Fresno’s oldest peace group celebrates 50th anniversary

When Ellie Bluestein moved to Fresno in 1965 from Michigan, she was already a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

“When I came to Fresno, the Vietnam War was really getting going, and there was no branch in Fresno,” Bluestein recalled, “so the national office called me and asked me if I thought I could start a branch here, because all over the country women are ready to do something. I said I had just got here, so I don’t know a lot of people, but I’ll try.”

Bluestein sat down at her desk and wrote 47 letters to everyone she could think of: community leaders; colleagues and friends of her husband, Gene, an English professor at Fresno State; and everyday people she met when she first moved to town.

She invited them to her house to learn more about the worldwide organization that was established in 1915, when 1,200 women gathered in The Hague during World War I to “study, make known, and eliminate the causes of war.”

She received 12 responses, and of the 12, eight people joined that night. They elected Ellie the first president of the Fresno WILPF branch. Fifty years later, the organization has expanded to 250-plus members in the Fresno area.

Now, 100 years from the inaugural meeting in the Hague and 50 years from the gathering in Bluestein’s home, WILPF members are gathering to celebrate Friday at the Henry Madden Library, debuting their work as the oldest peace group in Fresno with a presentation and exhibit entitled “Dangerous Women: 50 Years in Fresno, 100 Years Internationally.”

The exhibit is named after Jane Addams, the founding president of WILPF and the first U.S. woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover labeled Addams “one of the most dangerous women in America” for her opposition to the war, explained former Fresno WILPF president Sandra Iyall.

“There were women from countries that were involved in the hostilities that were trying to cross the border to get into the Hague and their governments were labeling them dangerous women, too, because they were trying to meet and stop the war,” Iyall said.

“You talk about persecution, especially in the British press. The women were labeled mad-as-hatters and just chatterboxes and pejorative terms for them,” said Mary Murphy, a longtime Fresno WILPF member. “There was a photograph from the British press that was making fun of them for doing this.”

Local protests, global issues

The Fresno WILPF branch has faced its share of conflict across the years, from standing up for agriculture employees’ rights during the United Farm Workers movement to the California Supreme Court case in 1981-82 when WILPF placards on buses reading “Think before you register for the draft” were destroyed by city officials.

Murphy, while working with a Delano satirical newspaper called El Malcriado, or The Disobedient, was arrested in Tulare County as she protested alongside Dolores Huerta, one of the founders of the union.

Blanche Nosworthy, another WILPF president in Fresno, was one of a group of WILPF members who housed several protesters during the United Farm Workers movement. A group of WILPF members from out of town, as well as priests and wives of other picketers who had been arrested, invited her along to a farmhouse outside of Clovis where she was later arrested and held in jail for two weeks.

“We had to go down and bring her medications and I asked her how it felt to be there,” Bluestein said. “Joan Baez (the folk singer) came and sang for them. Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon papers fame) came and talked to them. All kinds of priests – Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist, was there with them. And so she said in some ways it was like being in a dormitory, but it was not pleasant being in prison.”

Many men wanted to be conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War era, Bluestein explained, but were scared to speak up out of fear of being ostracized.

“We organized draft counseling, and we had lawyers, doctors and psychologists come and explain what it is to be a conscientious objector,” Bluestein said.

Today, WILPF members remain active in Fresno, such as when they protested conditions for sweatshop workers for The Gap in 2013.

Each month, Joan Poss, a member of WILPF, stands in front of the Fresno County Courthouse in honor of Women in Black, another organization against violence and war. On income tax day, WILPF members stand outside the post office with fliers on the percentage of the U.S. budget going to military spending vs. education.

This month’s exhibit

The exhibit is broken up into five sections, highlighting artistic endeavors by the group as well as moments of political and military unrest. Bluestein described the qualities of what she called a “dangerous woman” – “one who advocates for peace and stopping wars throughout the world, one who supports human rights for all, one who works for environmental justice to save the Earth for future generations, one who visualizes a world community.”

One reason the exhibit is important is how it shows “not only political activity, but how creative we are. We aren’t just anti-things; we are for things, too,” Murphy said. “We do things to support one another to build a community in Fresno, and it makes us much happier.”

Bluestein said she still runs into familiar faces in town – protestors who used to stay at her home decades ago.

“It’s very exciting because it’s not just for the marching and the writing letters and visiting Congress people. It’s also for the art, for the community,” Bluestein said.

This story was originally published September 10, 2015 at 1:01 PM with the headline "Fresno’s oldest peace group celebrates 50th anniversary."