Madam, - Once again the male chauvinist, as exemplified by PD Doyle (September 4th), bashes what he calls "the sisterhood" without help from the facts. He blames us first for trying to get rid of nuclear weapons and then for not having got rid of them all over the world.
Yes, the initial motive for setting up the women's camp at Greenham was to eliminate the enormous danger posed by the arrival in Britain of the American Cruise missiles. But there was also, from the very beginning, a consistent view in the camp that all weapons of mass destruction everywhere had to be eliminated - a view which led to a most painful split in the movement after Mikhail Gorbachev hosted a women's peace conference (entitled "2000 without nuclear weapons") in Moscow, 1987. At this event women from Greenham Yellow Gate challenged Gorbachev to his face to get rid of his own weapons. Their action resulted in the ostracism of Yellow Gate and a strange silence in the British media.
I wrote all about it in the book Awkward Corners, which I co-authored with John Arden in 1988, and which a faction associated with the Communist Morning Star tried to suppress. Until now, this part of Greenham's history has been pretty thoroughly hidden.
I was a regular visitor to Greenham for 19 years, off and on, and was part of the Yellow Gate grouping during and after the split. I experienced the camp when the Cruise missiles were no longer there. I saw the fence removed, the base demolished and the common returned to the people.
I presume PD Doyle would have supported David Andrews's initiative: the non-proliferation treaty signed by many nations. A related point of interest: at the UN Women's Conference in New York, 2000 ("Beijing + 5"), which I attended, a resolution was put forward to get rid of all WMD. It was supported by most of the world, including Iran. But who opposed it? The USA, the EU, and Israel. - Yours, etc,
MARGARETTA D'ARCY, Galway.