Love as Moral Imperative and Gendered Anti-war Strategy in the International Women’s Movement 1914-1919

Abstract

ABSTRACT Some pacifist women active during and after the First World War consciously chose a rhetoric of love and shared humanity. Used to counteract the discourse of hate that dominated belligerent nations at this time, it was central to the vision of a feminist peace developed by women’s groups working to oppose the war, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. Using the insights gained by scholarship on the history of emotions, this analysis explores the gendered ways in which members of the WILPF performed and evoked emotions of friendship, love, and sisterhood to create, consolidate and reflect emotional communities during and in the aftermath of the First World War within and beyond their own national contexts. In the majority of belligerent nations, the majority of the women’s organisations engaged in patriotic war service and rejected WILPF members’ anti-war activism as sentimental and naive. This analysis argues that they deployed articulations of love at all stages of the war and its aftermath as both a moral imperative and a powerful, gendered strategy of resistance that was central to their claim to greater political influence at home and abroad.