The relationships among motherhood, peace activism, and women’s rights shifted in the politically conservative climate of the Cold War decades. With a focus on the concept of bosei, generally understood to be the “motherly” qualities that are supposedly inherent to women, the talk will examine how popular perceptions of the mother, the child, and the mother-child relationship gradually evolved to create the image that mothers, more than anyone else, protect children from war. This image did not result simply from a mothers’ desire to keep their children safe, nor was it the outcome of the Japanese experience of the Asia-Pacific War in which many mothers became widowed or lost their children. I argue that the maternal focus of Japanese women’s peace activism emerged from a convergence of various interests, including the security alliance between Japan and the United States, Japan’s Cold War-era political strategies, and Japanese women’s fight for increased rights.