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Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2001

Abstract

This paper first looks briefly at the connections – personal, political, practical and philosophical – between pre-First World War British and European women's suffrage and feminist pacifism as it emerged after 1914. Two feminist approaches to postwar peacemaking are compared, and the underlying assumptions of the Paris Peace Conference of the Allied and Associated Powers are compared with those of the women gathered at Zurich in May 1919. The aspirations and achievement of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom between 1919 and 1930 are analysed less in terms of what the organisation did for women than in terms of the women's own intent, and what they hoped to do for the world. The article considers how they confronted the political disabilities they faced as women, and on occasion turned them to their advantage, and shall show how they saw their pacifism as integral to their feminism, although it frequently took them out of gender stereotypes, particularly in their insistence on moving into that most male preserve, international relations.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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