Gender and the “Jews’ War”: Women, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-War Campaigns in Britain, 1938-1940

Abstract

ABSTRACT The study of the gender complexion of pacifist movements has greatly expanded in recent decades, a product of the convergence of the new international history and study of transnationalism with the ever firmer rooting of women’s and gender history. Yet the study of pacifism in wartime has received less attention, and that of unlikelier pacifists emerging from the far Right even less. The British Union of Fascists and National Socialists [BU] launched its ‘Peace Campaign’ in 1938, and women fascists played leading roles on both practical and symbolic levels. It culminated in the launch of their own Women’s Peace Campaign in 1940, relying heavily on tropes of women’s innate pacifism and, more narrowly, domestic concerns in the home and on the home front. The BU’s policy shift from para-militarism to a militant non-interventionism and a racially motivated isolationism was more accurately an anti-war and stop-the-war campaign. Even before 1939, they dubbed the world war the ‘Jews’ War’, and women contributed in equal measure to the xenophobic and racialist charge of the BU’s campaign. However, situating anti-war fascist women amongst other women’s groups who organised to oppose the Second World War, in particularly in the Peace Pledge Union – which had launched a Women’s Peace Campaign in December 1939 – exposes the variegated nature of British women’s activism and attitudes from the high water mark of appeasement to the end of the Phoney War.