This article uses the trope of ‘hysterical motherhood’ to elucidate one of the unique forms that women’s protest action took at the height of the American anti-nuclear movement. It advances an understanding of ‘hysterical motherhood’ as both an embodied tactic and a performative act, arguing that its tactical effectiveness lay in its ability to redirect the societal gaze from the ‘hystericized’ bodies of women to the bodies and practices of militarised men. In so doing, it (re)structured the field of the possible: constraining and enabling performative enactments of masculinity and the nuclear state.