Biography
Frances Crowe was an American Quaker, longtime Western Massachusetts peace and anti-nuclear-power organizer, and one of the most prolific draft counselors of the Vietnam era — she counseled an estimated 2,000 conscientious objectors and draft resisters out of her Northampton home in the 1960s and early 1970s. She was a central organizer of the regional movement against the Vermont Yankee and Indian Point nuclear power plants, and of the Western Massachusetts opposition to U.S. military intervention from Vietnam through the Iraq wars.
She was arrested more than fifteen times for civil disobedience over the course of her life, almost all for short terms, with longer stretches at the Hampshire County Jail in Northampton. She was first arrested in 1972 (at age 53) for blocking Selective Service offices in protest of the Vietnam War; her last documented arrest came in November 2018 at age 99, when she sat in protest outside a TD Bank in Northampton against the bank's financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline. She wrote about her arrests, draft counseling, and Quaker pacifism in her 2014 memoir Finding My Radical Soul. She died on August 27, 2019 at age 100.
