The Woman's Peace Party and the Moral Basis for Women's Pacifism

Abstract

At the beginning of August, 1914, Germany began a march to war that rattled the world for the next four years. At the end of that month in New York City, 1,500 women held a march of their own-a quiet, somber march embellished only by the mournful beat of muffled drums and a large white peace banner.1 The contrast could not been greater. Men marched to war; women marched for peace. And although everyone knew that some women accepted war as inevitable and that some worked unceasingly for peace, society still tended to believe in a dichotomy of peaceful women and belligerent men. This dichotomy seemed so obvious to one group of women, in fact, that it was one of their primary reasons for founding the first separate women's peace organization-the Woman's Peace Party. In the fall of 1914, two European suffragists, Rosika Schwimmer of Hungary and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence of England, traveled through the eastern and midwestern United States, urging American women to do whatever they could to stop the European war. The urgency and conviction of their message soon sparked the interest of some of America's most prominent women. Thus as most Americans began to take refuge from the European catastrophe in the warm security of the Christmas season, leading women around the nation turned outward instead and began organizing a national peace demonstration. It was to be a demonstration by women only, not by established peace societies, for as Carrie Chapman Catt wrote Jane Addams, those societies very masculine in their point of view and have as little use for women . .. as the militarists.2 Addams concurred. Generally men and women work best together on these public measures, she wrote, but in this crisis, there is no doubt that the women are the most eager for action.3 In December, Addams, the renowned social reformer and founder of Hull House, called a women's peace meeting. Addams invited all women's clubs that had standing peace committees to meet in Washington, D.C., on January 10-11, 1915. The affiliations of the 3,000 women who attended reflect the breadth both of her appeal and of women's interest in peace. Both the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the National American Women's Suffrage Association sent representatives, as did more broadly based women's organizations such as the National Council of Women and the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Also participating were groups defined by religion-the National Council of Jewish Women and the National Conference of Catholic Charities-and groups defined by occupation-the Women's Trade Union League, the International Congress of Farm Women, the National League of Teachers, and the League of American Pen Women. Women came representing the National Federation of Settlements, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the National Association of Colored Women, and peace advocates of long standing came from the American School Peace League, the World Peace Foundation, and the American Peace Society. Even the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Spanish-American War Nurses sent representatives.4 The peace meeting that these women attended became the organizational conference of the Woman's Peace Party and marked the beginning of the separate women's peace