Preliminary Programme

This paper explores a cross-spectrum of pioneering and original European and North American women (such as Bertha von Suttner, Emma Goldman, Emily G. Balch, Helene Stöcker, Jane Addams, Jessie W. Hughan, Rosika Schwimmer) whose visions and experiences of feminism, antimilitarism, democracy, and internationalism guided them from the slippery terrain of national politics into the even more ambivalent arena of international relations. An additional spotlight centers on the influence and coordinated actions of male peace activists and internationalists (such as Alfred H. Fried, Louis Lochner, Ludwig Quidde, Roger Baldwin, Rudolf Grossmann, Samuel Dutton), revealing an often disregarded element in the historiography of feminist peace activist political positionings.

Although where these women stood – on regional politics, on (inter)nationalism, and on their vocations – tended to fluctuate with time, location, and context, it is a fact, that during World War I a transatlantic solidarity among feminist peace activists emerged and developed through the 1920s and 1930s in the international organizations that they had helped to build, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and in the international political actions that they helped to promote, such as The Disarmament Committee of the Women’s International Organizations, which was short-listed in 1934 for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Based on comparative transatlantic (auto)biographies of women antimilitarists and social scientific insights on political movements, I aim to show how definitions of “nation,” “internationalism,” and “organizational commitment” ultimately operated as buffers between which many of these interwar activist women positioned themselves in their strivings for world peace. Specific questions that may be addressed include: Where were the lines drawn to define peace, feminism, and internationalism? Who encouraged or prevented what Emily G. Balch, residing in Bern, expressed (in a letter to Fanny G. Villard) as her desire for “many homogenous [peace] groups, acting freely and not hampering one another”? And who are some of the forgotten, ignored, or excluded women and men whose inclusion should push us to consider alternative assessments of or indeed reinterpret the political history of pre-World War II organized transatlantic feminist peace movements? (Show less)

I focus on Austrian women peace activists who first became visible during The International Women's Congress in The Hague in 1915 and who
went on to work for the Austrian branch of the WILPF in the interwar period. Most of them were radical feminists and organized in the "Allgemeine Österreichische Frauenverein." Some of them were active in the Suffrage movement until 1918 or in other women's organizations. But not all women who were active in the Suffrage movement were committed to
the peace movement.
I analyze the social and professional background of some peace activists and their general influence on the national and international activities of the Austrian radical-liberal women's movement. Internationally, they
were accepted by the WILPF and played a rather important role in it. For some of them, however, this important role and influence on an
international level did not mean that they were equally accepted and successful on the regional level, or at least one has to look at it as a
temporary development. I will follow their traces until the year 1938.
Beside bonds and friendships, regular tensions and differences can be traced; a variety of exclusions and inclusions took place on a regional level, simultaneous with a rhetoric of sisterhood on an international floor. One has to consider the meaning of international networks,
solidarity and friendship in a complicated political landscape. The extent to which these women wanted to broaden their communication
and connections to other groups of women activists, eg. to women in the socialist movement who were also active in international contexts, has to be investigated. The gap between different international oriented
women existed, and was based on their social origin and was not linked by gender. (Show less)

This contribution is focused on non-violence during a totalitarian age. More specifically, I will analyze the possible relationship between non-violent practice and anti-fascist activism, also from a cultural perspective. At the end of the Great War, thanks to the policies of "non interference" established by the League of Nations, different political-educational projects that were peace-oriented emerged.
In my doctoral research I observed the activity carried out by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s governing bodies between 1919, the year the League was founded, and 1939, when the international secretary, Gertrude Baer, left Geneva for New York. During these twenty years, the International WILPF Executive Committee and the International Secretariat strengthened the organization, becoming involved with the League of Nations and other international associations in public debates on the traffic and production of armaments, on economic reform and the exploitation of resources, and on the promotion of a non-violent culture among the youth.
The use of WILPF’s education materials, unexplored before, allowed me to see how internationally active the secretariat was, and how the international officers distinguished between disarmament and education those sectors of activities which better expressed their ideals, at least during the 1920s. However, it is important underline how in this decade the “wilpfers” – even if they had occasion to deal with Mussolini’s politics – did not take any official action to censure his Fascist regime. Why did an organization that had identified the realization of peace with the freedom for everyone have such a distant attitude towards the Italian political situation? How did the decision to have the League of Nations as the only institutional referent come about and what was its effect?
As I could observe, the Executive Committee’s distance from all “national issues” produced a sense of isolation from within the Italian Section, which was one of the first sections founded in 1915. This section, in fact, had good international relationships with the League as well as with French and English members until 1927, when national political persecutions forced some of its leaders to leave Italy and cut off the contact with international activities with which they had been involved.
At the beginning of the 1930s something changed. The WILPF International Executive Committee accorded League membership to the “Group of Italian Women Abroad” (all political exiles). At this point, Italian as well as German members’ evidence about persecutions and abuses carried out by Fascists and Nazis in their own country helped WILPF executive officers make a definite choice in favor of an anti-fascist public position. In other words, the public consciousness of these pacifists was pushed to realize that the affirmation of non-violent principles required a wide range of confrontation, which had to involve not only the personal aspirations of all people who worked for peaceful relationships (within and outside of national borders), but also those of whole institutional systems. (Show less)