The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women's Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I. By David S. Patterson. (New York: Routledge, 2009. xx, 443 pp. Cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-415-96141-7. Paper, $36.95, ISBN 978-0-415-96142-4.)

Abstract

David S. Patterson published Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914 (1977) and is now focusing on the war years and the role of women. What emerges is a complex but compelling narrative of the difference women made and the important roles they played to promote an immediate cease-fire and a lasting peace to the major American and European policy makers. Female leaders gained experience in a wide range of social reform movements, including temperance, social welfare, the settlement house movement, and women's suffrage. While some female leaders focused on a single campaign, others became leaders in several. Still others became international leaders: Jane Addams, Aletta Jacobs, and Rosika Schwimmer emerge as major women in the international peace movement. Addams began her activist career in Chicago's settlement house movement but quickly became the decade's most famous American woman. She was joined by the Dutch suffrage leader Aletta Jacobs and the Hungarian suffrage leader Rosika Schwimmer, both active in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (iwsa).