Women's International League For Peace And Freedom Research Articles

Activism and International Thought: The Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and the Problem of Statelessness in the Interwar Period

AbstractThis article examines the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) as an important site of women's international theorizing on the normative problem of statelessness in the League of Nations era. The problem of statelessness covered several issues connected with the loss of nationality, a new condition of human vulnerability associated with the dissolution of four empires after World War I. It opened up a series of questions about the Versailles system, where the ethical value of sovereignty was assumed, rather than examined for its consequences for individuals. WILPF developed programs of political and epistemic activity on global and local fronts that explored what it might mean to approach the statelessness question in terms of a transnational public interest, as opposed to the state interest privileged by the Versailles order. The article argues that WILPF's international thought is distinctive for the symbiotic relationship that exists between WILPF women's transnational activism and their theoretical conceptualization of the international. This is illustrated through an analysis of Jane Addams's thought, which provides a crucial link between late-nineteenth-century American pragmatism and the early twentieth-century progressive internationalism exemplified by WILPF. WILPF's interwar advocacy on the statelessness question shows how knowledge production and theory building were done in ways that are quite different to the mainstream neo-positivist idea of theory today, and which need to be included as part of our historical understanding of the origins of the twentieth-century field of international relations.

Peran Women’s International League For Peace And Freedom Dalam Pemberdayaan Perempuan Afghanistan

Women's discrimination is always happening in Afghanistan caused by the frequent conflict that occurred in Afghanistan and also poverty. This issue of discrimination also received attention from the international organization both government or non-government. One of the non-governmental international organizations that participated in this issue are Women International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). This research aims to analyse the role of WILPF related to women's empowerment in Afghanistan. This research uses qualitative method and descriptive research to explain the role of WILPF to empower Afghan women. The concept of this research are international non-governmental organization (NGOs) and transnational feminism to explain the efforts to empower Afghan women by WILPF for peace mission. The finding of this research addresses that the role of WILPF in Afghanistan to empower Afghan women who is through education, advocacy, empowerment of individuals, and monitoring agreement.

Between National and International: Women's Transnational Activism in Twentieth-Century Chile

AbstractThis article explores the transnational dimension of women's mobilization in twentieth-century Chile and the connections they established with women's international non-governmental organizations, particularly the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). It sheds light on the political choices women made when forging transnational alliances to expand and make their activism more effective, together with the material and ideological dynamics that shaped their collaboration. The article analyses this topic by focusing on key but little-explored figures of women's activism in Chile – especially, but not solely, feminist academic Olga Poblete – and their personal communications with the leadership of women's organizations in the US and Europe. The article contends that, although both the WILPF and WIDF shared strengths and weaknesses in promoting their ideas and establishing links with activists in Chile, the alliances that Chilean women chose to pursue were mostly defined by their own political priorities and local contexts.

Syro-Lebanese Women’s Transnational and International Collaborations at the League of Nations

Most people associate the League of Nations with failure. Founded after World War I, the organization failed to forestall another global war, which was among its animating objectives. However, the League did lay the groundwork for the international system in force today. The League of Nations’ integration of women’s rights into the framework of international governance is among its most important legacies. In the 1920s “women’s rights” encompassed a woman’s right to own property, to an education, to a safe work environment, and to a nationality. Throughout the 1920s the League’s leaders resisted calls from international women’s organizations to internationalize women’s rights, stating that women’s issues were national concerns rather than international ones. After the Hague Conference on the Codification of International Law in 1930 revealed that sometimes a woman’s marriage to a nonnational rendered her nationless, some officials in the Secretariat agreed that certain aspects of the “woman question” were international in nature (DuBois 2009).The League’s role in inserting women’s rights into the realm of international governance is largely forgotten, which is hardly surprising, because the League did not become the subject of substantive historical inquiry until the early 2000s.1 Also forgotten are the transnational campaigns and international connections that elite Syro-Lebanese women forged in an attempt to be heard in the discussions about women’s rights happening at the Palais des Nations. As citizens of the French Mandate for Syria, Syro-Lebanese women’s rights activists had no decision-making power at home or at the League. In addition, international women’s rights organizations viewed Syro-Lebanese women through an Orientalist lens and considered them second-class women’s rights activists (Weber 2008). Despite these obstacles, Syro-Lebanese women’s activists sought change in the international organizations affecting their lives, namely, the League of Nations and international women’s organizations. Thus their campaigns were simultaneously transnational, working with women’s organizations in other nations in the name of justice, and international, targeting supranational organizations and governing bodies.2To rectify being blocked from decision-making positions, internationally oriented activists from Syria and Lebanon developed a multipart activist program. First, they formed a network of like-minded women in the Eastern Mediterranean and in other parts of Asia. Efforts to create “Eastern,” “Oriental,” or “Asian” women’s networks went both ways. For example, Indian women approached Arab women to join the All-Asian Women’s Conference and Arab women invited Indian women to join the Eastern Women’s Conferences (Mukherjee 2016; Nijhawan 2017). In calling for and attending conferences, participants actively negotiated what it meant to be “Eastern” women, a capacious identity category defined in contradistinction to “Western,” which often had anticolonial overtones.3Next, activists used the newly established regional network of Arab women to secure representation in international women’s organizations, such as the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), the International Council on Women (ICW), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). While the organizations’ leadership prioritized US and western European feminist issues, such as suffrage and nationality, many individual activists within the organizations were sympathetic to the campaigns led by Syro-Lebanese women. On the international level, Syro-Lebanese activists sought to end colonialism and establish an international women’s rights system that acknowledged the multiplicity of women’s rights systems in the interwar world, including the civil and common law traditions in force in the United States and Europe and their colonies and the many other tribal and religious legal traditions that granted women rights and protections.Finally, once representation was secured, activists organized transnationally with their allies to get their concerns on the radar of the leaders of international women’s organizations, who could use their clout to raise Syro-Lebanese women’s issues at the League of Nations and in other international governing bodies. Despite many barriers to their participation, Syro-Lebanese activists tenaciously carved out a circuitous activist pathway that increased their chances for representation in conversations about the status of women happening in Geneva. Syro-Lebanese activists saw their status as linked to that of women in other world regions and worked to improve the status of all women, but especially those in the colonized world. Indeed, they thought colonialism was one of the greatest impediments to improving the status of women.However, despite their transnational campaigns, Syrian and Lebanese women’s rights activists were not represented in early conversations about what constituted international women’s rights and which rights should be included in the category of “women’s rights.” Their absence from these early debates is part of a larger story of elite US and western European women positioning themselves as empowered to speak for the world’s women.4 Crucially, not all US and western European feminists shared the worldview that activists in the colonized, or recently decolonized, world were lesser feminists (Marino 2019).A campaign launched by Nour Hamada, a Druze women’s rights activist from Mount Lebanon, illustrates what Syro-Lebanese women’s transnational activism targeting the emergent gendered international system looked like in practice. Hamada and her activist colleagues generally came from elite families with economic and political power, which facilitated their engagement with the international women’s rights organizations and the League (DuBois and Emrani 2008). In 1938 Hamada lobbied the League for more equitable representation on its Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. The Committee of Experts was created in 1937, when the League was hemorrhaging members as war in Europe loomed on the horizon. Tasked with conducting a global survey of the status of women, the committee was the result of eighteen years of activism from the same international women’s rights organizations that offered token representation to women from the colonized world but did little to end colonialism. The League consented to the activists’ demands to take the study of the status of women seriously only when the organization desperately needed the support of women to keep itself afloat.Seizing the opportunity presented to them, a variety of activists used the survey to prove that women’s rights were an issue that merited international attention and support. Hamada and several other activists from Syria and Lebanon went a step farther and tried to get the League to recognize a range of women’s rights systems, including what they called “Eastern” women’s rights. These systems sought the same citizenship and suffrage rights claimed by US and European women, but they advocated that women should be granted those rights through a collectivist, rather than individualist, framework. After a rather undemocratic nominating process, the ranks of the committee were announced: four women and three men. All of the representatives were from Europe with the exception of Dorothy Kenyon, a US lawyer. Women from other world regions took issue with the committee’s composition, Hamada among them.To advance her campaign for including representatives from the “East” on the committee and to get it to recognize “Eastern” women’s rights more broadly, Hamada cultivated an activist coalition. She reached out to fellow activists in Beirut and Damascus and asked them to write to the League to support the creation of a seat for women of the “East” on the committee (the letters also suggested that Hamada might be a good candidate for the position, should it be created). Additionally, Hamada connected with allies from international women’s organizations. Hamada’s global mobility aided her efforts to organize transnationally and shaped her feminism, which reflected a unique combination of international and Greater Syrian influences.5 The leadership of IWSA, ICW, and WILPF were happy to pay lip service to supporting the women’s movement in the colonized world, but rarely took risks to support their “sisters’” overlapping struggles to secure national independence and women’s rights. Some members of these organizations, however, were willing to push against the status quo and support the activism of women from the colonized world.Hamada had worked with the US feminist Alice Paul and the Swiss feminist Emilie Graizier during a previous campaign to get the League to recognize a woman’s right to nationality. Hamada had met Paul while in the United States and knew Graizier because they were both active in feminist circles in Geneva. Hamada pressed Paul and Graizier for help and both assented. In response to her request, Graizier wrote a letter supporting Hamada’s efforts and Paul appealed to the secretariat to create a seat for a representative of the East.6 Hamada did not receive any support from the leaders of the larger international women’s organizations. The IWSA and other international women’s organizations pressured the committee to include the “Status of Women of Primitive Peoples” in its global survey of the status of women, but they did so on behalf of—not with—women from the colonized world.7 Focusing on Syro-Lebanese women’s activism in the domestic realm alone ignores the creativity of a group of activists who were far removed from power but nonetheless worked through the channels available to them, however indirect, to make sure that their voices were heard. Indeed, studying Syro-Lebanese women’s rights advocates through a transnational lens reveals the full extent of their vision for women’s rights, which was not bound by national borders.Why does this micro-transnational campaign that advocated for a reconceptualization of the structure and scope of the League’s Committee of Experts matter today? Most important, it shows how women’s rights activists with few resources but a grand vision for a more equitable future used all the tools at their disposal to pressure the world’s first governing body to include them. It was an audacious call that directly challenged the hierarchies of the colonial world. The campaign also reveals the circulation of several visions for internationalizing women’s rights in the early twentieth century. It demonstrates that the system that was eventually internationalized was (and is) not the only viable model for protecting women’s status at the international level. Countering a move to codify women’s rights within a Western (civil and common law) rights framework, Syro-Lebanese women’s activists offered the alternative international vision of “Eastern” women’s rights.Finally, the campaign proves the maxim that representation matters. Without representation from the “East,” a core demand of Hamada’s transnational campaign, the Committee of Experts faced little opposition when it formalized civil and common law as the bedrock of the international women’s rights system. Hamada’s efforts to secure representation at the League of Nations encourages a reexamination of the exclusionary roots of the contemporary international women’s rights system. The lack of representation from the “East” on the committee continues to affect who has access to conversations about women’s rights on the international level—both in international organizations and in international governing bodies—and who is left in the margins, trying to build a bridge between alternative women’s rights systems and the Western definition of women’s rights that was absorbed into the League and its successor, the United Nations. Thus studying transnational feminist campaigns led by Middle Eastern and North African activists gives us a clearer picture not only of the dynamism of women’s movements within and beyond national contexts but also of the history of the international women’s rights system more broadly.

Illness Writing and Revolution, Converging Narratives: The Year in Lebanon

Illness Writing and Revolution, Converging NarrativesThe Year in Lebanon Sleiman El Hajj (bio) Revolution: The Roots and Routes of Illness For over four centuries, Lebanon was shackled to the Ottoman Empire, whose later decline was described by nineteenth-century commentators as the "Sick Man of Europe." This epithet is one of many disease metaphors that may serve to gauge the social, even somatic damages inflicted by repressive political systems. A longstanding acquiescence in a corrupt, factional status quo, rooted in sectarian leaders' promises of protection—from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to present-day Lebanon (Hamzeh)—festered into the unprecedented nationwide revolution that swept the country in October 2019. The year 2019–2020 therefore brimmed with new and established voices—Lebanese journalists, activists, essayists, writers, and translators calling for a paradigm shift from subservience to subversion. Overall, their ethnographic texts, cultural essays, memoirs, feature stories, and poetry write, rather than write about, the recent experiences of oppression, uprising, and defiance in a country on the tenterhooks of change. By assembling and apprising narratives that range from a gendered revolution to the crippling pandemic, this intersectional medical/cultural approach may enhance the understanding and development of lifewriting studies as a vehicle for addressing and redressing the ills that surround us. Cultural-Medical Ills Spur Activist Texts: Converging Pathologies Coming on the heels of a tanking economy, unprecedented inflation, and currency devaluation, the 2019–2020 taxes proposed by the Lebanese government created a seismic ripple in the Lebanese social fabric. Starting on October 17, 2019, irrespective of sect, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were taking to the streets daily, asking for an eradication of sectarian patronage, and for systemic [End Page 98] accountability over the long-standing mismanagement of public services (Salloukh). Grievances included electricity, internet, gas and oil, reconstruction and development, and environmental issues, which "have been persistently hijacked by sectarian interests" (Fakhoury 2). These contentious issues constitute the daily challenges to be negotiated in Beirut, an overall disruptive situation Ghassan Moussawi describes as al-wad' in a seminal work of ethnography-as-biography that came out in June 2020: Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Situations in Beirut. Moussawi's al-wad' is a fluid term he theorizes to read the lived stories and oral histories of queer men and women in their fights against oppression and obscurantism in Lebanon. Later in the year, Moussawi and fellow sociologist Salvador Vidal-Ortiz called for repurposing the term queer to denote opposition, activism, or struggle, "as a verb, as a practice of unsettling, or spoiling […] and reshaping of social forces, and not [strictly] as a sexual identity marker" (1272). This combined intervention—the oppositional reframing of "queer" to both transcend the sexual and resist the structural debacles subsumed by the Lebanese al-wad'—allows for a nuanced reading of not only the revolution but also the life narratives it spawned. Indeed, according to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), "women in Lebanon are not just agitating for their rights, but for the rights of everyone." Lebanese women traumatized by the Civil War (1975–1990) have insisted this time around on national unity as people's driving force. Even as there are both Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, "within those two groups, a great amount of diversity exists in women, but their commonalities are what makes the women of this region such fierce samples of a strong culture" (Thomas 183). This subversive potentiality, actuated by Lebanon's gendered and inclusive revolution, has brought together women, migrant workers, refugees, and the LGBTQ+ community, coalescing around principles of secularism, liberalism, and human rights. The Lebanese historian Joelle Abi-Rached writes in an autoethnographic essay that the call to implement these principles, for which she joined the throngs in downtown Beirut, also threaded the lived experiences of those present into one concerted macronarrative of illness, of which cancer takes center stage. Through recourse to various statistics, Abi-Rached shows how epidemiologically evidenced cancer is an inevitable byproduct of a more pervasive and aggressive cancer: the postwar state-level corruption that has precipitated nationwide environmental degradation—air and water pollution and toxic waste disposal, as well as garbage and sewage mismanagement...

Uluslararası İlişkilerde Kadınların Barış Hareketi: Barış ve Özgürlük için Uluslararası Kadın Birliği

This study aims to examine the women’s peace movement in the context of the activism of transnational civil society that was influential in the formation of the idea of international relations before the First World War. The main argument of the study is that the women’s peace movement, which was institutionalized with the First World War, offers a different approach to international relations and peace than the idealist approach that prevailed in international relations after 1919. This argument was put forward by examining the establishment of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the International Women’s Congress held in Hague, 1915, and the International Women’s Congress in Zurich, 1919. At the end of the study, which aims to draw attention to the activism of transnational civil society in the early stages of international relations, WILPF’s approach to peace is discussed. Based on the experiences of women’s movements before the First World War, women’s activism that transcends nation-state borders towards peace provides a current understanding of the causes of war and the conditions of sustainable peace. The evaluation of the approach of the international relations put forward by the women’s movement together with its origins contributes to the feminist international relations literature with historical research.

Imperial Internationalisms’ in the 1920s: The Shaping of Colonial Affairs at the League of Nations

ABSTRACT The evolving internationalisation of imperial and colonial affairs fostered the emergence of specific, and interrelated, arguments, institutional arrangements and repertoires of political action regarding colonial societies. The actors and the institutions aiming to shape colonial dynamics in a number of fields of intervention, with different agendas and expertise, multiplied, and the topics under debated expanded. Expressions of imperial internationalism – that is, discourses and projects promoted by groups and institutions aiming at developing forms of internationalism dealing with imperial and colonial affairs, namely through international organisations – proliferated. This article deals with two: The Union Catholique d’Études Internationales (UCEI), an example of (conservative) religious internationalism, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a case of (progressive) ‘international feminism’. Alongside other important transnational, non-governmental organisations, which competed for protagonism in the historical unfolding of the intersections between internationalism and imperialism and colonialism, the UCEI and the WILPF were active voices in the most important debates carried out by the League of Nations and its specialised agencies (from slavery and ‘native labour’ to opium trade), influencing their content and direction.

“Science was digging its own grave”: the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the campaign against chemical and biological warfare

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is the oldest active women’s peace organization in the world. Although their overall aim is the abolition of all war, from the outset they voiced particular opposition to chemical warfare. Later, this became a call against both chemical and biological warfare (CBW). This article draws on archival documents to trace this history, concentrating on the early days of WILPF and then on revived interest in the topic during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While early WILPF did not define CBW as an issue with any special gendered relevance for women, the historical record shows WILPF placed emphasis on its leading role in organizing opposition. It also shows a consistency of approach, WILPF often acting in an educational capacity as an informer of public opinion about the horrors of CBW. Over time, WILPF’s role changed in that the leaders of the key campaigns against CBW came to regard their role as distinct from those of scientists.

Women, wars, and world affairs: Recovering feminist International Relations, 1915–39

AbstractThe academic study of International Relations (IR) emerged in the context of transnational networks of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and activists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, women belonged to these networks in various capacities and, crucially, contributed to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Whether as members of pressure groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), as independent authors or academics, they discussed all major issues of IR. Drawing on a range of international authors – including Anna B. Eckstein, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Lucy Mair, Margery Perham, Helena Swanwick, and Louise Weiss – this article recovers the intellectual substance of their work, arguing that it constitutes a genuinely feminist approach to IR. Early feminist IR authors emphasised the interests of women, children, and other marginalised groups, they demanded female representation in government and diplomacy, they condemned imperialism and racism, opposed military capitalism, employed religious, emotional, and universalist rhetoric, and advocated the role of education. Despite widespread male domination, women taught at universities, published in academic journals, spoke at conferences, and organised international summer schools. This article explores the origins of feminist IR scholarship and contextualises this body of thought within the revisionist history of IR.

‘The White Australia Nettle’: women’s internationalism, peace, and the White Australia Policy in the interwar years

After Australia federated in 1901, the new Commonwealth government implemented policies that were aimed at establishing a system of labour protections for white male workers unparalleled around the world. This included introducing a number of bills that became known as the White Australia Policy (WAP), which sought to exclude non-white immigration to regulate any attempt to undercut the ‘white man’s wage’. After the Harvester judgement in 1907, which mandated a ‘living wage’ for a man and his family, the national identity of Australia as a ‘worker’s paradise’ and the widespread acceptance of the necessity of a ‘White Australia’ became intertwined. This article focuses on two women’s groups in Victoria immediately after World War I, who, because of their wartime experience, rethought their position on the policy of exclusion. The Sisterhood of International Peace (SIP) and the Women’s Peace Army were ‘non-party’ women’s groups formed in protest against the war, later to merge and become the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Pro-war groups considered them ‘unpatriotic’ because they promoted internationalism. Yet that internationalism, and the experience of travel made the women think differently about White Australia. Their experiences made them alert to overt racism, which they found distasteful. Yet the entangled policies of labour and exclusion made them unable to denounce the WAP entirely. This article examines the efforts of the SIP and the Peace Army to navigate the tension between the labour progressivism they admired and the racism that was so interlaced with its advancement in the WAP.

Antimilitarism, Citizenship and Motherhood: the formation and early years of the Women’s International League (WIL), 1915–1919

ABSTRACTThis article examines the concept of motherhood and peace in the British women’s movement during the Great War. It does so by focusing on the Women’s International League (WIL)—the British section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Drawing on the WIL papers, the article shows how a section of the movement continued to lobby for female representation during the war alongside its calls for peace. WIL referred to the social and cultural experiences of motherhood, which allowed it to challenge the discourse on gender and to build bridges between women of former enemy nations. This case study examines how maternalist rhetoric influenced feminism and sheds light on how British women attempted to enter the political sphere by linking women’s maternal experience to their demands for citizenship.

A Will to Peace: Jane Addams, World War I, and “Pacifism in Practice”

In the early 20th century, Jane Addams (1860‐1935) was among Progressive activists and intellectuals in America who envisioned human evolution toward a world without war. World War I and its aftermath required critical reassessment of this view, as Addams sought to defend pacifism against its critics, while deliberating about its methods with members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which she was a co‐founder and the first president. This essay argues that engagement with the “peace biology” tradition of social evolutionary theory was crucial to Addams's refutation of war as “natural” and her sustained faith in human cooperation. Indebted in particular to Peter Kropotkin and Georg Friederike Nicolai, Addams articulated a postwar understanding of “pacifism in practice” that resisted both concessions to violence and pledges to absolute nonviolence, as WILPF responded to international conflicts and movements for national self‐determination. Her critics notwithstanding, a century later evolutionary science lends nuanced support to her views on cooperation and women's particular potential for sustaining peace.

Feminism, Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the Challenges of Intersectionality Praxis

Black feminist scholars argued decades ago for working for peace and justice from the intersections of people's multiple identities. A body of scholarship focused on intersectionality subsequently arose since doing so is thought to have broader appeal and be more efficacious. However, the degrees to which social movements actually use intersectional discourses is undetermined. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses from a longitudinal study (1990–2005) of peace movement organizations (PMOs) reveals surprisingly low levels of use. A subset of data from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a group thought to be highly likely to use intersectional discourses, was used to further explore the disconnect between public statements and organizational sensibility. Findings show that while WILPF historically did not use intersectionality discourses, usage significantly increased in their recent civil society consultation process regarding women and security issues. The findings suggest that an ideological commitment to inclusion alone was not sufficient to produce intersectional discourses; a combination of an external mediated political opportunity and an internal demographic threat to the movement's longevity were necessary before discursive change occurred.

The Dangers of Feminism in Colonial Indochina

This article examines the controversy elicited by the visit of two Western feminists—Camille Drevet of France and Edith Pye of Great Britain—to French Indochina in 1927. Traveling as delegates of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and as guests of the Annamite Constitutionalist Party, Drevet and Pye challenged French male colonists whose vision of modern colonial governance rested on a defense of tradition and the presumed benefits of paternalistic guardianship over indigenous men and all women. Concerns regarding modern womanhood and an incipient Vietnamese youth revolt led French male colonists to denounce the threat that women's emancipation posed to Indochina. Vietnamese radicals were inspired by the WILPF visit, understanding that arguments to liberate women and the nation both rested on opposition to paternalistic subordination. The WILPF delegates emerged from the trip firmly opposed to colonialism; nonetheless, they struggled to articulate an explicitly feminist anti-imperialist agenda linking female and colonial subservience.

‘The Women's Movement Took the Wrong Turning’: British feminists, pacifism and the politics of appeasement

The history of foreign policy and especially the Munich Crisis of 1938–1939 have been viewed from various angles but never from the points of view of gender and feminism. This has been a significant oversight in the scholarship, especially as there were many prominent women politicians who were heavily invested in the appeasement debate, and because the majority of feminist organisations became increasingly preoccupied with foreign affairs and the specific effect of dictatorship on women. This article explores how British feminists responded to the policy and the fallout of appeasement in the late 1930s; how the British branch of the most prominent transnational feminist pacifist organisation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) made the transition from peace, to Crisis, to war; before focusing on two intertwined biographical case studies of Kathleen Courtney and Maude Royden. There were various responses and dramatic fluctuations in positioning in the years leading to the world war, with many feminists struggling to come to terms with the intellectual, emotional and psychological shift from feminist-informed internationalism and pacifism to a rejection of appeasement and support for the war effort. Both Courtney and Royden had spent the two preceding decades in the forefront of the feminist pacifist movement, and the rise of Nazi Germany, the international crisis and then the Second World War itself forced each to resituate herself and make psychologically and ideologically wrenching decisions.

A band of noble women: racial politics in the women's peace movement

A Band of Noble Women brings together the histories of the women's peace movement and the black women's club and social reform movement in a story of community and consciousness building between the world wars. Believing that achievement of improved race relations was a central step in establishing world peace, African American and white women initiated new political alliances that challenged the practices of Jim Crow segregation and promoted the leadership of women in transnational politics. Under the auspices of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), they united the artistic agenda of the Harlem Renaissance, suffrage-era organizing tactics, and contemporary debates on race in their efforts to expand women's influence on the politics of war and peace. Plastas shows how WILPF espoused middle-class values and employed gendered forms of organization building, educating thousands of people on issues ranging from U.S. policies in Haiti and Liberia to the need for global disarmament. Highlighting WILPF chapters in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Baltimore, the author examines the successes of this interracial movement as well as its failures. A Band of Noble Women enables us to examine more fully the history of race in U.S. women's movements and illuminates the role of the women's peace movement in setting the foundation for the civil rights movement.

Doing Feminist Peace

The history of the oldest international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), presents a practical lesson for individuals and organizations interested in bringing about social change, as well as a theoretical lesson for those concerned with conceptualizing social change. WILPF's positions on decolonization between 1945 and 1975 show how historical circumstances and ideological environment intersected with the organization's ideas about peace to determine different policy choices. An unprecedented resolution in the early 1970s on the inevitability of violent revolutions resulted from a shift in ideological beliefs. While the international environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored this shift, WILPF arrived at its new policies thanks to its reliance on a theoretically-informed feminist critical methodology. This allowed WILPF to increasingly critique entrenched assumptions and reach a better informed understanding of peace, thereby contributing to the redefinition of the context that had created and shaped the organization. An activist-inspired, theoretically-driven feminist critical methodology thus makes social change possible.

Western Feminism and Anti‐Imperialism: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s Anti‐Opium Campaign

In 1926, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) officially condemned imperialism as antithetical to lasting peace. A year later, following on this resolution, the League sent a delegation of WILPF members to make contact with like‐minded women in Indochina, China, and Japan. Upon the conclusion of the “mission to Asia,” the League launched a two‐year‐long effort to battle the illegal opium trade in Asia. This article argues that WILPF members undertook the anti‐opium campaign in response to two differing objectives: to showcase Western women’s competence in matters of international policy and to demonstrate the incompatibility of imperialism with peace and freedom. Even the most anti‐imperialist of WILPF members, however, had trouble articulating a specifically feminist rationale for opposing both the illegal opium trade and Western imperialism more broadly.

A Feminist in the House and Senate: An Interview with Dorothy Jensen Rupert

In June 2007, Mary Churchill, a longtime JFSR board member, sat down with former Colorado state legislator Dorothy Jensen Rupert, who has worked tirelessly on issues that promote the rights and well-being of women and children, LGBT persons, the incarcerated, and the environment. Although she is most well-known for her fifteen years as a Colorado state representative and senator (1986-2001), Rupert taught school and worked as a counselor in Colorado public schools for thirty-five years. She has also served on numerous local boards and city committees in addition to her role as an officer on the national board of the Women's Action for New Directions (WAND) and her active involvement in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In 2005, Rupert was one of forty U.S. women nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This interview with Rupert is part of an ongoing JFSR project to invite feminist pathmakers to reflect on their work and to give advice for future generations. In honor of Dorothy's eighty-fifth birthday in 2011, JFSR is pleased to publish this interview with a pathmaker in the area of religion and politics.