ZURICH 1919
Feminist pacifism and world peace
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I am currently working on a book manuscript on the Zurich Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in May 1919. This gathering of international feminist pacifists took place as a shadow peace conference during the larger show in Paris. WILPF members had wanted in 1915 to meet in the same city as the main gathering but Paris was only open to members of the Entente and its friends. The Zurich Congress enabled women from both sides of the war, and activists from neutral countries, to meet to propose new ways of conceiving of peace that directly engaged issues of social justice as the foundations of international stability. Moreover, the Zurich meeting provided some of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the structure of peace—including the form of the League of Nations—emerging from Paris. Thereafter, the WILPF set up a permanent office in Geneva to lobby the League and promote pacifist education and peaceful international interaction as a solvent to postwar tensions. The WILPF remains one of the leading global feminist peace organizations, with offices in New York, and, still, in Geneva.
This project is the outgrowth of a number of smaller projects under the broad heading of feminist internationalism (circa 1880-1930). These originated in a comparison of a number of Pragmatist thinkers in the United States whose common approach to American internationalism divided during the First World War in terms of their respective commitment to peace. The division appeared to have something to do with gender. An essay I wrote for an edited collection published in France (“Mead, Addams, Balch: Feminism, Pragmatism, and the Vicissitudes of Liberal Internationalism,” in Claire Delahaye and Serge Ricard (dir.), La Grande Guerre et le combat féministe. (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009): 93-126) compared the incipient feminist internationalism of Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch with that of their erstwhile intellectual ally, University of Chicago sociologist and Pragmatist, George Herbert Mead. This work led to further inquiries into the formation of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (in 1915 and 1919) and my belated reading of the research of Leila Rupp, Jo Vellacott, Lela B. Costin, Sandi E. Cooper, Linda K. Schott, Erika Kuhlman, David Patterson, and others.
What is historically significant about WILPF was that it worked from the outset as a public symbol of a genuinely transnational organization. Balch, who was its first postwar secretary, wrote in late 1922 that in her view the WILPF was “infinitely more significant in its essence, in its purpose, than in its accomplishments.”[1] For one, it constitutionally established itself as an intrinsically international organization rather than a federation of national chapters. Its executive of nine (plus a president) was elected only by members of its yearly international congresses; there was no allocation of positions by nationality.[2] This was a distinctive expression of the processes of globalization at the turn of the century, a social reproduction of the growing mobility and integration of political movements, and, finally, a socio-spatial form that was both critical of the logic of nationalism and of the “mutual and exclusive embeddedness of social space and geographic space.”[3]
Second, the WILPF’s Zurich Congress in the spring of 1919 produced the first published criticisms of the draft version of the Versailles Treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations. It charged both with violating the principles upon which a “just and lasting peace” could be built, with implicitly rewarding secret diplomacy in territorial and colonial adjustments, with denying self-determination, with imposing disarmament only on one side, and with developing economic proposals that doomed half the continent to poverty, despair, and social anarchy. The WILPF wanted the authority of the League Council weakened (Catherine Marshall complained that the permanent seats on the Council belonged precisely to the Great Powers who had no interest in making the League work),[4] and better provisions made for the protection of minorities by rejecting the “absolute sovereign rights of states.” They also wanted a comprehensive commitment to disarmament, an easier amendment process, the abrogation of regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine, and a fully transparent publishing of League business in order to build a functioning international public sphere.[5] Finally, the Zurich meeting proposed the adoption by the peacemakers of a “Women’s Charter,” which called for obligatory female representation in the new League and the extension of political rights to women as a precondition for a state’s admission to League membership. “They recognize that differences in social development and tradition make strict uniformity with respect to the status of women difficult of immediate attainment. But, holding as they do, that social progress is dependent upon the status of women in the community, they think that there are certain principles which all communities should endeavour to apply.”[6]
The iconography at the time always represented peace as a woman— either a winged angel carrying an olive branch, or a protective nurse, or mother, ministering to a wounded humanity. Yet two separate women’s organizations, including the WILPF, petitioned the Council of Ten for recognition in the spring of 1919, and were ignored on the grounds that women’s rights were a “domestic” matter.[7] The WILPF’s Charter was an attempt to construct a concept of rights that transcended sovereignty precisely because the domestic sphere of the nation-state was the location of their political marginalization. This was an incipient call for the codification of trans-border human rights some 30 years before the idea would finally emerge under the auspices of the United Nations.
In the early 1920s, the WILPF attempted in a myriad of ways to bring about a new culture of internationalism that spoke to such humanitarian conceptions. It sent a mediation team to Ireland; it formed a Commission for Eastern Europe; in January 1921 it hosted an economics and labour conference in Geneva to address reparations and the lasting effects of malnutrition and economic chaos; it was involved in the October 1920 conference of the British-based Fight the Famine Council for Economic Reconstruction, sending its principal French members, Gabrielle Duchêne and Jeanne Mélin as representatives.[8] It worked to forge close ties with the League of Nation’s International Labour Office, as well as a host of other like-minded non-governmental organizations that circled around Geneva in the 1920s.[9] On Duchêne’s advice, Mélin (who was from the Ardennes) was sent by Balch to recruit Belgian feminists despite persistent signs that “internationalism” was still deeply unpopular in the country and equated with Bolshevism. She returned with the beginnings of a Belgian feminist international that included a socialist committee that worked to raise money for starving Viennese children.[10]
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The WILPF’s Vienna Congress in 1921 was followed by a two-week summer school (“Education for internationalism”) in Salzburg in August, hosted by the humanist writer Stefan Zweig and his wife.[11] The 1922 summer school in Lugano, Italy, saw Herman Hesse, Romain Rolland, Bertrand Russell, and Tolstoy’s biographer Paul Birukoff as guests. In December 1922, the WILPF organized a “Conference for a New Peace “in The Hague, in which Mélin was the main French worker. After this, Addams, Marshall, and Mélin toured Britain, France, Holland, and Scandinavia to promote their call for a wholesale revision of the peace terms.[12] These activities also reflected the WILPF’s belief that one of its methods must be the promotion of educational change amongst the postwar youth, liberating them from their past hatreds.
There were, as well, numerous small gestures: German women opened Houses of Reconciliation in northeastern France. They lobbied for new content in German schools that downplayed martial heroism and emphasized the interdependence and diversity of peoples. French women, in turn, collected aid for German children in the occupied Ruhr and lobbied their own government against the occupation and reparations. Duchêne formed the Comité français de Secours aux Enfants after 1921 to organize relief efforts for Austrian and Russian children. German feminists Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg invited Mélin to talk in Stuttgart, to show to German citizens that someone who had to flee her home in the Ardennes before German soldiers was capable of seeing differently. “This would be much needed peace propaganda in Germany, especially among youth,” wrote Marguerite Gobat, a Swiss pacifist and assistant to Balch in Geneva. “A French as you, from the areas devastated by the Germans also, could perform miracles.”[13] Mélin could not go in the end but Duchêne took her place. Before a German audience, she reminded them how she and a small band of French women had in 1915 resisted hyper nationalism and forged ties with the feminist international. Their aim was to reject the “yoke of masculinity”, as she put it, but not just for their personal liberation; it was an understanding that as long as the world is classified into social classes of one form or another, the world lives in a permanent state of civil war. It is this will to domination, the constant dividing of the world into categories, that was the basis of war.[14]
The work of the WILPF, however ineffective it might have been in stemming interwar instability, was part of a general commitment to the instantiation of a general and broader category of universal human rights. I would argue, in fact, that these “outsiders” were the principal agents of these efforts to convert the League of Nations into a protector of women, children, and minority rights as a new form of international legal discourse. Any international history that focuses exclusively on the actions of diplomats and strategists will miss the incubation of one of the more important developments of the 20th century and its gendered origins.
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NOTES
[1] Balch, “Women’s work for peace,” The World Tomorrow (November 1922), 334, in “Miscellaneous writings, 1920-1922,” reel 21, Balch Papers, SCPC.
[2] WILPF Constitution, WILPF Papers, SCPC; Political Committee Resolution in the League of Nations, ICW Report, Zurich (1919), 58; Mary Chamberlain, “The women at Zurich,” Survey, (June 14, 1919), reprinted in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler, and Susan Strasser, eds., Social justice feminists and the United States and Germany: a dialogue in documents, 1885-1933 (Ithaca, 1998), 231.
[3] Paolo Boccagni, “Rethinking transnational studies: transnational ties and the transnationalism of everyday life,” European Journal of Social Theory 15, 1 (2012), 120.
[4] Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for peace, 35. The proposed amendments to the Covenant are in Political Committee Resolution in the League of Nations, ICW Report, Zurich (1919), 55-59, and 69-75, WILPF Records, SCPC.
[5] "Resolutions to be presented," International Congress of Women, Zürich, May 12-17, 1919, International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, Fonds Gabrielle Duchêne, Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The Paris Peace conference first received representations from an Inter-Allied Women’s Suffrage Conference hosted by the French suffrage organizations in Paris from the 10-16th of February 1919. The conference was held too soon after the end of the war for any of the American principals of the US suffrage movement to get passports. The Americans present were women who happened to be in France at the time. The French papers on the conference and its mission to the main Peace Conference are in the records of the Conseil National des femmes françaises, including, Millicent Fawcett to Woodrow Wilson, 24 February 1919; Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger to Wilson, 27 January 1919, and 3 February 1919; Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, letter to Clemenceau, 11 February 1919 and 19 February 1919; Message et lettres circulaire adressé à messieurs le Plénipotentaires, Conference des Femmes Suffragistes de Pays alliées et des Etats Unis [1919], all in Conférence des femmes suffragistes des pays alliés tenue du 11 février au 28 juin 1919 à Paris (1AF 164-172), and 1AF 166 Déroulement de la conference, Union Francaise Pour le Suffrage des Femmes (UFSF), Fonds Cécile Brunschvicg, Le Centre des archives du feminism, Université d’Angers, Angers, France. See also Witt-Schlumberger to Woodrow Wilson, 18 January 1919, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson [PWW], vol. 54, 1919, 133, Gilbert Close to Witt-Schlumberger, 24 January 1919, PWW, 54, 1919, 262. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, representing women from both sides of the war, met in Zurich from May 12 to 17, 1919, and sent a delegation to Paris to present the “Women’s Charter” to the Council of Ten. See Nina Boyle, The Voters' Council [UK] letter sent to Lloyd George, Wilson, House and Cecil, n.d., with attached "The Womens' [sic] Charter", 1AF 166 Déroulement de la conference, Fonds Cécile Brunschvicg. In both cases, the Peace conference made only a few minor concessions to demands for better representation, claiming, in the end, that suffrage was a divisive domestic issue that could not be introduced into the proceedings, however much Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George were personally sympathetic. On both meetings, see Jo Vellacott, “Feminism as if all people mattered” working to remove the causes of war, 1919-1929,” Contemporary European History 10, 3, (November 2001), 375-383.
[8] Sheepshanks was also secretary of the council, who, along with Swanwick, provided a bridge between the female WILPF and the British UDC. Sheepshanks to Jeanne Mélin, 17 September 1920, correspondence, box 40, dossier 1920, Fonds Jeanne Mélin, Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP), Paris. The results of that meeting were published as The needs of Europe: its economic reconstruction (London, 1920). As it turns out, none of the French delegates could attend.
[9] WILPF Report on activities relating to the League of Nations, November 1920 – March 1921, miscellaneous writings (1920-1922), Balch Papers, SCPC.
[10] Balch urged Mélin despite reports that pacifism and internationalism were not popular: “I would love to have a group of our Belgian League, working for reconciliation of the spirits of world peace.” Balch to Mélin, 13 August 1920; Balch to Mélin, 15 August 1920, Balch to Mélin, 18 October 1920, correspondence, box 40, dossier 1920, Fonds Jeanne Mélin, Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé, BHVP. Mélin’s report of the Relief Committee for Viennese Children caused Balch to reply: “Que c'est beau tout de même, cette aide aux enfants des 'ennemis' d'hier." (From her October 18th letter). Mélin was also thinking of going on tour to the United States with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, but the sudden death of her father kept her closer to home and she agreed to go to Belgium instead. Mélin to Pethick-Lawrence, 4 September 1920, correspondence, box 40, dossier 1920, Fonds Jeanne Mélin, BHVP; Balch to Mélin, 13 August 1920, Dossier 1920 Vie international, Ligue Internationale Des Femmes Pour La Paix et la Liberté (L.I.F.P.L.). Vie Internationale, cote: F delta res 207, box 1, Fonds Gabrielle Duchêne, Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre.
[11] Zweig had a home in Salzburg and after his self-imposed exile in Switzerland during part of the war, he returned there in the early 1920s. He described 1919, 1920 and 1921 as “the three worst post-war years in Austria.” Zweig, The world of yesterday, 329. On the summer school, see Notice announcing the Third Congress of the WILPF, Vienna from the 10 to the 16th of July 1921, box 34, Fonds Jeanne Mélin, Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé, BHVP.
[12] "Direkt Anlända Från Konferensen I Haag För En Ny Fred,” Sunday 17 December at. 7.30 Eve, the Music Academy's Great Hall, Stockholm, box 34, Fonds Jeanne Mélin, Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé, BHVP.
[13] "It seems that the much needed peace propaganda in Germany, especially among youth. A French as you, from the areas devastated by the Germans also, could perform miracles. We shall have to ask you a favor like this, but I await the arrival of Miss Balch for that and do not want to confuse issues. You have been appointed at the annual meeting of our Executive Committee, as a speaker at the League. Noblesse oblige!” Lida Gustava Heymann to Mélin, 1 August 1920; Heymann to Mélin, 16 September 1920; Heymann to Mélin, 9 October 1920; Heymann to Mélin, 1 November 1920; Mélin to Getrude Baer 30 December 1920; Mélin to C. Ramondt Hirschmann [Amsterdam WILPF] 30 December 1920, correspondence, box 40, dossier 1920, Fonds Jeanne Mélin, Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé, BHVP.
[14] [Duchêne] “Je suis heureuse de venir…” undated speech [1921], Dossier 1921 Vie internationale (correspondance), Ligue Internationale Des Femmes Pour La Paix Et La Liberté (L.I.F.P.L.). Vie Internationale, Cote: F delta res 207, box 1, Fonds Gabrielle Duchêne, Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre.
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