Finding a Cure for War: Women's Politics and the Peace Movement in the 1920s

Abstract

Women's politics in the United States did not expire after 1920, as a rich and recent historical literature makes clear.' But the contours and dynamics of the post-suffrage women's are not easily summarized. This study of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (CCCW), the largest women's peace organization of the 1920s, suggests that traditional notions about gender solidarity and women's special place in politics continued to exert a powerful, motivating influence on white, middle-class women's organizations for more than a decade after the suffrage victory. The key to understanding the CCCW is a generational view of women's politics. In tactics, structure and ideology, the CCCW stands in striking contrast to the identified by Nancy Cott as a characteristic of many women's organizations in the 1920s. In her groundbreaking study, Cott explores a trend in the post-suffrage women's toward associationalism, a recognition of individual and group differences among women, as well as an assertion of full equality with men; such recognition had, Cott suggests, a fragmenting effect on the formerly unified woman movement of the pre-war years.2 As a diverse coalition of nine major women's organizations, the CCCW might well have experienced this kind of fragmentation. Yet despite a multiplicity of identities and approaches, the CCCW functioned in the 1920s as a unified, gender-based mass movement, much like the suffrage campaign in its final years. The underlying, coherent base for the CCCW's mobilization was a generational tradition of women's politics, derived from a common legacy of pre-war political organizing and a common vision of female moral reform. How and why a diverse coalition of women came together around the same peace platform will be traced through the CCCW's most significant organizing effort, the campaign for the Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war. The women's peace in the inter-war years certainly had its own fissures and divisions.3 In the case of the Kellogg-Briand pact, generations were again key, for if a shared generational tradition held the CCCW coalition together, then generational difference with younger women was a fragmenting force in the for peace. The essay will conclude with a brief consideration of college women peace activists in the 1920s. Their activities highlight the generational basis of women's peace organizing, and point to the direction of change in women's politics, to the modem feminism described by Cott. The college also illustrates in detail one barrier to women's organizing in the interwar years a feminist generation gap which prevented older and younger women from uniting around common concerns.