Between 1860 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, arguments across and within nations had already led to some 226 recorded armed conflicts killing around 15 million people. ‘All wars are men’s wars. Peace has been made by women but war never,’ observed Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), one of the many women’s organizations which took part in an extraordinary peace campaign in the years leading up to the ‘Great’ War and during and after it. Since women are excluded from a political voice, demanded French feminists in 1915, are they not under an obligation to say that which the men cannot say? The women’s object was to try to prevent the war happening, then to block its escalation once it had begun, then to protest about and remedy the huge injustices of its consequences. Many women in the peace movement had a background in social reform, and the argument for peace derived directly from the case for human justice and equality. It was also about diverting the massive resources spent on war to the primary goal of promoting human welfare. By ‘forcing war itself into outlaw status’, women peace campaigners caused an interruption in the restricted vision of the reformist liberal male peace movement, from which, anyway, they were excluded. Their much more radical agenda attempted to change the nature of politics itself. Historians of peace have, however, mostly not noticed this, or have projected images of ‘the emotionalized woman pacifist’ incapable of intellectual analysis. Of course, this may be partly because women’s rejection of war has so often entailed extended (intellectual) critiques of masculinity.

‘The idea that these frail webspinners can affect the destiny of nations seems to me fantastic,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, attending a peace rally at which, as Woolf unsympathetically put it, the economist Mabel Atkinson had ‘drivelled at length about Peace’. There’s no doubt that the women’s campaign for international peace did have an effect, although it was an effect that was much less than the one they hoped for. Their most impressive achievements lay as much in the outcome as in the process: in the formation of an extensive network of friendship and commitment that transcended national boundaries, and the creation of a vision of how the divergent peoples of the world might live peaceably together.