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Ribbon Around the Pentagon, The
Western Folklore, Fall 1996 by Michael Owen Jones
The Ribbon Around the Pentagon. By Linda Pershing. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 318, 12 plates, 34 figures, acknowledgements, introduction, notes, bibliography of interviews and secondary sources, index. $45.00 cloth, $22.50 paper)
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In 1985 more than 20,000 women marched on Washington, D. C., surrounding the Pentagon and other buildings with a 15-mile long ribbon of panels they had sewn in protest of nuclear armament. The Ribbon was the brainchild three years earlier of Justine Merritt, a fifty-nine-year-old former high school teacher in Denver, Colorado, who learned needlework from her grandmother and mother. She spent more than 700 hours on a yard-long panel, creating a rainbow collage of embroidered names of people dear to her: "What I cannot bear to think of as lost forever in a nuclear war." A plan began to emerge among a group of close friends to encircle the Pentagon with a ribbon of panels on August 4, 1985 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As news of the idea spread, thousands of women made panels. Motifs ranged from family portraits to butterflies, abstract designs, and, especially, children. Themes dwelt on a concern for wholeness and relatedness (between nature and humanity, among peoples of different races and ethnicities, and between the personal and the political).
Picture it: 15 miles of colorful fabric stitched by women to express what's dear to them, and ceremonially wrapped around the impenetrable stone edifice to U. S. military might. The image is startling and compelling. It intriqued Linda Pershing who learned about the event shortly after it occurred. She spent six years researching the subject. She interviewed 44 participants (names and dates are listed at the beginning of the bibliography) and combed through enormous amounts of archival material, including correspondence, fliers, organizational records, videos, slides, minutes of meetings of the Ribbon project's board of directors, newspaper articles, newsletters, and the tabulated results of more than 1,200 responses to questionnaires distributed by two sociologists. Her research led to a dissertation about the Ribbon (1990), an article on peace work from piecework (1993), and a monograph on Mary Milne who constructed the largest number of panels in the Ribbon and in the process discovered herself and gained a sense of self-esteem (1995).
In the present work, Linda Pershing presents the full story of the Ribbon around the Pentagon, having restructured and enhanced the dissertation on which it is based and included some ideas from her article. In the first chapter she places the Ribbon in the historical context of the nuclear arms race, and in the second she documents the origins, development, and implementation of the Ribbon project. Next, she considers the Ribbon in the context of political needlework in the U. S. historically, including several direct antecedents such as the Hudson River Quilt (1969-1972), the People's Bicentennial Quilt (begun in 1974), the Martin Luther King, Jr., Freedom Quilting Bee (first organized in 1966), and others. In the fourth chapter she describes Ribbon panels and analyzes the project's rapid growth and the enthusiasm of participants whose numbers quickly swelled to many thousands. Then she focuses on public responses to the project, questions of how identity (gender, race, class, ethnicity) affected participation, and some of the meanings of the Ribbon. Chapter 6 concerns the ceremony in Washington, D. C. where thousands marched and draped several buildings, including the Pentagon, with the Ribbon as well as participants' subsequent reflections on the project. Chapter 7 explores the broader ramifications of the Ribbon and her study of it for gender theory and research on expressive culture. Here the author interprets the Ribbon in terms of symbolic inversions (e.g., turning the low social valuation of women's needle arts on its head) and coding (appropriation, indirection, and conveying oppositional messages through juxtapositions). The final chapter consists of a summary and conclusion. The author includes a dozen color plates and 34 black and white photos illustrating some of the panels, their makers, and the ceremony in Washington, D. C.
Linda Pershing hypothesizes that the Ribbon served as covert expressions of resistance to ways of thinking that the participants believed to be dangerous and destructive. She writes, "With color and imagination the Ribbon contested nuclear arms proliferation and offered women's visions: of particular loved ones, personal and artistic expression, cultural diversity, nature's beauty-all of which fall outside of the consideration of strategic military planners when they calculate the damage that nuclear weapons can do. It called attention to the details of daily life that give meaning to human existence. In a pleasing and artistic form, the Ribbon was a reminder of the possible impact of nuclear arms race on contemporary life and suggested that simply offering alternative views is subversive and potentially liberating" (176).
