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Perhaps the universal Sisterhood is necessary
before the Universal Brotherhood is possible.
Bertha von Suttner, June 1912As women entered into politics
when clean milk and premature labor of children
became factors in political life,
so they might be concerned with international affairs
when these at least were dealing with
such human and poignant matters as food for starving peoples
who could be fed only through international activities….
There might be found an antidote to war in woman’s affection
and all-embracing pity for helpless children.
Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of WarOur function is to establish new values,
to create an overpowering sense of the sacredness of life,
so that war will be unthinkable;
so that when international disputes arise,
even of the most grave character—when lives have been lost,
when our rights have been clearly invaded—
we shall not turn to wholesale, deliberate destruction of life
as the means of settling those disputes,
of avenging those deaths, of asserting those rights.
Crystal Eastman, July 24, 1915You can no more win a war than an earthquake!
Jeannette RankinIf by strength is meant moral power,
then woman is immeasurably man’s superior.
Has she not greater intuition,
is she not more self-sacrificing,
has she not greater powers of endurance,
has she not greater courage?
Without her man could not be.
If nonviolence is the law of our being,
the future is with woman.
Mohandas Gandhi, 1930Love is the measure by which we will be judged.
Dorothy DayThis is the way to peace—overcome evil with good,
and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.
Peace PilgrimExperiment with nonviolent struggle has barely begun.
But in a world in which traditional violent battle
can escalate into nuclear war,
it is an experiment that is absolutely necessary
to push to its furthest limits.
Barbara DemingA liberation movement that is nonviolent
sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
Barbara DemingFeminism can help women respect their own power.
Nonviolence can help them use their power effectively
in a way which maintains that respect
and extends it to others.
Jane MeyerdingThe true measure of justice of a system
is the amount of protection it guarantees to the weakest.
Where there is no justice there can be no peace.
Aung San Suu Kyi, “In Quest of Democracy”The more we understand, appreciate, and humanize
people we are taught to see as enemies,
the harder it is for our government
to persuade us to fight them….
The struggle to end war will be the culmination
of a global movement that rejects violence
on the part of individuals, terrorist groups, and nation-states.
Medea Benjamin, Stop the Next War Now
Women make up more than half of the human race.
Yet civilization
has been suffering for five thousand years under the
aggressive
oppression of male dominance and authoritarian patriarchy.
Some
of the great philosophers of peace, such as 'Abdu'l-Bahá
and Gandhi,
have seen hope for
a peaceful world in the future because of the softening of masculine
force by the feminine qualities of love, service, intuition, and
moral power.
The women's movement is well on the way to healing
a society so afflicted
by militarism that it teeters on the brink
of mass destruction.
Whereas war used to be a masculine "sport"
for warriors, in the twentieth century
the percentage of civilian
deaths in war steadily increased until
now everyone is imperiled
by the threat of nuclear holocaust.
At the same time women have
become increasingly involved in actively working for peace,
responding
instinctively to nurture the human race for the sake of its survival.
Previous chapters have discussed how women contributed
to the
abolition of slavery, suffrage, and women's rights.
As early as
1891 the National Council of Women (NCW) and the
Women's Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU) petitioned the US Government
to avoid
war with Chile, and in 1895 women's groups urged that a
Venezuelan
border dispute with England be settled by arbitration.
Bertha Kinsky was born June 9, 1843 in Prague and married Baron
von Suttner
after serving as a governess in his house.
She worked
briefly for Alfred Bernhard Nobel,
and he often supported her
peace efforts with donations.
She was influenced by Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution and
the progressive ideas of Herbert Spencer
and the historian H. T. Buckle.
She suggested that human progress
was leading toward
disarmament and peace in her Inventory of
a Soul.
In The Machine Age she argued that war is the
opposite of survival of the fittest,
because it kills the most
fit while allowing the defective to survive;
thus instead of evolving
the species, it causes degeneration.
She prophesied that someday
more powerful weapons would be able to destroy
entire armies at
once and would thus eliminate the strategies that make war feasible,
though her friend Nobel with his explosives business
continued
to believe that deterrence would prevent wars.
She could understand
a few sacrificing themselves for the majority;
but she felt that
to sacrifice all for none is extreme madness.
In 1888 she heard
a call from Hodgson Pratt of the London Peace Society
to form
a great league with branches in all European cities.
She believed
that everyone must contribute to humanity's well-being,
and she
saw the peace movement as a way to do so.
By far Bertha von Suttner's most famous and influential novel
was the
two-volume Lay Down Your Arms, which was published
in 1889.
Written from a woman's point of view as she loses two
husbands in the wars
of 1859 and 1870, she dramatically exposed
the superficiality and folly
of men going to war for honor to
show their courage.
Politicians and generals are particularly
criticized for promoting armaments.
In the last chapter the main
character wrote in her diary,
Today there is hardly any one left
who has not dreamed this dream,
or who would not confess its beauty.
And there are watchers too;
watchers conspicuous enough, who are longing
to awake mankind out of the long sleep of savagery,
and energetically and with a single eye to their object
collecting themselves for the purpose of planting the white flag.
Their battle-cry is, “War on War,”
their watchword, the only word which can have power
to deliver from ruin Europe armed against herself is,
“Lay down your arms.”
In all places, in England and France, in Italy,
in the northern countries, in Germany, in Switzerland, in America,
associations have been formed, whose object is,
through the compulsion of public opinion,
through the commanding pressure of the people’s will,
to move the Governments to submit their differences in future
to an Arbitration Court, appointed by themselves,
and so once for all to enthrone justice in place of brute force.1
Near the end of the book she predicted that the next war
would
not be a gain for either side but ruin for all.
This novel was
translated into dozens of languages and made the
international peace movement a major topic of discussion throughout Europe.
Leo Tolstoy hoped that it would
have the same effect on the war problem that
Harriet Beecher Stowe
had on slavery with Uncle Tom's Cabin,
though he called
it "untalented" and believed
that arbitration was not
a complete solution.
Nevertheless he did correspond with "Peace
Bertha"
as she came to be called in the satirical press.
Bertha von Suttner founded an Austrian peace society in 1891
and the next year attended the international peace congress at
Bern,
where she suggested a European confederation of states and
last saw Nobel.
It is widely believed that he included the Peace
Prize in his 1896 will because of her,
and she became the first
woman to win this Nobel Prize in 1906.
She also urged Andrew Carnegie
to do more for peace than merely donating libraries.
She promoted
and attended the Peace Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907.
Suttner traveled extensively, including a tour from New York to
California,
and spoke to an estimated 400,000 people.
She tried
to calm the conflicts in the Balkans; but she died on June 21,
1914,
one week before the assassination at Sarajevo of Franz Ferdinand,
the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire that touched off
the Great War.
Suttner had also written a two-volume autobiography,
and in 1917 her political articles
were published in two volumes
as The Battle for the Prevention of World War,
which was
immediately banned in Austria and Germany.
In England in 1900 Kate Courtney (1847-1929) and Emily Hobhouse
founded
a Women's Committee of the South Africa Conciliation movement
to urge settlement
of the Boer War and the South African Women
and Children's Distress Fun
to help those made homeless by Britain's
scorched-earth policy of burning farms.
The British established
large concentration camps in which
27,927 Boers died, mostly children
and women.
Also 14,000 African women died in black concentration
camps.
In 1911 Courtney complained that Italy's seizing Tripoli
from the Turks would set back
the Peace and Arbitration movement,
and novelist Bertha von Suttner
made the same point in her speeches
in Bucharest and Budapest.
Courtney objected to the imperialism
of the French in Morocco,
Austrians in Herzegovina and Bosnia,
Russians in Persia,
and the British in South Africa and Egypt;
she noted that only poor Germany was still a "lion without
a Christian."
She complained that the secret Cabinet government
could mobilize the nation
without warning or consultation, that
secret diplomacy was based on
an "enemy psychosis,"
and that two rival imperialists
were engaged in an uncontrolled
and unstable arms race.
During the World War, Kate Courtney worked for an Emergency
Committee to help
"enemy aliens," in the Union for the
Democratic Control of Foreign Policy (UDC),
and with the emerging
international women's peace movement.
In 1915 she arranged for
Jane Addams to meet
with Robert Cecil at the Foreign Office.
She
tried to intervene on behalf of UDC chairman E. D. Morel after
he was arrested
and sentenced to six months under the Defence
of the Realm Act for sending
two pamphlets to pacifist Romain
Rolland in neutral Switzerland.
Courtney's War Diary expressed
intelligent views about the terrible war
and described what she
was doing about it.
After the war the first meeting of the Fight
the Famine Committee was held at her house,
and she prophesied
that the humiliating terms being imposed on Germany
were likely
to push Germans into another war.
Maude Royden (1876-1956) studied at Oxford and as a preacher
tried
to become the first woman ordained in the Church of England.
In 1908 she became a speaker for the voting rights of women, and
from
1912 to 1914 she edited the suffragists' weekly paper, The
Common Cause.
She embraced internationalism and peace and
was appalled when the Great War broke out.
She became an activist
with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)
and in 1915 published
her first pacifist pamphlet,
The Great Adventure: The Way to
Peace, in which
she advocated non-violent direct action (NVDA).
She argued that the Christ offered humanity an alternative
to
violent reaction in the Sermon on the Mount.
She suggested how
England could have used nonviolent methods
to resist German aggression,
because many Germans
were socialists and would have supported
them.
We could have called for the peace-lovers in the world
to fling themselves—if need be—in front of the troop trains.
If millions of men will go out to offer their lives up in war,
surely there are those who would die for peace!
and if not men, we could have called out women!2
Royden believed that the heroism of the cross is much greater
than the heroism of the sword; the greater adventurer
goes to
the enemy with naked hands.
The Christian ideal should not be
sacrificed to national necessity
because truth is better than
victory.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation organized a peace caravan,
and they were nearly burned to death by a mob in Midland town;
but police intervened and sent them away on a train.
Royden realized
that women could be as militaristic as men;
yet she believed that
the women's movement could be a natural force for peace.
Because
they believed in moral force instead of physical force,
they could
work against militarism;
the physically weaker sex would not agree
that "Might is right."
When Royden attended the International Alliance for Women's
Suffrage conference
at Geneva in 1920, she was allowed to preach
from Calvin's pulpit,
inspiring people that only love can create
and build,
because without love the world perishes.
In the 1920s
she complained that the League
of Nations was being betrayed
as the "balance of power"
once again was substituted for collective security.
In 1931 Maude
Royden appealed to both men and women to form a Peace Army
that
could intervene nonviolently between combatants.
She was deeply
disappointed that "only a thousand people" volunteered
and that they were never organized, though she did initiate protest
meetings
at the London docks against shipping arms to Japan.
She
had compromised her pacifism to accept the collective security
of the League;
when World War II began in 1939, she repudiated
her pacifism.
Simone Weil (1909-43) was a child during the First World Wa
in France and "adopted" a soldier, who was killed.
She
felt she was cured of nationalistic patriotism when she saw
the
French humiliate the Germans after the war.
She studied with the
pacifist philosopher Alain for four years and noted that
the slavery
of soldiers is much worse than the slavery of workers.
After the
signing of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact,
in 1929 she circulated
a manifesto calling for immediate and complete disarmament.
The
next year she participated in a peace march to support Briand.
When French President Lebrun came to unveil a local war memorial
in October 1933,
she opposed war by speaking to her socialist
and pacifist friends from a window ledge.
The next month Simone Weil published her
"Reflections
on War" in La Critique Sociale magazine.
She noted
that war always strengthens the state over the people regardless
of ideology.
War affects not only foreign policy but domestic
policy
as well because a massacre is oppressive.
She argued that
a revolution dies when it becomes a war.
Whether the enemy is
fascist, democratic, or communist,
the adversary becomes the bureaucracy
and the military.
The "protector" that makes its citizens
slaves becomes just as much an enemy.
The worst betrayal is to
subordinate oneself to the war machine,
which destroys human values.
War is not only the supreme example of inhumanity
but actually
is a competition in inhumanity.
The state machine fights in order
to maintain its ability to make war.
She prophesied that future
wars would be an insane destruction of wealth
built up by civilization
over generations until civilization itself perished.
In 1936 Weil believed that the socialist government of Spain
deserved her support
in its fight for survival against the fascists,
and that summer
she pointed a rifle at planes but primarily served
as a cook.
She observed how pitiless killing became a way of life.
She left the war after she was scalded by burning oil.
Weil soon
returned to her pacifist principles as she asked if war
could
ever bring the world more justice, liberty, or well being.
In
1937 she wrote her powerful antimilitarist essay
"Ne Recommencons
pas la Guerre de Troie," which
was translated as "The
Power of Words."
She asked why nations waged war against
each other century after century.
In the Trojan War she saw Helen
as an empty symbol that could be replaced
by any abstraction in
capital letters such as nation, security, capitalism,
communism,
fascism, democracy, etc.
She astutely observed,
What a country calls its vital economic interests
are not the things which enable its citizens to live,
but the things which enable it to make war;
petrol is much more likely than wheat
to be a cause of international conflict.
Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose
of safeguarding or increasing one’s capacity to make war.3
A government cannot appear weak in its external relations
without
weakening its authority over its own people.
She perceived that
only complete and universal
disarmament could resolve this dilemma,
but she realized that was nearly inconceivable.
The illusion of
national security by retaining the capacity to make war
is practically
impossible, because the only way to achieve it
is to deprive other
countries of the same security.
In March 1938 Weil signed a statement by French anti-fascists
urging their government to negotiate with Germany for the sake
of world peace,
and she agreed to speak that summer with Maria
Montessori for peace.
Yet the next month she wrote an article
how they could
resist invasion by decentralized armed resistance.
She urged the democracies to gain the moral advantage over Hitler
by renouncing their colonies in Africa and Asia,
and she criticized
French imperialism in Algeria and Indochina.
If they adopted the
methods of Hitler, she felt that a victory
would not be much better
than a defeat.
Reflecting on the Roman empire, she warned,
"Every
people which turns itself into a nation by submitting to a centralized,
bureaucratic, military State becomes and long remains
a scourge
to its neighbors and the world."4
She believed that the League of Nations failed
because it left in place the dogma
of national sovereignty, and
she proposed a federalist world order
that would decentralize
the nation states.
She pessimistically predicted that if a just
and magnanimous peace
was not established after World War II,
the continued mutual massacres would destroy all the states.
Simone Weil taught philosophy at various schools in France,
but she refused to eat more than those people on relief.
She worked
in a factory to find out what that was like.
Her essay "The
Iliad: Poem of Force" explained the nature of violence
as portrayed in one of the earliest and best examples of western
literature.
After the Nazis occupied Paris, she moved to Marseilles;
though of a Jewish family, she had a mystical experience in a
chapel.
She went with her parents to the United States in 1942.
She crossed back to England to work for the French resistance,
but leaders would not let her parachute into France.
Because of
the Jewish victims in Europe, she ate little
and died of tuberculosis
on August 24, 1943.
Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois.
Her mother died before she was three, and she was raised by her
father,
who believed in Quaker principles and served eight terms
in the Illinois Senate.
Illness interrupted Jane's medical studies.
Traveling to Europe, she was impressed by Toynbee Hall in the
slum of London.
In September 1889 she and her college friend,
Ellen Gates Star,
founded Hull House in Chicago to provide a social
center
for the poor working people in the neighborhood.
This was
the beginning of the social settlement movement in the United
States.
Hull House became a focal point for social reforms in
child labor laws,
protection of immigrants, labor unions, and
working conditions
as well as a meeting place for educational
and cultural activities.
Her excellent books Twenty Years at
Hull-House and
The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House
described this experience.
In Newer Ideals of Peace, published in 1907,
Jane Addams criticized the militarism
in city government, the
inadequate responses of legislation to the needs
of an industrial
society, the lack of immigrants and women in local government,
the inadequate protection of children, and the social problems
in the labor movement.
Based on her experience in working with
immigrants from various countries,
she developed a cosmopolitan
attitude she called "cosmic patriotism."
She became
an ardent internationalist and hoped that people could move beyond
their narrow nationalist orientations toward a more universal
human effort and affection.
Jane Addams was vice-president of the National American Woman
Suffrage Associatio
from 1911 to 1914; but when the war broke
out in Europe,
she devoted all her energies to working for peace.
In September 1914 Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian journalist and
suffragist,
came to America and spoke to President Wilson,
Secretary of State Bryan,
and then the general public about the
United States
intervening to negotiate a peace settlement.
Emmeline
Pethick-Lawrence, an English feminist, spoke at a suffrage rally
in Carnegie Hall about organizing a woman's peace movement.
Crystal
Eastman formed a woman's peace committee and suggested
that Pethick-Lawrence
contact Jane Addams in Chicago.
Carrie Chapman Catt also wrote
Jane Addams a letter complaining that
the present management of
the peace movement
in the United States was overmasculinized.
Addams agreed that women were the most eager for action,
and she
and Catt called a national conference of women's organizations.
They gathered in Washington on January 9, 1915 and formed the
Woman's Peace Party
with a Preamble that stated, "As women
we feel a peculiar moral passion of revolt
against both the cruelty
and waste of war,"5 and with the following insightful platform:
1. The immediate calling of a convention of neutral nations
in the interest of early peace.
2. Limitation of armaments
and the nationalization of the manufacture.
3. Organized opposition to militarism in our own country.
4. Education of youth in the ideals of peace.
5. Democratic control of foreign policies.
6. The further humanizing of governments
by the extension of the franchise of women.
7. “Concert of Nations” to supersede “Balance of Power.”
8. Action toward the gradual organization of the world
to substitute Law for War.
9. The substitution of an international police
for rival armies and navies.
10. Removal of economic causes of war.
11. The appointment by our Government
of a commission of men and women,
with an adequate appropriation to promote international peace.6
Thus to stop the current war they suggested a conference of
delegates
from neutral nations or at least an unofficial conference
of pacifists.
To make sure that the settlement terms would not
sow the seeds
of new wars they recommended self-determination
and autonomy
for all disputed territories, no war indemnities
unless international law had been violated,
and democratic control
of foreign policy and treaty arrangements.
To secure world peace
for the future they suggested replacing the "balance of power"
with an international congress, an international police force,
and courts to settle
all disputes between nations; an immediate
and permanent League of Neutral Nations
could use binding arbitration,
judicial, and legislative procedures
and an international police
force for protection.
The progressive national disarmament should
be protected by the peace program;
until disarmament is complete,
munitions manufacture should be nationalized.
Private property
at sea should be protected by international and national action
to remove the economic causes of war.
The national program for the United States included approval
of the
Peace Commission Treaties that require a year's investigation
before
any declaration of war, protest against the increase of
armaments,
and a recommendation that the President and US Government
set up
a commission of men and women to work for the prevention
of war.
Three thousand people attended the mass meeting,
and Jane
Addams was elected chairman.
National headquarters was established
in Chicago,
and within a year 25,000 women had joined.
Crystal Eastman felt that a Woman's Peace Party was good
because
women are mothers, or potential mothers, and
"therefore have
a more intimate sense of the value of human life."7
Thus
there can be more meaning and passion in their determination
to
end war than in an organization with both men and women.
In an
article for Survey Crystal Eastman explained how the
Woman's
Peace Congress at The Hague was organized
by the Dutch suffragist
Aletta Jacobs, whom she called,
"one of a group of 'international'
women who are challenging public opinion
with the idea of world
union for peace."8
The Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting scheduled
for Berlin
had to be canceled because of the war.
Instead, Dr.
Jacobs called a meeting in February 1915 at Amsterdam
to plan
a larger congress of individuals to focus on methods of bringing
about peace.
Leaders from Belgium, Germany, and Britain met with
their Dutch hostesses
and issued a call for an international Congress
of Women at The Hague on April 28;
they invited Jane Addams to
preside.
Representatives of over 150 organizations from twelve countries
gathered
that spring of 1915, and 1,136 women voted to adopt twenty
resolutions.
These were similar to the program of the Woman's
Peace Party.
The International Congress of Women advocated
universal
disarmament secured by international agreement.
They believed
that the private profits from armament factories
were a strong
hindrance to abolishing war.
In addition they decided to urge
the neutral countries to offer continuous mediation
for a peace
settlement between the belligerent nations,
and they selected
envoys to approach the different governments.
Jane Addams, Aletta
Jacobs, and the Italian Rosa Genoni went to
Austro-Hungary, Belgium,
Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.
Emily Balch,
Chrystal Macmillan, Cor Ramondt Hirschmann, and Rosika Schwimmer
were sent to the Scandinavian countries and Russia.
In Sweden
alone 343 meetings were held on June 27,
and The Hague resolutions
were signed by 88,784 women.
In August, Jane Addams met with President Wilson, who said that
the resolutions
were the best formulation he had seen so far.
After having witnessed the war, Jane Addams explained
why the
young soldiers and civilians were revolting against war.
She found
that every nation claimed that they were fighting
in self-defense
to preserve their traditions.
Though the elderly men believed
that war was right and should be fought to the finish,
the young
men in the trenches were not convinced
that it was a legitimate
way of settling disputes.
She quoted a young man who said,
We are told that we are fighting for civilization
but I tell you that war destroys civilization.
The highest product of the universities,
the scholar, the philosopher, the poet,
when he is in the trenches,
when he spends his days and nights
in squalor and brutality and horror
is as low and brutal as the rudest peasant.9
He went on to explain that in the trenches there was neither
courage nor cowardice,
as chance determined who was blown up.
Addams found war to be so unnatural that soldiers
had to be drugged
to make the bayonet charge.
The English were given rum, the Germans
ether, and the French used absinthe.
She believed that if peace
were made by negotiation,
the civil authorities of the western
democracies would have more influence;
but if it was fought to
victory, the military authorities would make the final settlement.
Of the factors that Jane Addams believed caused the war to
continue,
she placed first the influence of the press, observing,
The press everywhere tended to make
an entire nation responsible for the crimes of individuals,
a tendency which is certainly fraught with awful consequences,
even though the crimes for which the nation is held responsible
may have originated in the gross exaggeration
of some trivial incident.10
She also noticed that the domination by the press prevented
the mobilization of the advocates for peace.
She began to believe
that "the next revolution against tyranny would
have to be
a revolution against the unscrupulous power of the press."11
People of different countries were not able to get the information
they needed
to make sound judgments about the war, because the
press selected the knowledge
they wanted the people to have just
as the church did in the past.
The women at The Hague believed
that the time had come to begin negotiations,
or else the war
would go on year after year until exhaustion.
Some politicians
called these women envoys foolish.
However, one high official
told Addams that hers were the first sensible words
he had heard
in his office for ten months;
usually people just asked him for
more ammunition and more money.
To him the words "why not
substitute negotiations for fighting" were the most sensible.
Addams hoped that the breakdown of the philosophy of nationalism
would bring about a new birth of internationalism,
founded not
just on arbitration treaties but upon governmental institutions
designed to protect and enhance by cooperation a world becoming
conscious of itself.
After visiting the capitals of the belligerent governments,
Addams found they had no objection to a conference of neutral
nations,
even though they could not ask for mediation.
To alleviate
the fear of beginning a conference while one side had a military
advantage,
she argued "that the proposed conference would
start mediation at a higher level
than that of military advantage."12
Three out of five neutral European nations were ready to join
in such a conference,
while the other two were still deliberating.
By fall all the leading belligerent nations were willing to cooperate
in a Neutral Conference, and the neutrals Norway, Sweden, Denmark,
and Holland
were eager to participate if the conference were to
be called by the United States.
Unfortunately the US declined
for the reasons that
Latin American countries could not be ignored
nor was there room for many of them to participate;
also the Central
Powers had the technical military advantage at that time.
Another
neutral country would offer to call the conference
if the United
States would attend, but this made no difference.
Even 10,000
telegrams to President Wilson
from woman's organizations were of no avail.
In January 1916 the Woman's Peace Party became the United States
section
of the international organization which came to be named
the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Henry Ford donated a chartered ship to take women to Europe
for
a private Neutral Conference, which was held in Stockholm on January
26.
They formulated further appeals to the neutral and belligerent
nations to begin mediation.
Crystal Eastman started in November 1915 the "Truth About
Preparedness Campaign"
sponsored by the Woman's Peace Party
and
the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM)
She revealed
the economic exploitation behind the industrialists' propaganda
for military increases through public debates and numerous articles.
In the summer of 1916 AUAM's private investigation of the facts
in Mexico
revealed that the American troops were the aggressors
in a skirmish,
and a massive publicity campaign changed President Wilson's mind,
preventing
the United States from entering into a misguided war with Mexico.
In 1917 Crystal Eastman and Roger Baldwin founded the
American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to protect human rights.
Alice Paul
told Jeannette Rankin, "It would be a tragedy
for the first
woman ever in Congress to vote for war."13
Rankin said, "I
want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war."14
Rankin voted against entering the war, and in 1941 she was
in
Congress again to vote against another World War.
After America
entered the war, Crystal Eastman and other radicals
struggled
for an early peace, opposed conscription, universal military training,
and other repressive legislation; they sponsored classes led by
pacifists
such as Norman Angell and Emily Green Balch.
Disappointed by Wilson's
entering into the war,
Jane Addams turned her efforts to the struggle
for food.
She urged international cooperation and demanded that
food blockades,
still in place after the armistice, be immediately
lifted.
She felt that women could do much for international organization
especially in regard to such a basic issue as food for survival.
In 1919 the International Congress of Women held in Zurich criticized
the peace terms for sanctioning secret agreements,
denying self-determination,
giving spoils to the victors, creating
discord in Europe,
demanding disarmament only for the losing side,
and
condemning a hundred million people to poverty, disease,
despair,
hatred, and anarchy because of the economic proposals.
They welcomed
a League of Nations,
which four years earlier
had seemed
so unrealistic to many;
but
they criticized the plan for varying from Wilson's
fourteen points.
The Women's Peace Society (WPS) was founded in 1919
by William
Lloyd Garrison's daughter Fanny Garrison Villard.
As the League
of Nations was forming, the
Women's International League for
Peace and Freedom (WILPF)
established its headquarters in Geneva,
where they kept a close watch
on the League
of Nations Assembly and Secretariat.
WILPF helped to publicize
its proceedings and offered frequent criticism.
In lectures Jane
Addams urged the United States to participate in the World Court.
In August 1921 Elinor Byrns was acting as chair of a conference
that was held
on the Canadian side of Niagara and formed the
Woman's
Peace Union (WPU) of the Western Hemisphere.
They urged President
Harding to work for
"immediate, universal and complete disarmament"
at the upcoming Washington Naval Conference.
The WPU pledge was
based on Garrison's 1838 "Declaration of Sentiments."
We women of the Western Hemisphere believe that
under no circumstances is it right to take human life
and pledge ourselves to work for world peace….
We affirm it is our intention never to aid in or sanction war,
offensive or defensive, international or civil, or in any way,
whether by making or handling munitions,
subscribing to war loans, using our labor
for the purpose of setting others free for war service,
helping by money or work any organization
which supports or condones war.15
In 1923 Elinor Byrns and Caroline Lexow Babcock of the WPU
initiated a resolution for a constitutional amendment to outlaw
war
and remove the power of the US Congress to declare war,
raise
or support any military, or appropriate money for war.
They promoted
a "Declaration of Independence from the Tyranny of War"
because war must be abolished before it abolishes the human race.
They persuaded Republican Senator Lynn Joseph Frazier from North
Dakota
to present their resolution in every session of the Congress
from 1926 to 1939.
Elinor Byrnes published a pamphlet in 1927
entitled
"Violence and Killing Always Wrong" in which
she connected violence to ownership and the will to power.
She
condemned child abuse, capital punishment, and the use of force
to break strikes.
Jeannette Rankin worked for the WPU in 1929.
The next year the WPU gained the support of the Women's Peace
Society,
the War Resisters League, the American Friends Service
Committee (AFSC),
the Pennsylvania Committee for Total Disarmament,
the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
and WILPF to testify at the
hearing on the Senate Joint Resolution 45.
In 1923 the WILPF board in a resolution urged the US Congress
to pass a bill
forbidding the use of the military for collecting
private debts
or protecting private investments in foreign countries.
WILPF believed that the United States could help developing countries
without imposing "occupation or overlordship."
They
opposed increasing the US Navy.
In 1924 WILPF suggested that governments
agree to
the compulsory jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of
International Justice.
Their Congress held in Washington that
year also recommended better education
to avoid mass suggestion,
the abolition of capital punishment
and the improvement
of prisons,
and a better balance of influence between men and women.
The National
Committee on the Causes and Cures of War (NCCCW)
soon became the
largest woman's peace group in the United States
after it was
founded by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1924;
as the most broad-based,
it was the most conservative.
In 1928 the NCCCW organized 14,000
meetings to urge ratification
of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw
war.
WILPF considered this treaty a valuable step toward substituting
law for war
and achieving the disarmament of all nations.
The 1929 WILPF Congress in Prague warned that modern warfare
threatened civilian populations and that the only way to safety
is disarmament.
NCCCW and WILPF worked together in gathering 600,000
signatures in the US
to contribute to the eight million that were
presented to the 1932 Geneva Conference
for the Reduction and
Limitations of Armaments.
After Japan invaded Manchuria, WILPF
sent a letter to President Hoover
urging the United States to
cooperate with the League
of Nations Council
in challenging this treaty violation and
to work with the signatories
of the Nine Power Pact, to publish
its diplomatic notes with Japan,
and to prohibit arms shipments
to Japan.
In 1933 WILPF stimulated North Dakota Senator Gerald
P. Nye,
chairman of the Munitions Committee, to investigate the
profits made
by arms manufacturers in the World War and that industry's
role
in bribing public officials to vote for larger military budgets
and fix prices.
WILPF's 1934 Zurich Congress formulated aims
that
became its policy for the next quarter century.
The primary goals
read:
Total and universal disarmament,
the abolition of violent means of coercion
for the settlement of all conflicts,
the substitution in every case of some form of peaceful settlement,
and the development of a world organization
for the political, social and economic cooperation of peoples.16
In addition they committed themselves to studying and alleviating
the causes of war by nonviolent social reform.
Jane Addams donated
to WILPF the money she got
for winning the Nobel Peace Prize in
1931.
She had been International President of WILPF
for twenty
years when she died in 1935.
When Chamberlain appeased Hitler in 1938 at Munich,
WILPF issued
this strong response:
It is a sham peace based on the violation of law, justice and right.
It is a so-called ‘peaceful change’ dictated by four Powers
and forced upon a young and small State,
which was not represented
when its dismemberment was finally decided upon.17
The International Chairmen of WILPF sent out an appeal to help
Czechoslovakia financially and economically.
In it they declared,
Pacifism is not the quietistic acceptance
of betrayal and lies for the sake of ‘Peace.’
Pacifism is the struggle for truth, the struggle for right,
the struggle for clear political aims,
for firm political will and action.
Pacifism is not weak acceptance of ‘faits accomplis’
achieved by brute force.
Pacifism is courageous initiative
for a constructive policy of just peace.18
In 1951 WILPF considered a plan for a nonviolent national defense
along Gandhian lines to deter aggression without
the disadvantages
and dangers of armaments.
They discovered that nonviolent principles
must be understood by the people
before this can work on a national
scale, recognizing that violence breeds violence,
upholding truth
before prestige, accepting the principle of equal rights,
freedom
of conscience and of information,
and strengthening altruistic
rather than materialistic values.
WILPF has supported the United
Nations and criticized the Korean War,
nuclear arms and testing,
civil rights violations, the Vietnam War, and the nuclear arms
race.
In March 1983 WILPF representatives visited the NATO governments
to protest the deployment of more nuclear weapons in Europe.
WILPF
holds to the Gandhian principle against war and violence,
because
a good end cannot be attained by a bad means.
WILPF remains perhaps
the largest and most influential
of all the international women's
peace organizations.
Another great peacemaker and social reformer was Dorothy Day,
who founded the Catholic Worker.
Dorothy was born in Brooklyn
on November 8, 1897.
A scholarship helped her to attend the University
of Illinois,
where she joined a socialist group.
In 1917 she went
to Washington to picket the White House with the suffragists.
She was arrested and bailed out.
When the thirty-five of them
appeared in court, they were convicted;
but their sentencing was
postponed.
That afternoon they picketed and were arrested again,
going through the same procedure.
The third time they refused
to pay bail.
The leaders were sentenced to six months, the older
women to fifteen days,
and the rest, including Dorothy, to thirty
days.
They demanded to be treated as political prisoners and went
on a hunger strike
for ten days until their demands were met.
Day was so obstreperous that she was handcuffed
and thrown in
a cell with leader Lucy Burns.
Dorothy Day moved back to New York, and she was soon mixing
as a writer
and activist with Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Louise
Bryant, and Max Eastman.
She wrote for The Masses until
it was suppressed by the US Government.
For many years Dorothy
worked as a free-lance writer.
She published an autobiographical
novel entitled
The Eleventh Virgin and even sold its movie
rights.
She fell in love with an older writer, who did not want
to marry,
and she had an abortion.
Later she formed a common law
marriage with anarchist Forster Batterham
and gave birth to the
girl Tamar.
She raised her daughter, and in 1928 she became a
Catholic.
Dorothy once said, "I believe because I want to
believe;
I hope because I want to hope; I love because I want
to love."19
In December 1932 Dorothy went to Washington for the Hunger
March of the Unemployed that was organized by her Communist friends.
There she prayed to God for some way that she could help the poor.
Returning to New York, she found waiting for her a homeless French
priest named Peter Maurin, who had been told that she had similar
beliefs as his.
He was full of ideas and shared them with her
in an uninterrupted flow.
He disagreed with Communism because
he considered the dictatorship of the proletariat and class warfare
to be unsound means.
He said, "A pure end requires pure means.
Christian charity and voluntary poverty are the pure means for
the realization of a Communist society."20
He proposed publishing
a newspaper to popularize his ideas for a communitarian revolution,
round-table discussions to clarify thought, houses of hospitality
as living centers to help the poor and provide hospices, and farming
communes as "agronomic universities."
So Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin began the Catholic Worker movement
in the depths of the Depression.
They started publishing a newspaper
called The Catholic Worker in May 1933.
About twenty people
moved into a house on the west side of New York; they fed the
hungry, clothed the needy, and sheltered the homeless, not as
an impersonal state agency but by personal sacrifice and care.
Soon "houses of hospitality" were being started in Boston,
Rochester, Milwaukee, and other cities.
They lived in voluntary
poverty, practicing Christ's teachings.
By 1935 the circulation
of the Catholic Worker newspaper went over 100,000.
They
moved into a large house on Mott Street and later also got a small
farm outside of New York.
Despite disagreement from Peter Maurin,
Dorothy Day spent much of her efforts in the 1930s helping workers
to organize unions. Dorothy traveled and spoke to groups.
They
picketed the German consulate to protest Nazi anti-Semitism and
gave out literature criticizing Nazi policies.
In May 1939 Dorothy
and some friends formed the Committee of Catholics to Fight Anti-Semitism.
When the Second World War began, Dorothy Day still retained
the Gospel teaching of human brotherhood and would not give up
her pacifism.
In June 1940 their "Peace Edition" of
the Catholic Worker suggested they could use nonviolent
means to resist an invader.
Day wrote about the immorality of
conscription, and she urged Catholics to be Conscientious Objectors.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Catholic Worker
headline and subheadline read,
Our Country Passes from Undeclared to Declared War;
We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand.
In Addition to the Weapons of Starvation of Its Enemy,
Our Country Is Now Using the Weapons
of Army, Navy, and Air Force.21
Yet some Catholic Workers joined the army, and dissension within
the community
caused a precipitous drop in circulation of the
newspaper.
By January 1942 fifteen Catholic Worker houses of hospitality
had closed
because there were not enough people to take care of
them.
Day estimated that 80% of the Workers had "betrayed"
their pacifist principles;
but others formed the Association of
Catholic Conscientious Objectors.
In 1955 Day organized a civil disobedience protest against
New York City's
compulsory air raid drill, and seven people were
given suspended sentences.
Another year Dorothy spent thirty days
in jail for this simple protest.
In 1957 she wrote,
We were setting our faces against the world,
against things as they are,
the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system
which lives by war and by preparing for war;
setting our faces against race hatred and all nationalist strivings.
But especially we wanted to act against war
and the preparation for war: nerve gas, guided missiles,
the testing and stockpiling of nuclear bombs, conscription,
the collection of income tax—against the entire military state.
We made our gesture; we disobeyed a law.22
In 1959 they were sentenced to thirty days but were released
after ten days.
They did this every year until 1961, when after
2,000 people refused to take shelter,
the city decided to drop
the requirement.
Dorothy Day also worked for the civil rights of African Americans
and traveled to the South to do so.
In 1957 she went to support
the pacifist and interracial community
founded by Clarence Jordan
called Koinonia near Americus, Georgia.
As they were threatened
by Ku Klux Klan violence,
she volunteered to watch their produce-stand
at night in a car;
someone from a passing car fired a shotgun
into the car, but she was not hit.
Dorothy also went to Danville,
Virginia to pray, march, boycott,
and suffer imprisonment in the
civil rights struggle.
On April 22, 1963 the Mothers for Peace, a group made up of
Catholic Workers,
members of PAX (which became Pax Christi in
1972), Women Strike for Peace,
WILPF, the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
and others, met with Pope John XXIII
to plead for a condemnation
of nuclear war and the development of nonviolent resistance.
During
the Vietnam War, Dorothy Day inspired the radical Catholic Left
to protest.
She continued to oppose conscription and taxes for
war,
and in October 1965 she spoke at the first draft card burning.
A heckler shouted that they should burn themselves, not their
draft cards.
Three days later young Roger LaPorte, a student of
religion and a
Catholic Worker volunteer, poured gasoline on himself
and struck a match
in front of the United
Nations building, dying 33 hours later.
Dorothy believed that
he knew it was wrong to take his own life;
but in her column she
explained his desire to end the Vietnam War.
In the previous week
six massive air strikes had killed the most since the war began.
She called language satanic that described the
Army's spending
as adding extra "zip" to the economy.
In 1948 Day had
written, "Love must be tried and tested and proved.
It must
be tried as though by fire, and fire burns."23
Day and many Catholic Workers had for many years refused to
pay federal income tax
because most of it went to pay for war.
In 1972 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sent them a letter
stating
that they owed $296,359 in unpaid taxes, fines, and penalties
for the past six years.
In their newspaper Dorothy explained that
they might lose their houses;
but she remained firm in her belief,
shared by the War Resisters International,
that wars will cease
when we refuse to pay for them.
She wondered how much the IRS
would think they owed
if they had counted up all the way back
from 1933!
The Catholic Worker was too busy helping the poor to
go through
the legal hassles of becoming a non-profit corporation,
which would also restrict their political activities.
However,
by verbal negotiation in June 1972 Government agents
were persuaded that they acted out of religious conviction.
Thus they were not
prosecuted because officials realized that
they would just continue
to act as they had in the past.
Ammon Hennacy was probably the
best known of the Catholic Workers
for refusing to pay income
tax while publicizing his protest.
He had been imprisoned for
nearly two years by the US Government
for refusing to be conscripted
into the war in 1917.
He worked as a laborer so that no tax would
be withheld and lived simply.
Dorothy Day encouraged other radical Catholics to protest
such
as the Jesuit brothers Dan and Phil Berrigan.
At the age of 75
she was arrested for picketing with Cesar Chavez
and the United
Farm Workers Union and spent twelve days in jail.
She died November
29, 1980;
the continuing Catholic Worker movement is her great
legacy.
On January 1, 1953 a woman calling herself Peace Pilgrim
began
walking around the United States and Canada for world peace.
By
1964 she had walked 25,000 miles, and she kept walking, praying,
counseling and teaching until her death in an automobile accident
on July 7, 1981.
She owned only the clothes she wore, a comb,
a folding toothbrush, a pen, and a few letters.
She walked until
she found shelter, and she fasted until she was given food.
She
discovered the golden rule as a child
and believed she could make
friends by being friendly.
She had a deep belief in God and prayer
and taught spiritual principles to all she met.
Peace Pilgrim described the steps of preparation for peace
as taking a right attitude
toward life, bringing one's life into
harmony with universal laws,
finding one's special place in life
by God's inner guidance, and simplifying life.
She recommended
purifying the body by a good diet,
purifying thought by reducing
negativity, purifying desire by seeking only God's will,
and purifying
motive by being of service.
Peace Pilgrim advised relinquishing
self-will, the feeling of separateness,
attachments to things
or people, and negative feelings.
Then the lightness beyond time
and space of peace could be attained
in the oneness that binds
all life together and permeates all.
Spiritual maturity is when
God or the higher self
controls the body, the mind, and the emotions.
Her credo was to use good to overcome evil, truth to overcome
falsehood,
and love to overcome hatred, and the key, she said,
is practice.
She believed that those who use violence are still
spiritually immature.
She noted the extreme contrast of the two
choices we face -
either a nuclear war of annihilation or the golden
age of peace.
Dagmar Wilson was the mother of three and worked as an artist
illustrating children's books.
She became concerned about the
policies of the Cold War and was influenced
by the ideas of Linus
Pauling, Bertrand Russell,
and Albert Einstein.
After hearing
a speech by psychiatrist Jerome Frank,
she joined the Committee
for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE).
During the Berlin wall crisis
she read about the protest of Bertrand Russell
and was moved to do something about his arrest.
When she learned
that SANE was planning no response, she called her friends.
On
September 21, 1961 they came up with the idea that
for peace women
could go on strike for one day.
The next day the women began issuing
their appeal to
"End the Arms Race - Not the Human Race,"
proclaiming,
"We strike against death, desolation, destruction
and on behalf of life and liberty."24
In October they explained
that women devote their lives to raising children to be healthy
and good citizens, but in the nuclear age all women, including
mothers,
have an urgent duty to work for peace so that their children
will have a future.
They were particularly concerned about reports
that the levels of strontium 90 in milk
had risen sharply since
the atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs.
By the end of 1958
there had been at least 190 tests of hydrogen bombs
including
125 by the United States.
Now the US and USSR were arguing over
who had broken the testing moratorium.
The women set November 1, 1961 as the strike day, and thousands
of women
in sixty cities refused to work on that day.
Women Strike
for Peace (WSP) gained much publicity, but the original initiators
did not want to form a traditional "top-down bureaucratic
peace organization."25
Instead, each local group was free
to plan and carry out
their own activities on the first-of-the-month
strike day.
Some WILPF activists worked with both groups; other
women preferred
the freedom of Women Strike for Peace, which was
"intentionally simple, pragmatic, non-ideological, moralistic,
and emotional."26
Instead of allowing the majority to rule
by voting, they worked for consensus on decisions.
Bella Abzug
from New York became the chairperson of WSP's legislative committee.
They used the slogan "Pure Milk Not Poison," and their
numbers grew.
In January 1962 Berkeley Women for Peace had a thousand
women
attend the California legislative session to oppose civil
defense legislation.
WSP urged women to boycott milk unless it
was decontaminated,
especially during periods of nuclear testing.
This prompted the US Public Health Service to warn mothers on
April 26, 1962
not to stop giving their children milk because
of the protests.
By then WSP had forty radiation committees pressuring
dairies, milk processors,
the US Department of Agriculture, and
the US Congress to purify the milk.
In June 1962 the Midwest group met at Ann Arbor and formulated
the following Women Strike for Peace policy statement:
We present a resolute stand of women in the United States
against the unprecedented threat to life from nuclear holocaust.
We are women of all races, creeds, and political persuasions
who are dedicated to the achievement of
general and complete disarmament
under effective international control.
We cherish the right and respect the responsibility
of the individual in a democratic society to act
to influence the course of government.
We join with women throughout the world to challenge
the right of any nation or group of nations
to hold the power of life or death over the world.27
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed
fourteen WSP women from the New York area for a hearing in December
1962.
This absurd endeavor was satirized by a cartoon in the Washington
Post
showing a Congressman asking his colleague if these people
are subversive
because they are women or because they are for
peace.
A hundred women volunteered to testify and were refused.
Three of the subpoenaed women refused to testify in secret, and
two years later
they were indicted for contempt of Congress;
their convictions were overturned by a higher court in August
1966.
In his book Thirty Years of Treason Eric Bentley
gave WSP credit
for striking the crucial blow in the final demise
of HUAC.
In 1963 Women Strike for Peace created a Clearing House on
the
Economics of Disarmament to publish an amateur bulletin, yet
they got expert advice
from the dissident economist Seymour Melman,
who
skillfully showed how bad militarism is for the economy.
United Nations Secretary-General
U Thant recognized the influential role
of Women Strike for Peace
by personally thanking Dagmar Wilson, Lorraine Gordon,
and Helen
Frumin before going to Moscow to witness the signing on August
5, 1963
of the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests
in the Atmosphere,
in Outer Space, and Underwater.
Popularly known as the partial
test ban treaty,
this at least moved nuclear tests underground.
By 1964 Women Strike for Peace had become as concerned
about the Vietnam War as they were about disarmament.
On March 16, 1965
Alice Hertz, an 82-year-old founder of Detroit WSP,
sacrificed
her own life by setting her body on fire in a Detroit shopping
center
in order to protest the escalation of the Vietnam War.
WSP organized many protests and sent Christmas cards signed
by
thousands of women to President Johnson in 1965.
The next year
WSP opposed the renewal of the draft.
In the summer of 1966 two
women from WSP and two from WILPF
were arrested for blocking a
napalm shipment from Santa Clara, California.
The following winter
2,500 women gathered outside the Pentagon
with photos of napalmed
Vietnamese children.
They demanded to speak to generals and banged
on the locked Pentagon doors with their shoes.
In 1970 WSP proclaimed
a "Declaration of Liberation from Military Domination."
That year Bella Abzug was elected to the US House of Representatives
from New York.
She and WSP called for the impeachment of Richard
Nixon as early as January 1972,
because he thwarted the Congressional
mandate and the will of the people to end the war.
The tremendous influence of feminism on the peace movement
in the 1960s and 1970s
is perhaps best typified by Barbara Deming.
Writing for The Nation and Liberation magazines,
she described
her participation in various nonviolent protest
movements.
She visited Cuba and North Vietnam and reported the
viewpoints of the other side.
She explained the philosophy and
methods of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA)
and their
recommendation of unilateral disarmament to all countries including
the Soviet Union.
In her account of the San Francisco to Moscow
walk the mirror images
of Russian and American fears and defense
policies were revealed.
At the same time the person-to-person
effectiveness of
nonviolent direct action was eloquently portrayed.
By walking for peace in the South she combined the quest for
civil
rights and justice with peace and nonviolence.
She was arrested
for civil disobedience in Birmingham, Alabama and Albany, Georgia.
During the Vietnam War she lectured and wrote about the atrocities
the United States
was perpetrating against the Vietnamese people.
She particularly pointed out the Lazy Dog bombs that are ineffective
against the
"steel and concrete" targets but were designed
to enter flesh.
She told of how schools, hospitals, and homes
were being bombed unmercifully.
Barbara Deming became a strong advocate of nonviolent revolution
as the most effective way to transform a violent and oppressive
society.
Although she sympathized with revolutionaries who feel
the need for violent methods
of liberation, she argued that in
nonviolent struggle there will be fewer casualties.
She acknowledged
that in standing up to violent power, some suffering is inevitable.
Yet she believed that the nonviolent action of assertive noncooperation
with the oppressors can be as strong and effective as violent
struggle
while maintaining the respect for everyone's human rights.
She wrote,
This is how we stand up for ourselves nonviolently:
we refuse the authorities our labor,
we refuse them our money (our taxes),
we refuse them our bodies (to fight in their wars).
We strike.28
She went on to recommend blocking, obstructing, and disrupting
the operation of a system in which people are not free.
At the
same time the adversary is confronted, their rights are respected,
and they are made to examine their conscience about what is just.
A violent response to a nonviolent action further reveals the
injustice
and loses sympathy from allies and supporters.
Deming
believed that nonviolent methods have barely begun to be used
with their full power.
Like Andrea Dworkin, Deming came to believe that nonviolence
must be combined
with radical feminism, for the patriarchal male
dominance over submissive women
pervades the entire society in
deeply ingrained ways.
Women and everyone in the peace movement
must insist on the equality of the sexes
and live the revolution
in their personal lives.
Feminism and pacifism have much in common.
Caroline Wildflower described how feminism improved the peace
movement.
She explained how in the 1960s the male leaders
were
reluctant to give women shared leadership.
Instead, women were
assigned to secretarial work.
When the Women's Movement started
raising the consciousness about these injustices
in society, changes
began to happen in spite of the resistance of habit.
Not only
were the authorities and hierarchies of society being challenged,
but the same structures within the peace groups were being
scrutinized
and criticized by empowered women.
The results of this continuing
evolution are that the group processes are becoming
more egalitarian,
jobs are rotated so that everyone is broadened,
women are expressing
an equal voice with more emotional power,
men are becoming more
sensitive to their own feminine qualities,
and a more healthy
overall balance is emerging.
In the 1980s the military buildup under President Reagan
stimulated
the peace movement to mobilize.
Women, minorities, and the poor
were being neglected
while the Pentagon budget accelerated.
The
issues became especially obvious to women when increased expenditures
on nuclear weapons, missiles, bombers, submarines, aircraft carriers,
etc.
were compared to decreases in education, health, job training,
family aid,
food, housing, energy, civil rights, environmental
protection, etc.
The five-year military budget for the US alone
was projected at 1.6 trillion dollars.
World military expenditures
average $19,300 per soldier
while public education spending averaged
$380 per student.
The governmental budgets of the western powers
allotted four times
as much money to military research as they
did to health research.
The world in 1982 spent 1800 times as
much on military forces
as it did on international peacekeeping.
In April 1982 the Women's Pentagon Action Unity Statement included
the following:
Our cities are in ruins, bankrupt;
they suffer the devastation of war.
Hospitals are closed,
our schools deprived of books and teachers.
Our Black and Latino youth are without decent work.
They will be forced, drafted to become cannon fodder
for the very power that oppresses them.
Whatever help the poor receive is cut or withdrawn
to feed the Pentagon which needs about $500,000,000 a day
for its murderous health....
We women are gathering
because life on the precipice is intolerable.29
Many women, such as Ann Davidon, spoke about breaking through
the
"macho mental barrier" and demilitarizing society
by shifting resources to useful production.
Sally Gearhart believed
"the rising up of women in this century to be the human race's
response to the threat of its own self-annihilation and the destruction
of the planet."30
She called upon the world's women to take
the responsibility for sustaining life.
The women's peace movement is truly international.
In October
1981 over a thousand women from 133 countries met
in Prague, Czechoslovakia
on the themes Equality, National Independence, and Peace.
They
all agreed that the nuclear arms race must be stopped
and that
women and men of good will can prevent nuclear war.
The Women's
International Democratic Federation (WIDF) reported on the activities
of the women's peace movement in Europe and the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of thousands of women were protesting the danger of war,
not only in western Europe but in eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union as well.
The Soviet Women's Committee reported that during
the last week of October 1982
Action for Disarmament was celebrated
in the USSR by fifty million people
with over 80,000 events in
protest of the arms race.
According to WIDF, in the spring of
1982 women demonstrated for peace
in Angola, Argentina, Australia,
Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Finland,
West Germany (800,000
citizens), East Germany (77,000 women),
Great Britain (100,000),
Greece, Italy, Japan (30,000 in Tokyo on Easter), Yemen,
Mauritius,
Mozambique (20,000 women), Nicaragua (100,000), Netherlands,
New
Zealand (20,000 women), Poland, Soviet Union, Sweden, and the
USA.
Women's peace camps were established at
Greenham Common in
England and at Seneca, New York.
Ruth Sivard published statistics comparing government
expenditures
on the military to social programs.
She noted that in 1986 the
total spending on military forces reached about $900 billion
as
what the world spent per soldier had increased to about $30,000
but what was
provided per school-age child for education had only
gone up to $455.
The two superpowers, the USA and USSR, were spending
60% of the
world's defense expenditures but had only 11% of the
world's population.
Yet military spending in underdeveloped nations
had increased 800 percent since 1960 after adjusting for inflation.
In 1988 Women for a Meaningful Summit from the United States
and Soviet Union
included Coretta Scott King, California Assemblywoman
Maxine Waters,
and Cora Weiss of SANE/FREEZE International.
Their
peace platform urged that the agreement to reduce strategic nuclear
weapons (START)
be concluded without delay, and they declared
that war is obsolete,
that nuclear and conventional weapons do
not provide security,
and that the "real enemies are hunger,
disease, racism,
poverty, inequality, injustice, and violence."
They suggested that by a partnership among all nations the systems
of war
could be "dismantled and replaced by systems of peace
and justice" using nonviolent means.
Comprehensive security
would include the "political, economic, military, humanitarian,
cultural, and environmental spheres."
They affirmed that
"no nation has the right to intervene
in the internal affairs
of other nations."31
They demanded that the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights be fully implemented,
and they called for strengthening
international institutions so that the United
Nations,
the International Court of Justice, and other
international
bodies could resolve conflict peacefully.
In 1997 Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban
Landmines (ICBL)
won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to get
121 nations
to sign the Mine Ban Treaty in Ottawa.
Before she
died, Princess Diana had also worked on this issue.
As of 2005
this treaty has been ratified by 143 nations,
but the United States,
Russia, China, India, both Koreas, Pakistan, Israel,
Egypt, Iran,
and Iraq are among the 42 nations that have refused.
About a hundred
million landmines exist in the earth, and despite these recent
efforts
about 15,000 to 20,000 casualties still occur each year.
In her acceptance speech Williams explained how landmines, once
they have been placed,
do not discriminate between soldiers and
civilians, and after the end of the war
they remain deadly indefinitely
unless they are removed.
She estimated that seventy countries
have been contaminated by tens of millions of mines.
Cambodia
still has about five million from the 1970s.
The United States
military reported that about thirty million mines
were scattered
throughout Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Six million landmines were
sown in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Angola has nine million;
Mozambique and Somalia have a million each.
The number of landmines
stockpiled throughout the world is estimated at 100-200 million.
The Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty bans the use, production,
trade and
stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines.
Outstanding reporting on peace issues comes from Pacifica radio's
Amy Goodman,
who hosts Democracy Now! on weekdays broadcasting
from New York City.
Pacifist and conscientious objector Lew Hill
founded Pacifica in April 1949
as a commercial-free community-supported
radio network
that is dedicated to peace and justice.
The first
station broadcasted as KPFA-FM in Berkeley.
KPFK-FM began broadcasting
from Los Angeles in 1957.
The next year Nobel prize-winner Linus
Pauling
debated Edward Teller, the inventor of the H-bomb.
WBAI
in New York joined the Pacifica family in 1960.
Pacifica radio
has withstood numerous efforts to censor its content and an investigation
by the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the
early 1960s.
In 1970 KPFT began broadcasting from Houston, and
it survived two bombings
of its transmitter towers by the Ku Klux
Klan in its first year.
WPFW started broadcasting from Washington
DC in 1977 after winning
a six-year battle for the last available
radio frequency in the nation's capital.
Amy Goodman won several awards for her courageous reporting
of the
Santa Cruz massacre in Dili, East Timor on November 12,
1991
for WBAI's popular Morning Show.
Jose Ramos-Horta, who won
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, gave Goodman credit
for publicizing
this massacre of peaceful demonstrators
that the Indonesia Government
tried to deny even happened.
She and Pacifica reporter Allan Nairn
were beaten by the Indonesian army;
but they were not killed probably
because they said they were Americans.
Goodman noted that the
United States had supplied their weapons.
Then they witnessed
the soldiers open fire on the large crowd gathered for a funeral;
271 people were killed, and another 270 have "disappeared."
The Democracy Now! program that Amy Goodman hosts began in
February 1996.
In 1999 her program "Drilling and Killing:
Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship" resulted in her being
banned from Chevron's public news conference.
In October 2000
the Pacifica program director Stephen Yasko tried to interfere
with the content of Democracy Now!, but Amy Goodman retained her
independent journalism from "the embattled studios of WBAI."
She continued to broadcast as "the exception to the rulers"
her "resistance radio" that includes important news
and interviews often ignored, neglected, or censored by the mainstream
media.
In August 2001 Pacifica took her program off the air, and
Democracy Now! had to move out of the WBAI studio and broadcast
from an alternate location for the one station that retained her
program.
After a struggle for power, a new Pacifica board was
elected in December, and her program was fully restored in January
2002 along with its employees who had been banned and fired.
Amy and her brother Andrew Goodman wrote The Exception to
the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the
Media that Love Them, and it was published in 2004.
Some of
the outstanding people given a voice on her program include Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Phyllis Bennis, Dan Berrigan, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey
Clark, Ani DiFranco, Phil Donohue, Ariel Dorfman, Robert Fisk,
Michael Franti, Col. Sam Gardiner, Danny Glover, Jason Halperin,
Jennifer Harbury, Chris Hedges, Seymour Hersh, Yolanda Huet-Vaughan,
Dennis Kucinich, Rita Lasar, Michael Meacher, Michael Moore, Ralph
Nader, Allan Nairn, John Perkins, Michael Ratner, Ken Saro-Wiwa,
Jeremy Scahill, Danny Schechter, Norman Solomon, Lynne Stewart,
Maxine Waters, Howard Zinn, and Andreas Zumach.
As of 2006 Democracy
Now! is syndicated on weekdays on more than four hundred
radio
stations, satellite television, and on the Internet at democracynow.org.
Aung San Suu Kyi was born in Rangoon on June 19, 1945.
Her
father Aung San, who led the independence revolution and was a
national hero,
was assassinated on July 19, 1947.
Her mother Khin
Kyi was ambassador to India 1960-67,
and Suu Kyi was influenced
by the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi.
She earned a degree in
philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University in 1967,
and she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York
from 1969 to 1971.
While working as a research officer in the
Foreign Ministry of Bhutan in 1972,
Suu Kyi married Michael Aris,
a scholar of Tibetan culture.
She was working on her doctoral
dissertation at Oxford on Burmese literature
in March 1988 when
she learned that her mother had a stroke.
Suu Kyi immediately
went back to Rangoon to take care of her
and was later joined
by her British husband and their two sons.
On July 23 General
Ne Win, who had ruled Burma as a one-party state since 1962,
announced
his retirement and proposed a referendum
on whether to have a
one-party or multi-party system.
The central committee of the
Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP)
elected new leaders who
decided not to have the referendum.
Student demonstrations led to some arrests, curfews,
and declaration
of martial law on August 3 as 10,000 people gathered.
Five days
later on 8-8-88 at 8:08 a.m. the pro-democracy movement was founded,
and a general strike began with tens of thousands demonstrating
in Rangoon.
On August 15 Aung San Suu Kyi proposed a People's
Consultative Committee
to act as an intermediary between the students
and the government.
Eleven days later she spoke to a rally of
a half million people
outside the Shwedagon Pagoda, calling for
free and fair elections as soon as possible.
On September 12 she,
Tin U, and Aung Gyi suggested an interim government.
Six days
later army officers took over the government
under the State Law
and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).
On September 24 Aung San
Suu Kyi, Tin U, and Aung Gyi formed the
National League for Democracy
(NLD) with Suu Kyi as General Secretary
as mass arrests and summary
executions of
pro-democracy activists occurred throughout Burma.
The BSPP became the National Unity Party (NUP) and by threatening
punishment
and dismissal brought an end to the general strike
on October 3.
Aung San Suu Kyi sent two letters to Amnesty International,
complaining that
on October 15 more than six hundred men had been
arrested
in Rangoon while sitting at tea shops or eating stalls.
Aung San Suu Kyi traveled throughout Burma for seven months
and
spoke to large crowds in more than a hundred places.
Aung San's
widow and Suu Kyi's mother, Khin Kyi, died on December 27,
and
hundreds of thousands attended the funeral in Rangoon.
Later in
January 1989 Aung San Suu Kyi's tour was disrupted by the military,
and 34 NLD workers were arrested.
In February she criticized the
human rights violations and the resumption of Japanese aid.
In
April, Captain Myint Oo threatened to kill Aung San Suu Kyi in
Danubyu.
Six soldiers jumped out of a jeep and pointed their guns
at her.
She calmly waved away her supporters and kept walking
down the road.
When The Working People's Daily launched
fierce attacks on the NLD
and Aung San Suu Kyi in June, she began
criticizing
Ne Win openly at mass rallies in Rangoon.
She announced
that she would lead a march on Martyrs' Day, July 19;
but eleven
trucks with troops were stationed outside her house,
and thousands
of soldiers patrolled the streets of Rangoon to prevent the NLD
from marching.
The next day SLORC put Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin
U under house arrest
while scores of NLD workers were jailed across
Burma.
Aung San Suu Kyi asked to be held in prison with the other
activists.
She fasted on water for twelve days until she was assured
that they would not be tortured.
In December 1989 a hundred political parties announced
their intention
to participate in the May 1990 elections.
Aung San Suu Kyi's candidacy
was challenged in January for her alleged connections
with insurgent
groups, and the Elections Commission barred her.
In the election
on May 27, 1990 the people of Burma elected the
National League
for Democracy (NLD) to 392 of the 485 seats contested.
However,
SLORC refused to transfer power, and Aung San Suu Kyi
remained
under house arrest for six years until July 1995.
She did not
even leave the country to accept the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize
because
she would not have been allowed back into Myanmar,
the name given
to Burma by the military authorities in 1989.
She had the prize
money put in a trust for the health and education of the Burmese
people.
Aung San Suu Kyi has written about the need for
democracy, nonviolence,
and national unity.
She countered criticisms that democracy is
not Burmese.
In "Quest of Democracy" she described the
ten Buddhist duties of kings,
which are liberality, morality,
generosity (self-sacrifice), integrity,
kindness (courage), austerity
(self-discipline), non-anger, nonviolence,
patience, and not opposing
the will of the people.
She argued that these Buddhist values
and principles of accountability
were more likely to produce democracy,
respect for public opinion,
and just laws than a ruling class
that does not honor the will of the people.
In "Freedom from Fear" Aung San Suu Kyi
suggested that
fear corrupts more than power.
It is not power that corrupts but fear.
Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it
and fear of the scourge of power
corrupts those who are subject to it.32
She wrote that the Burmese are aware of four kinds of corruption.
These are desire (from bribes or for one's friends),
doing wrong
from ill will toward enemies,
committing errors from ignorance,
and fear, which
she believed was the root cause of the other three.
She noted that public dissatisfaction with economic hardship
was
the primary motive of the democracy movement in Burma since 1988.
She suggested that one must have determination to persevere in
the struggle
and make sacrifices, that saints are sinners who
keep on trying,
and that the free are the oppressed who continue
to work for a free society.
She agreed with her father, who though
he founded Burma's national army,
believed that army officers
should stay out of politics.
On August 14, 1994 the United Nations representative Jehan Raheem,
US Congressman Bill Richardson, and New York Times reporter
Philip Shenon
were allowed to interview Aung San Suu Kyi,
and
the following month she met with two SLORC generals.
She was depicted
in John Boorman's film Beyond Rangoon in 1995.
Aung San
Suu Kyi was released from detention on July 11, 1995.
The next
day she asked international businesses
not to invest in Burma
until democracy was restored.
She also started a tourist boycott.
In October the NLD reappointed her General Secretary despite a
SLORC ban,
and she asked any organization working with the regime
in Burma also to consult with the NLD.
In 1996 the Ministry of
Information conducted a propaganda campaign
against Aung San Suu
Kyi by having the state media portray her as
an untrustworthy
female, a prostitute of her body and the nation,
and that her
husband Michael Aris was manipulating her like a puppet
at the
behest of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
SLORC accused
Aung San Suu Kyi of receiving $82,000 from the United States
for
her personal use while the US was providing $2.5 million through
the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International
Rescue Committee.
A cult was developing that suggested she is
an archetypal "Lady"
and a powerful spirit (Nat) of
Democracy, and she was
portrayed by the media as an un-Buddhist
animist.
On Human Rights Day, December 10, 1997 Aung San Suu Kyi asked
why
the government found it necessary to put their people in jail
if they do not have the support of the Burmese people.
In May
1998 Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD formed the
Committee Representing
People's Parliament (CRPP) based on those elected in May 1990.
However, an effort was made to divide the NLD as 25 members criticized
her for this.
The NLD demanded that the elected government be
seated by August 1998.
In July and August 1998 the army blocked
her car at a bridge twice to keep her
from leaving Rangoon even
though she spent several days in the car.
Burma suffers from severe
ethnic conflicts, but Aung San Suu Kyi believes that
democratic
institutions could provide the proper means of conflict resolution.
One does not need recourse to violence in order to rebel against
tyranny
and oppression as long as human rights are protected by
the rule of law.
Her husband had been diagnosed with prostate
cancer in 1997;
but he was not even allowed a visa so that he
could visit her, and he died in March 1999.
Police stopped her car from leaving Rangoon on August 24, 2000,
and a week later 200 riot police forced the convoy to return to
the capital.
The next day police raided her headquarters, seized
documents,
and arrested several members of the party.
On September
23, 2000 Aung San Suu Kyi and
other party leaders were detained
in their homes.
The next month the State Peace and Development
Council (SPDC) was persuaded
by the Malaysian prime minister Datuk
Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
to open a dialog with Aung San Suu Kyi.
In January 2001 NLD chairman Tin U and 84 other members were released
from custody,
and Suu Kyi hoped that her talks with the SPDC would
be productive.
That month the military stopped the outrageous
propaganda campaign
against her in the state-run media.
In April
more than thirty US Senators warned President George W. Bush
not
to lift the sanctions against the Myanmar regime.
Secret negotiations
by the United Nations led to her release in May 2002.
Eight other
members of the NLD were also let go,
but according to Amnesty
International more than 1,500 others were still in Burmese jails.
In 2003 Aung San Suu Kyi still would not leave Myanmar to accept
awards
because she would not be allowed to return.
In March she
was interviewed by the BBC, and she said that she did not look
upon
the generals as the enemy but that she wanted to work together
for a settlement
that would be beneficial to everyone, including
the military.
She was so popular that it was difficult for the
regime to arrest her in Rangoon.
However, in May 2003 they got
three hundred members of the
Union Solidarity and Development
Association (USDA)
to attack her caravan in the country near Mandalay.
Three weeks later some of her supporters were killed when the
army fired at her vehicle.
She remained with her supporters but
then was taken away by her driver.
Later they were arrested and
sent to Insein Prison.
The government claimed that she was under
protective custody.
After undergoing surgery in September, she
was moved back to house arrest.
Large banks helped the Myanmar
regime get around the tough sanctions
imposed by the United States
that went into effect in August 2003.
International protests of
her detention were held in June 2004,
and the rock band U2 dedicated
two songs to her.
In November 2005 the NLD confirmed that her
house arrest had been extended
for another year, and in response
the United States
raised the issue in the UN Security Council.
Medea Benjamin worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist
in Latin America
and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization
the World Health Organization, and the Swedish International
Development Agency.
After being a senior analyst for Food First,
in San Francisco
she co-founded Global Exchange in 1988.
Ten years
later the Washington Post credited this organization
with
putting labor rights on the human rights agenda.
Global Exchange
helped to organize large protests against the
World Trade Organization
meeting at Seattle in December 1999.
Benjamin was criticized by
some activists for her statement that it was correct
for Seattle
police to arrest "anarchists" who destroyed property.
Benjamin was instrumental in coordinating the anti-sweatshop campaigns
that have sprung up on college campuses, and she has led the effort
to get corporations,
such as Nike and the Gap, to establish ethical
codes of conduct.
In 1999 her work helped expose the indentured
servitude of garment workers in Saipan
that led to a billion-dollar
lawsuit against seventeen retailers.
She has also promoted worker
rights in China, the liberation of Indonesia
from the tyranny
of General Suharto, and self-determination for East Timor.
Benjamin
supported the peace process between the Zapatistas
and the Mexican
government and has struggled to
get the embargoes against Cuba
and Iraq lifted.
In 2000 Medea Benjamin was the Green Party candidate
for the US Senate in California.
She has written and edited books
to help link citizens of the first and third worlds,
and she wrote
a biography of Brazil's first poor and black woman senator, Benedita
da Silva.
Code Pink: Women for Peace was founded by Medea Benjamin, Jodie
Evans,
Starhawk, Diane Wilson, and about a hundred other women
on November 17, 2002
in order to protest the impending invasion
of Iraq by the George W. Bush administration.
They marched through
the streets of Washington and began a vigil
in front of the White
House that lasted four months.
Their vigil was supported by Greenpeace,
WILPF, WAND, Public Citizen, NOW,
Women for Women International,
Neighbors for Peace and Justice, and others.
In September 2002
when Donald Rumsfeld was testifying at a
House Armed Services
Committee hearing, Benjamin and Diane Wilson
chanted, "Inspections,
not war" and were removed.
A month later Wilson scaled the
fence at the White House and was arrested
by the Secret Service;
she was banned from Washington for one year.
Wilson and two other
protestors were arrested in Austin when the Texas legislature
was passing a resolution supporting the war.
In February 2003
Benjamin and eleven other women visited Baghdad to assess
the
likely impact of war, and they concluded that
the UN inspections
to remove weapons were working.
On International Women's Day,
March 8, more than 10,000 people marched in Washington,
and about
two dozen women were arrested for protesting the imminent war.
By the end of 2003 there were more than a hundred
Code Pink chapters
which act autonomously.
Code Pink Central sends out weekly Code
Pink Alerts to more than 30,000 people.
Code Pink activists have
presented themselves in pink slips (women's lingerie)
to warn
politicians and other public figures such as Fox News' Bill O'Reilly
and FCC director Michael Powell that the people may fire them
from their jobs.
In 2004 Medea Benjamin was dragged off the floor of the Democratic
national convention in handcuffs for having displayed a banner
which read, "End the Occupation! Bring the Troops Home Now!"
At the Republican convention she was also removed,
and her sign
read, "Pro-Life: Stop the Killing in Iraq."
Benjamin
was also ejected from Bush's second inaugural ceremony.
After
the destruction of Falluja in November 2004, Code Pink helped
Global Exchange and Families for Peace to raise $600,000
in humanitarian
relief for the refugees from Falluja.
In 2005 Benjamin traveled
to Iraq with military families
who had lost loved ones in the
war, and she organized the
Occupation Watch Center to coordinate
humanitarian aid to Iraqis.
To protest the closing of the Salinas
library in California because of lack of funding,
Code Pink organized
a 24-hour read-in in April 2005.
That month women unfurled banners
and spoke out at the Congressional hearing
for UN ambassador nominee
John Bolton.
In the book Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence
and Terrorism,
which she edited with Jodie Evans,
Benjamin
recommends the following ten actions for peace:
1. Educate yourself on the issues.
2. Demand truthful media.
3. Communicate!
4. Hold your leaders accountable.
5. Help the United States kick our oil addiction.
6. Build the peace movement.
7. Support members of the military who are speaking out.
8. Protect our civil liberties and oppose the backlash against immigrants.
9. Support the creation of a Department of Peace.
10. Teach peace.33
If men through their aggression, power urges, and rigid stubbornness
have caused war after war, then women through their love, nurturing,
and flexibility
can help us to learn how to prevent wars in order
to save our civilization.
Western civilization in the twentieth
century became
pathologically destructive, endangering all life.
Much therapy and healing is needed to cure the disease of masculine
militarism.
Feminist nonviolence is clearly the remedy
recommended
by the greatest of the peacemakers.
Our society as a whole and
each person individually must learn to revere
the loving, sensitive,
caring, empathetic qualities of our being.
Women are excellent
teachers of peace in this process that will evolve
into a balanced,
healthy, integrated, and just society.
Feminism has enabled women
to take their rightful place in the anti-nuclear movement,
thus
strengthening the power and health of the peace movement.
1. Lay Down Your Arms by Bertha von Suttner, tr. T.
Holmes, p. 424.
2. The Great Adventure by Maude Royden quoted in Women
Against the Iron Fist
by Sybil Oldfield, p. 53.
3. "The Power of Words" by Simone Weil quoted in Women
Against the Iron Fist
by Sybil Oldfield, p. 77.
4. "Europe's Colonialism in Africa and Asia" by Simone
Weil quoted in
Women Against the Iron Fist by Sybil Oldfield,
p. 84.
5. Quoted in Women Strike for Peace by Amy Swerdlow, p.
27.
6. Quoted in American Women's Activism in World War I by
Barbara J. Steinson, p. 35.
7. Crystal Eastman to Jane Addams, 28 June 1917, quoted in Women
Strike for Peace
by Amy Swerdlow, p. 31.
8. On Women & Revolution by Crystal Eastman, p. 238.
9. Women at The Hague by Jane Addams, p. 71.
10. Ibid., p. 84.
11. Ibid., p. 91.
12. Ibid., p. 164.
13. Quoted in Women Strike for Peace by Amy Swerdlow, p.
32.
14. Ibid.
15. Niagara Falls Conference Minutes, 19 Aug. 1921, WPU:NYPL,
quoted in
The Women's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War:
1921-1942 by
Harriet Hyman Alonso, p. 19.
16. Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: 1915-1965
by Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, p. 122.
17. Ibid., p. 162.
18. Ibid., p. 163.
19. By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy
Day, p. 48.
20. Quoted in Dorothy Day by William D. Miller, p. 241.
21. By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy
Day, p. 261.
22. Ibid., p. 280.
23. Ibid., p. 228.
24. Women Strike for Peace by Amy Swerdlow, p. 18.
25. Ibid., p. 49.
26. Ibid., p. 51.
27. Ibid., p. 88.
28. "Nonviolence and Radical Social Change" by Barbara
Deming in
Revolution & Equilibrium, p. 223.
29. Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence,
p. 415.
30. Ibid., p. 266.
31. "Women for a Meaningful Summit" in Women on War,
p. 66.
32. Freedom from Fear and Other Writings by Aung San Suu
Kyi, p. 180.
33. Stop the Next War Now, p. 223-225.
This is a chapter in World Peace Efforts Since Gandhi,
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