'Deadly Serious About the Bomb': Australian Women’s Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1945-1965.

This thesis traces the history of Australian women’s protest against nuclear weapons in the early Cold War. The 1950s and early 1960s saw a small but determined group of women take to the streets or pick up a pen to campaign for nuclear disarmament. This thesis focuses on identity-construction and the ways in which women’s activism was, and is, inexorably enmeshed with their internal and external lives. Through such an analysis, this thesis demonstrates how women forged a space for themselves in the highly gendered Cold War political climate and firmly situates women at the forefront of Cold War analysis.