When mothers shook the world

Some of the world’s most famous protest movements are remembered as being led by students, dissidents, and ordinary citizens rallying against corruption, repression, and economic collapse — from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the massive unrest that erupted earlier this year in Tehran.

Yet some of the most pivotal movements of the modern era have also begun with mothers standing in public squares, refusing to stop asking where their children had gone and demanding an end to violence and war. In honor of Mother’s Day this Sunday, we’re highlighting three political protests led by mothers from around the world.

Argentina

White headscarves became a defining symbol of resistance in Argentina when mothers and grandmothers began wearing them in protest against what is widely regarded as one of the bloodiest US-backed military dictatorships in Latin America.

During a period known as Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the 1970s and 80s, thousands of political dissidents and suspected left-wing opponents were tortured, killed, or disappeared by the state. The military junta kept few records of the missing, but their families refused to let them vanish quietly.

In 1977, a group of mothers and grandmothers staged a protest in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, strategically gathering in front of the Casa Rosada presidential complex, to demand information about their children and provoke the ire of the military. Soon, the group began protesting every week, wearing white headscarves symbolizing the diapers of the children they had lost.

At first, government officials dismissed the “Mothers of the Disappeared,” as they came to be known, casting them off as “las locas” – madwomen.

“Of course we were mad,” Taty Almeida, one of the mothers, whose 20-year-old son, Alejandro, disappeared in 1975, told reporters on the 40th anniversary of the first protest. “Mad with grief, with impotence. They took a woman’s most precious gift, her child.”

Yet the military soon found itself baffled over how to suppress a group of unarmed mothers in a country where Catholicism — and the image of the Virgin Mary — along with traditional family values were deeply intertwined with national identity, without provoking a broader backlash.

When Argentina hosted the World Cup in 1978, they leveraged the international attention on the tournament and continued to demonstrate. Even after the dictatorship ended in 1983, the mothers have continued to look for the disappeared and identify children who grew up in Argentina without knowledge of their parents.

Liberia

In the early 2000s, Liberia was engulfed in its second civil war in less than a decade. More than 250,000 people had died, and one in three had been displaced by fighting between forces loyal to Charles Taylor, a guerrilla leader who assumed the presidency in 1997, and armed rebel groups. As the war raged, bands of rebels and child soldiers tore through the countryside, looting, burning villages, and committing mass murders and rape.

In 2003, Leymah Gbowee, a mother of five, decided to organize a group of women from her church to pray for peace. She later worked to expand the group into a nonviolence campaign bringing together Christian and Muslim women under the banner of “Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.” Much like the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, they chose white T-shirts and scarves as a uniform.

“Did we have any idea of what we were going to do? No,” Gbowee, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her activism, later told the BBC. “But we just knew that we had gone from bad, to worse, to ridiculous, and we needed to do something.”

Over 2,500 women began gathering every day at a fish market in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. For months, Taylor dismissed their demands — though frequently threatened them in public addresses — but eventually relented and agreed to attend peace talks with rebel leaders in Ghana.

When peace talks in Accra began to falter, the women staged a sit-in and refused to let either side leave — literally barricading the doors — until an agreement was reached. The talks culminated in the 2003 Comprehensive Peace Plan, after which Taylor resigned under mounting international pressure and fled into exile in Nigeria.

Liberian women’s activism continued through the aftermath of the Accra peace accord up to the 2005 elections, which brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the presidency – the first female elected head of state in an African country.

Russia

Three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian troops entered the breakaway republic of Chechnya to try to keep it from declaring independence.

The first Chechen war became a devastating conflict that killed thousands of people, most of them civilians, and shattered the Russian Federation’s image as a peaceful democracy. But it was an anti-war movement that began with mothers who would play a significant role in making the war domestically unsustainable for Russia.

In January 1995, after a catastrophic Russian assault on the Chechen capital, Grozny, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers — a group formed in 1989 in response to the abuse and mistreatment of conscripts during the Soviet-Afghan war — descended on Chechnya.

As journalist Julia Ioffe writes in “Motherland,” a history of modern Russia told through the experiences of women, many of those soldiers who were listed as captured or missing had been drafted as teenagers with little to no training.

The committee, led by activist Maria Kirbasova, helped hundreds of mothers travel to the warzone, where they searched morgues and negotiated directly with Chechen field commanders for the return of their children. Some, Ioffe writes, “walked right up to Russian military formations and snatched their sons back.”

By the time the war ended in Russian defeat in 1996, the mothers had successfully gotten dozens of their sons released and helped families recover the missing children. “The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers,” Ioffe writes, “became a powerful cultural and political symbol because it showed women at their most essential and socially acceptable: as mothers.”