Women's Ways in War: The Poetry and Politics of the Woman's Peace Party, 1915-1917

Abstract

In the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, there are two and a half file boxes of miscellaneous peace sorted alphabetically by author—the productions of hundreds of obscure and forgotten poets. Most of these poems survive in one-of-a-kind pamphlets, newspaper clippings, and rare journals. Judging from the items identified by date of publication and from historical references scattered through the poems, virtually all were written in this century, and most date from before 1940.1 More than the introduction of individual writers into the canon, this mass of poems, all in some way entering into dialogue with pacifist politics, undermines our confidence that the literary history of modernism is something we already know. Furthermore, much of the poetry in the Swarthmore Collection challenges our usual literary critical methodologies, which even when they concern themselves with questions of politics and history often conceive of individual authors or literary coteries as in relief against a historical-political backdrop, less participants than critics of society. The poems in the Swarthmore collection particularly work against this view because so many of them have transparent ties to a specific political organization, the Woman's Peace Party (WPP), which was one of the groups most active in opposing American intervention in World War I.