In Canada, in May 1962, as Conservative Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker began his re-election campaign, he was confronted by an unusual spectacle. As he gave a speech in the city of Trail, a group of women disrobed in front of him, to protest the government’s maltreatment of the Freedomites (or Sons of Freedom), a left-wing faction of a religious pacifist movement known as the Doukhobors. The incident made international newspaper headlines. Among those struck by the story was Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978), an American songwriter and political activist, who went on to write a song inspired by the group, titled Do as the Doukhobors Do. The song was part of the American folk revival scene of the 1960s. And I encountered this story while looking through newspaper clippings in the Doukhobor archival collection at Simon Fraser University, Canada. The story behind this song reveals how its context anticipated later forms of women’s radical protest, placing both Reynolds’ song and the protest itself, in a broader lineage of social and feminist resistance.
Born in San Francisco, to a socialist, Jewish immigrant family, Reynolds faced both political and gender-based barriers from a young age, including access to education. These experiences shaped her life and gave her an affinity to both the Freedomite women and the protest and anti-war movements of the era. By the mid-1960s, having befriended figures such as Pete Seeger, (1919-2014), a renowned American folk songwriter, political activist and pacifist, and invigorated by the civil rights and peace movements, Reynolds had become a prominent voice in the American folk song revival.
By the time Reynolds heard about the Doukhobor women she had already started to question the potency of North America’s protest movement. In the song she advocates following the Doukhobors’ example, with a touch of humour that was inherent to much of Reynolds’ work: ‘If you have a protest no one wants to hear / Just attend a rally where the big shots meet / Strip to your hide and walk down the street’. Reynolds used the Doukhobors’ story to highlight the limitations of existing protest methods: ‘They sign those petitions ’til they’re sad in the face, she wrote, ‘And still they seem to be getting no place’. The song’s lyrics go on to reference the Everyman, a boat built by Bay Area pacifists that they intended to sail into the Pacific Ocean nuclear test zone, in protest against nuclear weapons testing: ‘The little boat EVERYMAN couldn’t leave port / Bomb tests continue of every sort / We’ve got to do something / That’s wild and new / And do as the Doukhobors do’. For Reynolds, the Doukhobors’ protest was ‘wild and new’ and she believed that it could revitalise the American protest movement. The song was published a month after the Doukhobors’ protest, in the seventh issue of Broadside, a magazine established in 1962, dedicated to protest songs.
Who, then, were the Doukhobors, and what did Reynolds see in their story? The Doukhobors were a religious sect founded in the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. They believed that the temple of God resided in each human being and consequently rejected hierarchical forms of Christianity. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Doukhobors had transformed into a fully-fledged pacifist religious movement. On 29 June 1895 in Georgia, the Doukhobors staged their first mass protest, known as the Burning of Arms, to highlight their refusal of compulsory military service. The resulting persecution of the movement by the Russian imperial state, led around 7500 Doukhobors to immigrate to Canada in 1899.
Once in Canada, in recognition of their pacifist beliefs, the Doukhobors were granted exemption from military service. Yet their history is marked by their conflict with the Canadian authorities over land ownership, taxation, and education. By the 1920s, the Doukhobor community had split into three groups: those who were ready to accept Canadian laws, those who wanted to live communally and who protested the idea of individual land ownership, and those who rejected assimilation entirely. This third, more radical faction, went by the name of Sons of Freedom (or Freedomites). It is this group who practised disrobing as a protest method, and who Reynolds is referring to in her song (Reynolds’ use of the term Doukhobors, rather than Freedomites, reflects the broader, media-driven homogenisation of the movement).
The Freedomites’ radicalism was rooted in a strong adherence to the Doukhobor principles, particularly non-cooperation with the state and a belief in God’s absolute authority over humanity, placing them within the framework of Christian anarchism. Throughout much of the twentieth century the Freedomites continued to resist Canadian assimilation policies. They also denounced state education, which they perceived to be militarised, while also protesting wars and calling for a global boycott of military production.
The Freedomites practice of public disrobing dates back to 1903 and was originally intended to invoke religious ideas of Adam and Eve. Initially these protests, which included both male and female members of the movement, took the form of naked marches and pilgrimages. However, by the mid-1920s, they had evolved into socio-political direct action as a means of expressing dissent against state coercion. Open letters, written by Freedomites, describing the protests, also suggest that small groups of women used their bodies as sites of resistance to protest both sexual objectification and what they saw as Canadian consumerist culture.
The Canadian authorities responded to the Freedomites’ unique form of protest with mass incarcerations and tighter legislation. In 1931, the Criminal Code was amended and the mandatory penalty for public disrobing increased from six months to three years imprisonment. The prospect of being imprisoned did not deter the Doukhobors, and their protests continued intermittently throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
However, what was particularly significant in the postwar period was the Freedomites’ steadfast resistance to the Canadian authorities’ increasingly harsh efforts to integrate their children into the state school system. In 1952, Freedomite families who continued to resist state education had their children forcibly removed and placed in a prison-like school in New Denver. In 1959, after a seven year battle with the state, the Freedomites reluctantly agreed to send their children to school. While ostensibly they seemed to concede to the demands of the authorities, in reality the Sons of Freedom continued to be outraged by the way their children had been treated in New Denver. This triggered a fresh wave of protests, including the act of public disrobing that inspired Reynolds’ song.
But it was not just Reynolds who was captivated by the Freedomite women. In the mid-twentieth century, media outlets published sensational stories about the movement. Although the Freedomites’ protests also often involved men, it was the images of naked women that flooded the media. Some accounts suggest that Freedomite women undressed more frequently in front of male reporters to attract attention to their cause. This focus on the women may also have been a journalistic ploy to generate public interest. At the time, newspaper readerships were assumed to be primarily male, and women were typically seen as traditional, respectable housewives, making stories featuring the naked female body particularly eye-catching.
The unsympathetic way the Doukhobors were portrayed in the press was in part due to their use of extreme forms of protest, including arson, alongside public acts of disrobing. But the media’s reaction also reflected a broader discomfort with women who dared to challenge accepted social norms. In publicly exposing their bodies, Doukhobor women were transgressing ideals of femininity and unknowingly embodying the principles of the feminist movement. In 1959, a local newspaper described the Freedomite women as ‘feminists’ observing that
‘It will be surprising to some people that the men have so quietly allowed the women to take over, but the Sons of Freedom are evidently in the forefront of the feminist movement … No one can be considered in the sissy class who can throw rocks and eggs at the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police].’
In this way, the journalist framed the Freedomite women’s violent resistance to the police as unfeminine, further highlighting how far this group were perceived to have strayed from the so-called ‘sissy’ ideals of conventional womanhood.
As a religious minority fiercely advocating for their beliefs and subjected to public scrutiny throughout the mid-twentieth century, the Sons of Freedom anticipated forms of symbolic protest that were later embraced by other women’s movements. This is exactly what Reynolds captured in her song. She recognised the unconventional power of the Doukhobors’ protest method, together with the role of women’s bodies as sites of social and political resistance: ‘If public policy gets on your nerves / And no one pays attention to you / Throw away your dresses and your lingerie too and do as the Doukhobors do.’ Reflecting the legacy of radical protest, Do as the Doukhobors Do was finally recorded in 2000 by Seeger. The release was intended to commemorate the influence of Broadside and Reynolds’ contribution to the history of protest song. However, the fact that it was recorded by a man, and so many years after it was first written, obscured the significance of the song’s origins.
For the Freedomite women, disrobing was a nonviolent form of protest that drew immediate public and media attention to their causes for much of the twentieth century. The Sons of Freedom continued to resist the state until the mid-1980s. At this point, weary from their long struggle with the authorities, and aided by Canadian multicultural policy, members of the movement began to integrate into mainstream society.
However, their legacy survives, and over the last forty years disrobing as a protest method has been adopted by women’s rights protestors across the world. For instance, the Irish women’s ‘invasion’ of the male-only bathing place at Forty Foot in 1974, the nude demonstrations by the Mothers of Manipur in India, protesting abuse and rape in 2004, and the topless protests carried out by Ukrainian feminist activist group Femen in the 2010s. Similar forms of symbolic protest can also be found within the contemporary transgender rights movement, as activists in the UK resist gender regulation. This song captures both a radical moment in history and the radical legacy of a protest movement that continues to resonate today.