In the midst of World War I, female suffragists primarily from Europe and the United States met in The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss prospects for world peace and expanding women’s rights. The seeds that were planted in 1915 came to fruition in 1919 when the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was created. WILPF was an early proponent of marrying suffrage and post-suffrage activism to issues of world peace. Its founders believed that only in a world without war and injustice could people be truly free. WILPF’s first international president was Jane Addams, a well-known American progressive activist and founder of Hull-House. In 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
WILPF’s philosophy reflected the progressive emphasis on social justice and exemplified the moral grounds on which women entered male politics in the Progressive Era. The organization was influenced by the belief that war and other forms of violence could be prevented if politics and government had more women representatives and if society adopted more “feminine” characteristics. Women possessed certain traits, such as cooperativeness, that most WILPF women claimed would counteract male competitiveness and violence. Although the group’s philosophy corresponded to what most Americans believed about women, its political affiliation was often questioned. During the Red Scare, WILPF’s antimilitarism was sometimes viewed as unpatriotic, causing some of its critics, including Secretary of War John D. Weeks, to label it “red.” Other critics, however, opposed female suffrage and female political activism and, therefore, redbaited the organization in order to discredit it and undermine its appeal. Despite the attacks, WILPF’s appeal grew. With 2,000 members in 1921, the American section grew to 13,000 by 1937.
During its early years, WILPF dedicated itself to three main issues: internationalism, disarmament, and antimilitarism. WILPF supported the efforts of the League OF Nations and other international institutions in their attempts at international disarmament and diplomatic cooperation. Through these campaigns, the women of WILPF demonstrated their belief in their own power as women to influence nations and leaders in foreign policy decision making. In 1926, WILPF sent a delegation to Haiti to investigate the effects of the American occupation. In the late 1920s, the organization petitioned American politicians to withdraw from Nicaragua. WILPF representatives, including Jane Addams, lobbied President Calvin Coolidge to support the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, a treaty proposing that countries renounce war.
A major tenet of the organization’s agenda was the establishment of an international network of women. To that end, WILPF sent a delegation to Indochina and China in 1927. WILPF women maintained that if women in nations around the world pressured their governments, then war could be prevented. Although WILPF enjoyed considerable success as far as having access to influential politicians, particularly in the United States, its goal of averting war was not an international priority in the 1930s, as most Western economies fell into a depression, prompting governments to focus on economic strategies. Disarmament, an issue that most Western nations pursued in theory in the 1920s, was abandoned in practice as countries could not enforce its provisions in the 1930s. The 1932 disarmament conference in Geneva included female delegates for the first time, including WILPF’s Mary Woolley in the American delegation. Diplomatic crises in Asia and President Hoover’s lukewarm support for the conference revealed that international cooperation on disarmament was taking a backseat to other issues. WILPF, nonetheless, continued to focus on disarmament throughout the decade.
See also women’s status and rights.
Further reading: Carrie Foster, The Women and the Warriors: The U. S. Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1946 (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
—Natalie Atkin
World History
