“If Christ could be Militant, so could I”

Abstract

Summary On 23 July 1916, the Women’s Peace Crusade was launched in Glasgow, as a movement of working class women to protest the war and campaign for a negotiated peace. Helen Crawfurd was one of the leaders of the Crusade, which was revived in 1917 and spread that summer across Britain’s industrial heartlands, and as far as Canada. Helen Crawfurd was a remarkable woman: a feminist and socialist campaigner who characterized herself as a woman with a mission for the liberation of women, the solidarity of workers and a people’s peace. During the war years she was one of Scotland’s most persuasive anti-war public speakers for the Independent Labour Party, and a prominent ally of the Red Clydeside shop stewards’ movement. She was strongly (though increasingly critically) rooted in evangelical Protestantism, and her political engagement combined militant confrontation and performative activism expressed in an ethos and language with strong biblical resonances. This article considers her biography and the Women’s Peace Crusade, with particular reference to her commitment to ensure that women should “speak for themselves” through the creative appropriation of “crusading” as a strategy to subvert the notion of war as a holy crusade.