KAY CAMP, 7/10/1918 - 7/9/2006

Katherine Merrill Lindsley Camp, known to WILPFers as Kay, passed away on July 9, 2006 - the day before her 88th birthday - at her home in the Quadrangle retirement community in Haverford, PA. A lifelong activist and self-described "peace protagonist," she joined WILPF in 1958, eventually serving as our national president (1967-71) and international president (1974-80), and remaining active until only recently.

Kay attended peace conferences and fact-finding missions all over the world, forging ties with countless women activists in the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. As she told graduates of Swarthmore College, her alma mater (class of 1940), in a 1982 commencement speech: "Since we can't leave peace to the generals, it is up to us generalists, who tend to see things whole. Our fevered pursuit of national security through military means alone is no longer credible. Can't we understand that peace is our only security? . . . Peace is possible if we commit ourselves passionately to insist, resist, and persist."

For her efforts, she received an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore, the Martin Luther King Jr. award from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Gandhi Award from the Gandhi Foundation. Raised on a farm in Livingston, NJ, Kay married a fellow Swarthmore alumnus, the late William Camp. During World War II, she worked as a cryptographer for the federal government, after which she and her husband settled in the Philadelphia suburbs, joined a Quaker meeting, and raised their sons David, Nelson, and Anthony. In later years she was a grandmother to seven and an avid gardener, sailor, and tennis player, among many other things.

A brief biography can't fully capture Kay's accomplishments, however - nor how beloved she was to fellow WILPF women. As notes of sympathy sent to the National Office attest, she possessed a special "quiet and gentle forcefulness of . . . character," perhaps best epitomized in this letter from former International Secretary General and past International President Edith Ballantyne: "Kay Camp's death comes as a terrible shock. I feel a part of me has died with her. We worked closely together in WILPF for more than four decades-when she was U.S. Section president, then member of the IEC and later inter-national president. Our close relationship continued after that, although communication became difficult in the past few years."

Kay was such an extraordinary human being, with this special combination of high intelligence, creativity and activism, committed to the transformation of a military society to a peaceful one in which women had their big part. She had a wonderful way with words and could create a slogan at the drop of a hat. The title of her publication for WILPF, Listen to Women for a Change, became a slogan still used. She was the creator of WILPF's S.T.A.R. (Stop the Arms Race) signature campaign in the early 1980s to exhort citizens around the world to "buck the arms race with a buck," the slogan she created to raise funds to carry out the one-year campaign that took the petitions to NATO headquarters in March 1983, ending with a huge women's rally in Brussels. "Around a million signatures were collected and many paid one dollar for the privilege to sign. Kay was always a creator, and also an enthusiastic supporter of ideas of others, and once they were accepted she did everything to help make them a reality: the renewal of the WILPF summer schools for young women in the 1970s (later named Gertrud Baer seminars), the internship program started in 1980, and later the opening of the WILPF U.N. office in New York. Those were some of the bigger innovations that one remembers easily, but she was behind many others, small ones that were important but easily forgotten. "I remember many hour-long telephone conversations we had, often arguments about ideas, about positions, about actions that made each of us clearer and stronger in our thinking and convictions. Kay was a wonderful person to work with and to be with. She was gracious, generous and always challenging. "She joins the WILPF Hall of Fame. Her disappearance leaves a terrible void and we will miss her."