The Women's Interwar Peace Movement

Abstract

Rachel Waltner Goossen. Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and. Gender on the American Home Front, 1941-1947. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 180 and biblio- graphy and illustrations. Linda K. Schott. Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Womett's Inter- national League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II. Stanford: Stan- ford University Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 211 and illustrations. Linked together by similar subjects—women pacifists in the United States during or prior to World War II—both of these books are useful for an understanding of the interwar peace movement. Schott's study of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) should be read in conjunction with Carrie Foster's 1995 work on that group, The Women and the Warriors, and the 1993 biography of long-time WILPF leader Mildred Scott Olmsted by Margaret Bacon entitled One Woman's Passion for Peace and Freedom, both published by Syracuse University Press, as well as Harriet Hyman Alsono's two seminal works, The Women's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921-1942 (Knoxville, 1989) and Peace as a Women's Issue (Syracuse, 1993). Goossen's study of women in Civilian Public Service (CPS) nicely complements earlier works on conscientious objectors (CO's) like Cynthia Eller's conscientious Objectors and the Second World War (Praeger, 1991) with its religious and moral emphasis.