Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 6, Pt. 2

late-breaking news = addendum

Illustration, Dagmar Wilson (and very apt…)

Since this will all go away in a few days I won’t feel greedy about staking this extra claim on your attention. Leave it to the amazing Linda Granfield to find something I should have seen and missed. Today’s entry was connected to the date, August 6, and to Hiroshima. I wrote, in part, about an influential children's book — The Funny Mixed-Up Story; influential to me, anyway. The author was Faith McNulty; the illustrator, whom I overlooked, Dagmar Wilson. Linda pointed out — very kindly — that she, too, merited a mention, especially given the theme, or sub-theme, of the entry. She is absolutely correct. Linda sent a number of links; this New York Times obituary is a good summation. Not sure if it’s paywalled, appending the text in case. They can sue me. Thanks, Linda. You’re the best.

NYT, 01.23.2011

Dagmar Wilson, the founder of Women Strike for Peace, a cold war movement that helped organize demonstrations around the world calling for nuclear disarmament, died Jan. 6 in Washington. She was 94 and lived in Leesburg, Va.

Her daughter, Sally Ballin, confirmed the death.

On Nov. 1, 1961, about 50,000 women brought together by Women Strike for Peace marched in 60 cities in the United States and abroad demanding an end to atomic testing. As about 1,500 women led by Ms. Wilson gathered at the foot of the Washington Monument, President John F. Kennedy watched from a window at the White House.

That day, the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nina Khrushchev, the wife of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet prime minister, sent supportive letters to Ms. Wilson. “As mothers, we cannot help but be concerned about the health and welfare of our husbands and children,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote.

Two months later, at a news conference, President Kennedy said the marchers’ message had been received. He called them “extremely earnest” women who are “concerned as we all are about nuclear war.”

Ms. Wilson led a 51-member contingent to Geneva in April 1962 to raise their voices before delegates to a 17-nation disarmament conference. They met with the conference’s co-chairmen, an American and a Russian, and handed over bundles of petitions with more than 50,000 signatures calling for an end to nuclear testing. Coretta Scott King, the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was a member of that group.

In August 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed a historic treaty banning atomic testing in the atmosphere, in space and underwater. The idea to form Women Strike for Peace, Ms. Wilson said, came to her in 1961 while she was sitting with friends in the backyard of her house in the Georgetown section of Washington. They were troubled by the jailing in London of the philosopher Bertrand Russell for his part in antinuclear demonstrations.

Ms. Wilson, an artist and illustrator of children’s books, had never been an activist but had long been worried about nuclear fallout. Women, she decided, should strike — take time from their jobs and homemaking for the cause of peace.

“I decided that there are some things the individual citizen can do,” she told The New York Times in 1962. “At least we can make some noise and see. If we are going to have to go under, I don’t want to have to go under without a shout.”

With friends and neighbors, she built a grass-roots organization that was soon holding discussion groups, conducting letter-writing campaigns, picketing stores that sold war toys and gathering signatures on petitions calling for peace. During the Vietnam War, its members protested outside the White House, the Pentagon and the United Nations.

In 1965, Ms. Wilson’s activism attracted the attention of a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which summoned her and two colleagues to testify in secret about their efforts to gain a visa for a Japanese professor who had come to the United States for a lecture tour espousing pacifism. They were convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify unless the hearing was opened to the public. A year later, an appeals court overturned their convictions.

Dagmar Searchinger was born in Manhattan on Jan. 25, 1916, one of two children of Cesar and Marion Searchinger. Her father was a foreign correspondent for CBS Radio, and she spent much of her childhood abroad, graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1937. Soon after, she married Christopher Wilson, a British citizen who was assigned to the British Embassy in Washington as an aide. He died in 1986.

Besides her daughter Sally, Ms. Wilson is survived by two other daughters, Clare Wilson and Jessica Wilson; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Ms. Wilson was amazed by the response to that first Women Strike for Peace demonstration in November 1961.

“The girls are only beginning to feel their power,” she later said, adding: “Let’s face it, wars can no longer be won; wars are antediluvian. We simply have to abolish them.”