The Australian feminist Dale Spender complained in her invigorating (but sadly not well remembered) Women of ideas, and what men have done to them (1982), that there was no way in which the research for her book could be regarded as comprehensive: ‘Had I decided to wait until I had pursued every clue … I would never have come to write the book, for every fragment uncovered points to many more.’ The account offered in Women, peace and welfare is only one among many that might have been constructed. The contents of this book have been made out of what it has proved possible to find in a limited amount of time and with limited resources. Stitching the stories of different women in different places together in the shape of a single project runs the risk of over-emphasizing sameness at the expense of difference; yet what is most remarkable is how women of different political persuasions in different places did share similar ideas. They rejected violence towards people and nations as a form of human interaction, and they wanted communities and populations, not just their own social groups, to prosper and claim civil rights. In doing this they found alliances with other women a major source of solidarity and friendship. They thought deeply about what it means to be a citizen in relation to cultures, genders, geographies, nation-states and our habitation of planet earth. In their thinking they sometimes reproduced uncomfortable ideas about eugenics, evolution, class, colonialism and the ‘essentialism’ of women’s maternalist ethics – in that sense they were, as we would expect them to be, creatures of their time. They may not have achieved what they hoped for – a blueprint for a new, good society – but they did offer a powerfully argued alternative approach to social problems. This is at least as relevant today as it was in their lifetimes, as we confront a global politics of terrorism, international conflict, environmental destruction and violence, and the apparent inability of even the most ‘advanced’ welfare states to abolish gross inequalities of income, justice and citizenship. The resonance of the women reformers’ ideas extends to the way some of these have actually seeped into transnational thinking about welfare and peace.