David S. Patterson . The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women's Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I . New York : Routledge . 2008 . Pp. xx, 443. $36.95.

Abstract

On August 4, 1914, Woodrow Wilson offered his services as a mediator to the European powers who were going to war, and on December 18, 1916, he renewed that offer more forcefully. By then it was too late for Wilson to play a mediating role; Germany's leaders had already decided to resume the unrestricted submarine attacks that would lead the United States to declare war four months later. David S. Patterson's new book chronicles the efforts at mediation between Wilson's failed initiatives made by ordinary citizens, many of them women, rather than diplomats and statesmen. Despite the failure of such initiatives, Patterson argues that they had important consequences for the twentieth century. They lay the groundwork for the modern peace movement, they energized and expanded women's political activism, and they fostered a growing consensus for a reformulation of international relations. We learn how little was new in Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 1918. Most of the points had appeared repeatedly in peace activists' proposals for mediation in 1914 and thereafter, especially the call for a permanent international organization of arbitration.