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“Surprisingly deep and warm feelings.” A Complicated, Transatlantic, and Antimilitarist Feminist Struggle
| 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?
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