Effort of women opponents of war to mobilize opposition to war during World War I. The year 1915 was not a terribly propitious moment to organize an international women’s peace movement. For nearly nine months, Europeans had been locked in a murderous war that had already left hundreds of thousands of men dead on the battlefields. On both sides of enemy lines, governments demanded that their citizens rally behind the fatherland. Women, who in most of Europe and North America had little say in political matters, were expected to contribute morally and economically to the war effort. In belligerent countries, freedom of speech was or soon would be seriously curtailed. The fight for women’s rights was put on the back burner.
None of these hurdles prevented Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a prominent Dutch suffragist, from appealing to feminists from across Europe and North America to gather together at The Hague to protest the war raging around them. Her invitation was not always well received. Neither the Russian nor the French suffrage societies elected to send any delegates. The French were particularly strident in their refusal, asking, "How would it be possible for us, given the current conditions, to meet with the women of enemy countries? . . . Have they disavowed the political crimes of their governments?" (Report of the International Congress of Women, 28 April-1 May, 1915, The Hague, WILPF, WHC). Women from other countries struggled to obtain the visas necessary to travel. For three days, the British government prevented the U.S. delegation from crossing the English Channel, nearly causing them to miss the meeting altogether. Despite these hurdles, on April 28, 1915, an International Congress of Women convened; 1,136 delegates from 12 nations, neutral and belligerent, were in attendance (Bussey and Tims 1980, 19).
The participants ensured that both women’s rights and international peace would remain the core objectives of the congress. Indeed, the delegates saw the two as inextricably intertwined, as they explained, "The International Congress of Women is convinced that one of the strongest forces for the prevention of war will be the combined influence of women of all countries. But as women can only make their influence effective if they have equal political rights with men, this Congress declares that it is the duty of women of all countries to work with all their force for their political enfranchisement" (cited in Alonso 1993, 68). To promote these ends, the congress founded a new organization, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), and it elected the prominent U.S. social activist Jane Addams as its first international president. The congress also agreed to send envoys to meet with the leaders of the major European governments to pressure them into publicizing their terms for peace. Finally, the delegates insisted that women should have a voice when it came to drawing up an eventual peace treaty, and they agreed to reconvene wherever and whenever such a settlement was to be drafted.
For the remaining years of World War I, members of the ICWPP struggled to carry out their pacifist and feminist agenda in a persistently hostile environment. The organization’s envoys did gain an audience with many of the major belligerent and neutral powers. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States was reported to have been particularly impressed by the resolutions brought to him by Jane Addams (Bussey and Tims 1980, 21). In the meantime, members returned to their respective nations and attempted to build support for a negotiated settlement to the war. In the United States, the Women’s Peace Party, founded in 1915, took up the charge, although the U.S. entry into the war led to divisions in the organization, particularly over the appropriateness of women’s war relief work. English members concentrated their efforts on pacifist education in cooperation with other liberal pacifist organizations in their country. In Germany ICWPP members marked the second anniversary of the 1915 congress by sending the Kaiser a declaration of war aims and a call for peace without annexation.
French suffrage societies had declined to send any delegates to The Hague in 1915, but almost as soon as the congress ended, several prominent feminists, including the labor activist Gabrielle Duchene, broke with the mainstream and founded a French section of the ICWPP. Before the end of the year, the group published a pamphlet titled An Urgent Duty for Women asking their female compatriots, "Does our responsibility end with charitable activity and hero worship? . . . Can we truly answer that we are not interested in the future and that the war will end of its own accord?" (Un Devoir urgent pour les femmes). The brochure went on to demand that members of the French legislature make known their terms for peace. The police responded by confiscating the French section’s papers and threatening those members who did not keep silent with imprisonment.
When World War I ended in November 1918, the leadership of the ICWPP began to prepare for a second international meeting. The decision of the Allied powers to base the peace conference in Paris posed a dilemma. For the ICWPP to follow through with its original plan to meet concurrently with the peace talks would mean that Central European members would not be able to attend. The organization therefore located the conference in neutral Switzerland. Delegates from sixteen nations gathered in Zurich from May 12 to 19, 1919. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States were represented in the largest numbers. Although the French government refused to issue visas to ICWPP members, two French women managed to cross the border. A third French delegate, Jeanne Melin from the war-torn region of the Ardennes, secured a visa just in time to arrive for the last day of the congress. By coincidence, she walked into the hall just as one of the German delegates, Lida Gustav Heymann, was addressing the gathering. The delegates greeted the unexpected arrival of the French woman with a resounding ovation, and Heymann spontaneously grabbed a bouquet of flowers from the stage to offer to her French counterpart. Melin took the podium and responded, "I, a French woman of an invaded country affirm that we women never wanted a war that was possible only because we were denied our political rights and continued only because we did not have the power to stop it. I offer my hand to my German sisters; together we will work, henceforth, not against man, but for him" (Compte rendue de la Conference Internationale des Femmes, WILPF, WHC). Deeply moved, the entire delegation of women rose in response, pledging to work tirelessly against war.
Before adjourning the delegates at the Zurich congress passed a series of resolutions opposing the ongoing blockade of Germany, protesting against the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, offering their qualified support to a new League of Nations, and laying the foundations for a permanent women’s international peace organization, henceforth to be known by the name Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The WILPF, which continues to exist today, became the most enduring legacy of women’s peace activism during World War I.
