would have different parameters, but that it would still probably do a lot of the consciousness-raising work that
Sophia Burnett (32:18)
Mm.
Anna Baum (32:29)
you know, that Greenham did, particularly for women who went who weren't already in those kinds of spaces, you know, before they got there. And a lot of times, know, camps now they do have rules around phones and places phones can't be and phones not in meetings. And so we do still have, I think protest camps still do provide a sense of convergence in chat and connection that like just a demo or just a march isn't kind of long enough.
doesn't have enough downtime to have those same kinds of interactions. ⁓ Yeah, and when you're figuring out how to live with someone and not just protest for two hours or three hours with them, right? So very different days. And I think that's why we see such interesting politics emerge, particularly at places like a tar sands protests, like in France, in la ZAD in Italy against the trains, like things that are a little more rural or not.
Sophia Burnett (32:58)
That's interesting. Yeah.
Anna Baum (33:22)
just like in a city in an urban context, which also is an important thing about Greenham. It's in the, that base camp is like, there's not stuff around it, you know? Like it is removed from a kind of city or urban environment. And I think that's actually really important for thinking about the ways that connections develop slowly and creativity develops slowly. And there's all this downtime and they're battling the weather, you know, and the elements and all this is going on too, which is really different than a demonstration that takes place for two or three hours in an urban city street.
Sophia Burnett (33:31)
Yeah. Yes.
Yes.
Hmm, yeah,
it's a destination. mean, it's not, it's such a more weighted decision to go all the way to Greenham Common than to, I'm not saying, you know, of course, like people who go to Trafalgar Square, but that you could go almost like on your lunch break, couldn't you, to, and then it.
Anna Baum (34:00)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, in fact, I
used to go to Occupy London on my lunch break. You could just go for a couple hours. took my students one day. like, let's just go to St. Paul's Cathedral. So yeah, yeah, it's completely different.
Sophia Burnett (34:18)
Yeah,
yeah.
Do we have any idea of the...
Yeah, the media reception of Greenham and you know, because I imagine that for a lot of people they're seeing this array of women, but you know, in the photographs, it is quite moving actually to look at the photos because you have an array of women and some of them do just look like someone's mom, you know, in
Anna Baum (34:39)
Moon.
Yeah.
Sophia Burnett (34:48)
In the nicest possible way I can say that.
I can't remember how it was received because I was, you know, a preteen.
Or teen. Yeah.
But yeah, the UK media, you know, is renowned for being absolutely savage, especially the tabloids. So, but we didn't get tabloids. So I don't know what the, I don't know if you have an idea of what the reception was.
Anna Baum (35:03)
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, was pretty, yeah,
it was savage. And there was a lot of the kind of belittling that you would imagine of like feminists and a lot of kind of calling people dykes and a lot of like, ⁓ not in the reclaimed way. And a lot of just like making the women look really like the ugly witch or like really, with all the body hair like is everywhere and the kinds of stereotypes that you would get, especially in the eighties of what. ⁓
Sophia Burnett (35:23)
Right.
Mmm.
Anna Baum (35:39)
kind of a feminist would be. And the women had a lot of fun with this. I mean, I'm sure it also occasionally like stung, but the women would, you know, kind of, we're quite good. Kind of like the Green Party is right now. We were quite good at like knowing what to expect, not taking it too seriously, giving it back, turning it around, reclaiming the things that they were called in their songs and in their flyers. And ⁓ so it was a really powerful. And I think that's another thing that happens when you have a big group of people, you know, you have a big group of women together that it's much easier.
Sophia Burnett (35:47)
⁓
Right.
Yeah.
Anna Baum (36:08)
when
you're a big group to reclaim those kinds of derogatory or hate speech ⁓ of insult.
Sophia Burnett (36:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's absolutely
a lot easier to do as a group. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anna Baum (36:19)
Yeah.
yeah, it's the kind of media coverage I would say that you would expect. And occasionally there were also positive stories, especially in the more liberal leaning press, like The Guardian would be quite supportive. And then you also had at the time a lot of alternative press was thriving in the UK. so the ⁓ CND had its own publication, Peace News.
You had Spare Rib with this feminist magazine. You had something called Outright, which is a POC women of color led newspaper. There was some feminist newsletters. There was quite a lot of alternative press circulating around. So if you were in those scenes already and you were hanging out in the radical bookshops and cafes, and in the 80s, there was still a lot more of those kinds of community spaces also. Then.
Sophia Burnett (37:01)
Yeah.
Anna Baum (37:05)
You also saw a lot of positive news and a lot of debate. So a lot of the discussions about, know, Greenham and solidarity, what was nonviolence, what was violence, ⁓ was the camp too white, like was there space for different kinds of sexualities? Like those debates were happening a lot in that movement media. that.
that was, know, again, we don't have the internet, so these discussions aren't happening on Instagram or the Facebook page, you know, or TikTok, they're happening in newsletters and letters to the editors and, you know, debates or dialogues that are being captured in print, because that was how we had to circulate information before we had social media. So, again, all this kind of making and crafting that was happening, and that's where, to go back to the symbols,
We also see a lot of webs and other kinds of these key Greenham symbols because they would be sort of scrawled into the margins, right? You have marginalia when you have hand photocopied print things. And so you would see a lot of the kind of symbology of Greenham sort of reproduced through this kind of media. And then the Greenham women also made their own media.
So they made zines and newsletters at the, you know, they put together stories at the camp and then they would, someone would like go to an office and, you know, piece it together and get it photocopied. And they're beautiful. Like they're like works of art, you know, then, yeah. And they're, just covered in cartoons and little drawings and graphics of all of these, you know, symbols of the camp.
Sophia Burnett (38:28)
Yeah.
Wow
I was wondering what you were saying about the symbology and the marginalia and stuff. That's really cool, actually. And like young women today and older women, actually, and trans and anyone, you know, identifying with these feminine, feminist creative ideas, like I see online the idea of the witch.
Anna Baum (38:55)
Mm-hmm.
Sophia Burnett (39:01)
has returned. ⁓
Anna Baum (39:01)
Yes, yes, the witch is very big right now.
Sophia Burnett (39:04)
I was in Edinburgh recently and there's several shops, know, with queues, humongous queues, lines outside of young people waiting to get their various instruments for the art. And it's not Harry Potter, because initially I thought it was Harry Potter adjacent, but it's really about, yeah, it's sort of...
Anna Baum (39:20)
Yeah. Okay.
Sophia Burnett (39:28)
moon calendars and all of these sort of ancient things actually.
And I've got lost in my question, but that's fine. So.
Anna Baum (39:37)
Yeah, no, we can talk about
witches, witches and webs. So yeah, the witch was one of the reclaimed symbols at Greenham. And there's actually a lovely song called We Are the Witches song. And the web and the witch are linked as well as they are in popular culture. So that was one of the reasons, another reason for the popularity of the web because the web meant many things.
Sophia Burnett (39:42)
Was it linked? Okay.
Anna Baum (40:01)
But yeah, the reclamation of witches then is very similar to why we see it now. So it was about, you know, these were the healers and the feminists of their time that were persecuted and pushed out. And again, I think what we were talking about, about like, all of a sudden you have this group of people together. So they're not feeling like the isolated one who's causing trouble by speaking up. All of a sudden, all the isolated ones who...
⁓ speak up are living together, right, or are brought together into this space. And so that's a really powerful, you know, transformative moment. And so this idea that we are the witches together is, I think, yeah, quite kind of powerful movement. ⁓
Sophia Burnett (40:42)
Yes, it's probably
a lot harder to be an isolated witch. Yeah.
Anna Baum (40:45)
Yes, yeah. And
I'm not sure how many people would have taken that identity prior to coming to Greenham. Like it's another one of those identities that I think was spread and shared as part of the culture of the camp. Whereas I would say now, witchiness is a little bit more mainstream and a little bit more kind of quite overtly linked to feminism in a kind of reclaimed way.
Sophia Burnett (40:51)
Hmm.
Yeah, there's a kind of
semantic bleaching or at least a semantic sort of transition, isn't there, with the whole idea of what a witch is.
Anna Baum (41:20)
Yes,
yeah. And going back to the kind of pagan healer roots of witchiness. And so I think that that line of, mean, God, there's so many, I had a book that goes through all the different types of witches. There's so many types of witches. But I think if we generalize them as the kind of healer, pagan-y types of witch, green witches, ⁓ then yeah, we have a lot more identity for that.
Sophia Burnett (41:25)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that comes back to what you were saying
before. Yeah, the the healer pagan thing of the you mentioned before, you know, the one of the confrontations every day was with the weather, you know, that so it all that ties in as well. It's a very embodied situated.
Anna Baum (41:53)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, totally. You know what, and I didn't, I wasn't as witchy as I am now when I was writing my PhD and doing this research in the archives, but I wonder if any young people listening who are going to research Greenham Common, I think it would be really fun to go back to the archives and look and see what other kinds of witchy behaviors there might've been there. Because I wonder if they did talk a lot about things like the moon phases and menstrual cycles and these other things that we would associate with a more kind of modern.
which I my guess would be that there is stuff in the archive that would show them and someone might have written this paper I haven't come across it if they have but it's one of these things that's you know yeah.
Sophia Burnett (42:34)
I mean, possibly somebody's written about the
massive synchronization of everybody's menstrual cycles. Yeah. That's possible.
Anna Baum (42:40)
Yeah, everyone's. But yeah, it was one of those
and I think this is an interesting thing with any of these kinds of archives. And I'd really encourage, you know, young feminists or listeners to go to one of your archives and look through this kind of material, particularly from the kind of 70s and 80s and 90s before the internet. Because it's just the actual symbols, the signs, the ways that they're creating and using these are absolutely fascinating.
and really help contextualize and connect us to the present moment and to our kind of, not necessarily our own ancestors, but our kind of political, know, ancestral paths. And there's gonna be all kinds of things in the archives that people haven't researched yet. So I remember when I was a wee researcher and I was asking Sasha Roseneil, who's written these books on queer greenum, you know, I think I was asking her maybe about bisexual and trans, like,
issues at the camp and she was like, you know, one for the bisexual, she was like, well, I wasn't looking at that. So like, I'm sure there were loads of people talking about bisexuality, but I didn't ask them in my interviews. So like, there's good, that's one of these things that probably you could write an entire dissertation on bisexuality at Greenham Common and what it meant. But like, it's just never been researched, it's never been asked. So and then, you know, trans, wasn't even like really in the vocabulary in the way that it is now at that time. And so you didn't have, you know, who counts?
as a woman debates of who gets to be in this space because they just, those debates also weren't quite yet happening, at least not in the language we recognize today in the movement more broadly at that time. yeah. Yeah. And like non-binary didn't exist as a gender category, you know, as a gender identification. So you could definitely go back and look at precursors to that.
Sophia Burnett (44:14)
Yeah, yeah. They were still so marginalized, weren't they, trans at that point.
Yeah.
Anna Baum (44:26)
And you could probably find some really interesting things around more complicated gender identity looking through the lens of today. But nobody's done that, or at least to my knowledge, no one's done that research yet because it requires to be really contemporary and then trying to understand the past through a contemporary lens, which is a challenge and certainly not a traditional historical approach. So you might need to be in cultural studies if you're doing that. yeah.
Sophia Burnett (44:44)
Yeah.
No,
for sure. I mean, I think it would probably be for people who do digital humanities, there's probably sort of ways of exploring all this because there must be quite a lot of data to go through. Yeah, yeah, that'd be fascinating.
Anna Baum (44:57)
Yeah.
Mm.
And a lot of the legacies, like a lot of these symbols moved. And so the web in particular was a very reproducible symbol about Greenham. So you started to see the web in the other camps that were the kind of solidarity or sister camps that started. So the one in Italy was actually called La Ragnatella, which is the web and then lots of witches in the Italy camp. And the kind of slogan of
Greenham women everywhere, we are everywhere, would often use the web as its kind of symbol to kind of show that connection and that solidarity beyond the geographic location of Greenham itself.
So in terms of also that idea of like the web linking the different camps together, that at one point I feel like it was 1983.
used the web as the main visual image for the kind of promotion of a big kind of event that was happening. And it was talking about widening the web. And then around the outside of the web, you had written all of these different kinds of campaigns, know, so linking it to things like anti-apartheid, linking it to things like nuclear testing in the Pacific. And there was really this kind of effort to reflect on the whiteness of Greenham Common, the middle classness of Greenham Common.
and think about what it would mean to kind of be in solidarity with other kinds of issues, other kinds of causes. What was the link between UK-US imperialism and these other movements around the world? So there's a really interesting moment that happens a few years into the camp where people start thinking more broadly about their own identities and about solidarity and about what that might look like and how you might support other campaigns from the place or the site of Greenham Common.
And I love how the web became the symbol for this idea ⁓ of widening our solidarity networks.
Sophia Burnett (46:52)
I think we'll end it on that. That was so well said. Thank you so much for coming in. It was an absolute pleasure listening to you talk about...
Anna Feigenbaum (47:00)
Yeah, this was really fun!
Sophia Burnett (47:13)
So I'll just say officially goodbye. So goodbye, Anna Feigenbaum
Anna Baum (47:18)
Alright, thanks for having me. Great to talk to you.
