Women Crusade for Peace: Claudia Jones and the Cold War Peace Movement

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.3.1.0067
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Pages: 67-81
• Author: Denise Lynn
• Subject Matter: Gender,Race,Peace,Internationalism,Communism

The Journal of Intersectionality

67Volume Three, Number One

Women Crusade for Peace: Claudia Jones and

the Cold War Peace Movement

Denise Lynn, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of History and Director of Gender Studies

University of Southern Indiana

Abstract: After World War II, peace became a central tenet of the Black freedom struggle. But it

was also a liability to be associated with peace because the Soviet Union was a major advocate of the

peace movement during the Cold War. Claudia Jones, a communist leader and theoretician, was an

outspoken, vocal advocate for peace. She argued that war and nuclear weaponry were capitalist tools

to limit freedom struggles, contain non-white populations globally, and undermine women’s liberties.

She argued for women’s leadership in the peace movement and advocated a gendered internationalism.

Jones, an immigrant herself, believed that American women should advocate for peace beyond national

boundaries to secure their own independence, freedom, and equality. This was a particular imperative

for Black and colonized women, who, Jones argued, were the most oppressed strata. In order to free all

working people and secure a global alliance, women had to become leaders in the peace movement.

She saw peace as a necessary prerequisite to undermining capitalist power and reach the full potential

of a socialist state. Her advocacy and leadership in the peace movement came at great personal cost.

Jones would be arrested, convicted, and deported for her determined political advocacy, all the while

her health declined, leading to her premature death. This article argues that Jones’s gendered interna-

tionalism and peace were central tenets in her vision of a socialist future.

Keywords: Gender, Race, Peace, Internationalism, Communism

Claudia Jones, Trinidad born American communist, believed that her opposition to the Korean

War and criticism of the nuclear arms race is what led to her arrest, prosecution, and deportation.

In the post-World War II years, Jones was writing, speaking, and campaigning against Cold War

hostilities between the US and the Soviet Union and against nuclear proliferation. In 1950,

Jones published an article titled “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace” in the

Communist Party’s theoretical journal Political Aairs. It was this article, she believed, that led

the FBI to increase its surveillance and motivated federal authorities to pursue deportation. In it

she attacked President Truman’s order to pursue the deadly hydrogen bomb and “inaugurate a

suicidal” atomic weapons race with the Soviet Union. She also noted that the peace movement

was “headed” by the Soviet Union, or as she described it, “the land of Socialism,” and part of a

united front against the United States’ aggressive pursuit of nuclear weaponry and confrontation

with the USSR.1

The FBI was indeed interested in her article, but it was one among many articles the

agency collected on Jones’s peace activism. Additionally, federal authorities were discussing her

deportation a full two years before her article was published. She was correct that American

intelligence agencies did believe that the postwar peace movement was a threat for the very reason