The woman’s history was laid out on the table like an open book: passport, CIA file, photos, bio, airline tickets, FBI file, political cartoons, thank-you letters from POW families.
It reminded me of the time when I saw a family’s broad history on an auction table – years and years of work by a relative who wanted to ensure the family’s legacy.
This time, it was the life of one person, a woman named Ethel Barol Taylor of Philadelphia. I was unfamiliar with the name, but as I browsed the documents on the table, I saw that she had been a peace activist. This ephemera seemed to be the pieces from a much larger collection.
According to her biography – written by one of her children – she was the national coordinator of Women Strike for Peace (WSP), an organization of women – portrayed as housewives and mothers, but much more – who protested nuclear testing and the Vietnam War.
“… War can no longer serve to settle international disputes and … young men dying in Vietnam are dying in a place where many of you gentlemen have agreed we have no business being, for a cause which is questionable,” Taylor wrote in a 1965 letter to Republican U.S. Sen. Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, who had denounced the WSP.
Taylor and several other members went to Vietnam in 1968 for two weeks to retrieve letters from American POWs and bring them back home to their families. They returned with 138 letters, along with condemnations from a handful of men who opposed the war, according to a newspaper article among the documents at auction. The Pentagon noted that the names of all but four on the list had already been made public.
“You have made this a truly happy Christmas,” one woman wrote to Taylor. “I had not heard from my husband in four years, so you can imagine the joy I felt after opening the envelope and seeing Glenn’s handwriting.”
Not everyone was so thankful for Taylor and the WSP: She was said to be on “Nixon’s Enemies List,” and the FBI, the CIA (which paid housewives to infiltrate the women’s group), the State Department, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force kept her under surveillance, according to the biography at auction and a 1980s article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The newspaper story noted that she was a woman whose “dossier was bedtime reading for LBJ, who has chained herself to the White House to protest the Vietnam War, who twice went to jail, who once landed in Hanoi on a rickety plane by trucklight.”
Taylor was born during the first World War, had a talent for art but no money for art school; worked for her father, a lawyer and a department store, and got married to a man with a family business. With no need to work, she got bored. So, she started volunteering with Legal Aid, she noted in the newspaper article, although she was “apolitical.” Until the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima during World War II and she learned about the horrific effect of nuclear weapons on the human body.
She organized the Philadelphia chapter of the WSP in 1961, according to her obituary in the Inquirer. The national organization had been formed the same year when 50,000 women protested for one day against nuclear testing, according to the newspaper article.
A New York Times article described WSP members as women who “‘stress femininity rather than feminism. They are amateurs, women who, in less urgent times, would never have put down the mop to write a Congressman, much less demonstrate with their children in the street.'” Most of these women, it was noted, never touched a mop because they had domestic workers at home doing the cleaning for them.
Like most women at that time, they wore white gloves and hats, but they were doing “audacious things,” Taylor said in the newspaper interview. They were more than dainty little housewives and mothers: Some had been involved in other labor and political campaigns, and they were bold. WSP was largely a white women’s organization and was unable to recruit many black women.
Coretta Scott King, though, joined them in pushing for the nuclear test treaty in the early 1960s, and in 1962 she was a WSP delegate to a disarmament conference in Geneva. King also participated in a WSP march to the United Nations a year later.
During WSP’s anti-Vietnam War campaign, Taylor and the others went to peace conferences abroad, met with Vietnamese women and took those trips to Hanoi to retrieve the names of American POWs. She served as the national coordinator from 1974 to 1990, when the office closed.
One of the group’s founders was then-U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug of New York, known for her impassioned speeches and work in support of women’s and social issues.
Taylor later wrote newspaper opinion pieces and returned to her art. She became a sculptor, and her works were shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, according to the newspaper article. She also donated a sculpture to the Jimmy Carter Center in Atlanta. Years before, a logo for the Philadelphia WSP was created from a sculpture she had done of a mother holding up her child with raised arms.
At the auction, one of the documents was a political cartoon created in 1986 for the 25th anniversary of WSP by then-Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth. It shows President Reagan alarmed by the work of Ethel Taylor, who received an award of appreciation at the event. She died in 2003.
