This is the first post in our series “Mobilizing Motherhood,” focused on mothers in twentieth-century industrial and environmental activism.
In the early 1960s, members of Voice of Women (VOW), an anti-nuclear organization, collected baby teeth to test for radioactive isotopes. They held “Toothsome Teas,” watched children for wobbly teeth, sent tooth requests to libraries and dentist offices, and parked “Tooth Mobiles” at shopping centers. They thanked children with buttons and notes, and diligently cataloged teeth based on breast or bottle feeding before sending them to scientists for analysis. Through this work, they merged the practices of motherhood with activist science.[1]
The tooth survey, though, was not the first citizen science project VOW women undertook. From October 1962 through June 1963, Ursula Franklin, chair of the VOW research committee, led a study of fallout monitoring in Canada. She considered this the most important work she could do for VOW.[2] While not nearly as sexy as a “Tooth Mobile,” the story of VOW’s radiation brief reveals that not all women embraced mobilizing motherhood for science. Internal VOW divisions show that when women undertook citizen science as mothers, they not only constructed new scientific understandings of radiation, but also reworked women’s political identities.
In October 1962, Franklin wrote to VOW president Thérèse Casgrain that she needed to undertake a radiation study because “there is no subject more on the minds of our members.” She added, “I am very anxious to get all the facts straight and watertight, because we should not look like a bunch of hysteric females, getting worked up over newspaper reports.”[3]
Franklin developed national and international networks of women to track fallout monitoring practices in Canada, the UK, the United States, and West Germany and, in the process, “buil[t] the peace movement horizontally.”[4] Some, like Diana Wright in Saskatchewan, were already working on radiation briefs for their provincial governments. When Wright met with provincial health officials, they told her “that if there was a situation when it would be advisable for pregnant women and nursing mothers to drink powdered milk rather than whole milk, it would be better for Ottawa to announce it.” The health officials dismissed Saskatchewan women’s questions, telling them they would save more lives if they studied highway safety. This did not stop Wright and others from gathering data on radiation monitoring, always focusing on how exposure to Iodine 131 and Strontium 90 might impact children and pregnant women. [5] As they stated in the final report, “We are particularly concerned because the problem relates directly to the health of our children and to their future.”[6]
VOW submitted “Fallout Monitoring in Canada” to the Minister of National Health and Welfare in June of 1963 and held a day of meetings with MPs the following month.[7] The brief argued that the government held a responsibility for public health, including radiation monitoring. It also argued that citizens had the right to know what threats radiation posed, especially as fallout varied across Canada. Based on Franklin’s calculations, “THE CHILD IN SUSSEX RECEIVED NEARLY 150% MORE STRONTIUM 90 AND 100% MORE STRONTIUM 89 THAN THE CHILD IN OTTAWA.”[8] The brief also rejected the concern that monitoring would create “panic and undue emotional reactions, particularly among mothers,” pointing out that women had recently “absorb[ed] the facts of a whole new science of nutrition.”[9] Women’s need for more information in order to decide what to feed children, or how to breastfeed (or not) was a crucial part of the brief’s argument.
VOW members saw the brief as a political statement, not just a scientific report. They recognized they needed “to create as much publicity as possible” around the report while keeping it “as devoid of emotionalism as possible.” [10] But over the months Franklin worked on the radiation monitoring brief, internal tensions rocked VOW. Organizational debates revealed that not all women saw citizen science as a correct form of maternal politics. From 1962 to 1963, VOW moved further into New Left politics, engaging in political actions such as a “Peace Train” to Ottawa to deliver demands to the prime minister.[11] One of VOWs co-founders, Jo Davis, objected strenuously to the changing politics of the group. In a letter to members, she asked, “Don’t we as women know that gentle persuasion is more effective than nagging?”[12] Davis sent out a survey asking members what they thought the political direction of VOW should be.
Women used the survey to articulate their views of women’s role in politics. One wrote, “I too do not think that protest marches are the answer to this, but rather good public relations work. Thank you for your letter. May we continue to progress in our womanly ways.”[13] Others thought that VOW needed to resist feminine docility: “If the determination of women did not blossom out into something more militant and aggressive after two or three years it would be half dead.”[14]
In mid-January, 1963, women gathered at a “Day of Study” in Toronto. The conversation centered on Davis’s critique. Davis spoke “about the role women could play capitalizing on their special role as mothers,” recalling that once she “was actually nursing [her] little son at [her] breast” when talking on the phone with the Secretary of State for External Affairs. Franklin then stood to give an analysis of the surveys, noting the responses revealed that members believed the “divergence of opinion [was] really a strength … [and that] every action for peace was legitimate.” Davis asked to speak again to the group and did so despite being told she was out of order. When Casgrain stood to speak, the women gave her a standing ovation.[15]
Furious at the outcome of the meeting, Davis wrote a letter to VOW membership attacking Franklin and several other women in leadership positions. Davis argued that Franklin had “used her ‘scientific’ status to convince others,” concluding that “The movement began to think and look like a Communist outfit … her deeds have been enough to suggest to me that Dr. Franklin is a dangerous influence in VOW, no matter what else she is.”[16] Davis’s accusations of communism weighed heavily on Franklin and shaped her perceptions of her radiation study; she told a scientist colleague that although she considered “this radiation brief of some importance,” because she did not “wish to turn the movement into a Communist outfit [she] would like to get this done as soon as possible.”[17] Franklin did finish the brief, despite the severe strain caused by the rifts within VOW. As she wrote to Helen Cunningham, “I do not want to continue as research chairman … During the last six months both my family and my work has suffered without any correspondingly worthwhile return for VOW.”[18]
Franklin, though, continued her citizen science activism. While writing her radiation brief, Franklin received a letter from Ethel Kesler, head of the Montreal Baby Tooth Survey, asking for help expanding the survey across Canada.[19] Franklin responded enthusiastically while apologizing for her delayed response, noting that “my workload was unusually large (My husband had the ‘flu, my mother in law in the hospital, the children in a school play, examination papers to be in, lots of VOW work etc.) and I am also writing…an article on radiation for Macleans.”[20] VOW women quickly joined the baby tooth project. As one wrote in 1965, “This study had particular appeal to Voice of Women members, concerned as they are for the effects of radiation on children, and the response was immediate and enthusiastic.”[21]
The story of Franklin’s radiation brief shows us that not all women concerned with radiation believed that citizen science aligned with motherhood. While many historians of the nuclear age have heard of the baby tooth surveys, no one has paid attention to the ways Franklin’s earlier report laid the groundwork for the national VOW’s tooth collecting project. Gathering data on government fallout monitoring systems allowed Franklin to merge science with maternal care work. The women who helped her demonstrated that political responses to nuclear weapons needed to include domestic practices, since nuclear technologies erased the boundaries of homes. In doing so, they engaged in science and constructed new forms of political motherhood.
[1] Barbara to Ursula Franklin, January 25, 1965, “Tooth collecting in Canada,” Accession B2015-0005, Franklin Fonds, University of Toronto Archives.
[2] Kay Macpherson, “Persistent Voices: Twenty-Five Years with Voice of Women,” Atlantis 12, 2 (1987): 68.
[3] Ursula Franklin to Thérèse Casgrain, Oct 21, 1962, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[4] Diana Wright to Franklin, August 14, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[5] Diana Wright, memo to VOW Provincial Executive Members and Regina VOW executive, December 19, 1962, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[6] “Fallout Monitoring in Canada: Brief to the Minister of National Health and Welfare,” June 1963, p. 4, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[7] Franklin to All Councilmembers and Regional Chairmen, July 29, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[8] “Fallout Monitoring in Canada,” 15. Emphasis in original.
[9] “Fallout Monitoring in Canada,” 4.
[10] Betty Marsh to Franklin, January 10, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[11] Marie Hammond-Callaghan, “Bridging and Breaching Cold War Divides: Transnational Peace Building, State Surveillance, and the Voice of Women,” in Worth Fighting For: Canada’s Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror, ed. Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson and Catherine Gidney (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015), 139.
[12] Jo Davis to VOW members, November 16, 1962, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[13] Mrs. Nicol, Victoria, B.C., B2015-0005, Franklin Fonds.
[14] Mrs. Richards, Prince Albert, B2015-0005, Franklin Fonds.
[15] Ursula Franklin Royal Canadian Mounted Police files, 1949-1965, 78-80, Franklin Fonds.
[16] Davis letter, n.d. (presumably January 1963), B2015-0005, Franklin Fonds.
[17] Ursula Franklin to Dr. Langston, May 27, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[18] Franklin to Helen Cunningham, May 31, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[19] Ethel Kesler to Franklin, February 11, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[20] Franklin to Kesler, March 19, 1963, B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds.
[21] Barbara to Ursula Franklin, January 25, 1965, “Tooth collecting in Canada,” B2015-0005, Franklin Fonds.
Cover image: Cover page for “Fallout Monitoring in Canada,” B1996-0004, Franklin Fonds, University of Toronto Archives.
Latest posts by Emma Schroeder (see all)
- The Voice of Women’s Radiation Brief: Mobilizing Motherhood for Citizen Science - May 7, 2026
- Writing Home Into Environmental History - October 8, 2021
- Thrifty Housewives and Wicked Wastrels: The Gendered Dimensions of Conservation - April 13, 2021