10b. Early Examples

Women’s peace activism has taken many forms.

Some of it is group action in response to a particular conflict. Think back to when we considered Lysistrata – the theatrical women’s sex strike in ancient Greece that inspired similar actions in recent history. That was definitely a movement based on essentialized notions of female gender identity.

Sometimes it takes the form of an organization and develops a long-term response to a range of conflict issues. Possibly the oldest, still-existing women’s peace movement is an organization called the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

It grew out of the International Committee of Women for a Permanent Peace, which met in 1919, following a gathering of women in the midst of the First World War, in the Netherlands. The goal of the first meeting was to lobby state leaders for an international body that would mediate and bring an end to the war. One of the founders and early leaders of WILPF was Jane Addams, an American social activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

The organization emphasized women’s roles as mothers and nurturers who, because of their maternal nature, would want to resist war. We might consider it ironic that this idea was held by women such as Jane Addams who was lesbian and never bore children herself. But that just underscores how prevalent the linkage between women, mothering, and peace was at the time.

Ideologically, the women of WILPF were feminists who campaigned for women’s rights alongside their crusade for peace. Initially WILPF’s agenda also highlighted suffrage, the idea being that if women had the vote, the world would be a better place and war might be averted. As the First World War progressed, some pro-suffrage feminists distanced themselves from the peace movement. In Canada, giving some women the federal vote in 1917 was a means to promote support for conscription and the war. Indeed, the mothering argument also went the other way – truly patriotic women should be willing to give up their sons to save the nation, as this WWI poster depicting "the Greatest Mother in the World" suggests.

Another issue that divided the members of WILPF was whether to commit to opposing the First World War specifically, or war itself for all of time. Some women wanted members to sign a peace ‘pledge,’ a statement that confirmed their pacifist ideology for all time. As well, some members were absolute pacifists, believing that even relief to war sufferers supported the war effort at some level. Others rejected pledges and absolutism as a way of incorporating the diverse positions of women against the war.

The core pacifist-feminists in WILPF held fast to the movement through the Second World War, even as some members left, believing that military action was the only way to stop Hitler and the spread of Nazism. The organization continues to exist today, offering a peace response to a broad range of international and interpersonal conflict issues.