Cindy Sheehan, the "peace mom" who made headlines in 2005 by staging a marathon protest outside President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch, said Monday that she no longer wants to be seen as a leader of the anti-war movement.

In a 1,245-word missive entitled "Goodbye Attention Whore" posted on the liberal DailyKos blog, Sheehan said her campaign to end the war in Iraq had strained her relationship with her children, cost her a marriage and left her nearly penniless.

"This is my resignation letter as the 'face' of the American anti-war movement," Sheehan wrote. "I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost."

• Click here to read Cindy Sheehan's letter on the DailyKos blog.

Sheehan founded the Gold Star Families for Peace after her son, Casey Sheehan, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in an April 2004 battle in Baghdad. Sheehan was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's policies and was often a target of criticism herself for visiting with leftist leaders like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

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Sheehan, however, said she had become increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party. In an open letter to the Democratic members of Congress on Saturday, however, she announced that she was leaving the Party because she believed its leaders had failed to change the country's course in Iraq.

"I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a 'tool' of the Democratic Party." Sheehan wrote. "However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the 'left' started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used."