The Politics of Women's Suffrage

Front matter

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Contents

Foreword: the women’s movement, war and the vote.

Some reflections on 1918 and its aftermath

Susan R. Grayzel, Utah State University List of tables

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Contents

Working through social and cultural structures

. English girls’ schools and women’s suffrage

Helen Sunderland, University of Cambridge

. ‘A mistake to raise any controversial question at the present time’: the careful relationship of Glasgow’s suffragists with the press, 1902-18 Sarah Pedersen, Robert Gordon University

. “The weakest link’: suffrage writing, class interests and the isolated woman of leisure

Sos Eltis, University of Oxford

. Militancy in the marital sphere: sex strikes, marriage strikes and birth strikes as militant suffrage tactics, 1911-14 Tania Shew, University of Manchester

Navigating international structures

‘East Side Londoners’: Sylvia Pankhurst’s lecture tours of North America and the East London Federation of Suffragettes

Katherine Connelly, Arcadia University

Suffrage internationalism in practice: Dora Montefiore and the lessons of Finnish women’s enfranchisement Karen Hunt, University of Keele

Emotions and empire in suffrage and anti-suffrage politics: Britain, Ireland and Australia in the early twentieth century

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, University of Wollongong

From Votes for Women to world revolution: British and Irish suffragettes and international communism, 1919-39 Maurice J. Casey, Irish Emigration Museum

Afterword: a tale of two centennials: suffrage, suffragettes and the limits of political participation in Britain and America

Nicoletta E Gullace, University of New Hampshire viii

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Foreword: the women’s movement, war and the vote.

Some reflections on 1918 and its aftermath*

Susan R. Grayzel

‘As a woman I have no country, as a woman I want no country, as a woman my country is the whole world.’

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

I The epigraph above comes from a text that Virginia Woolf published ten years after British women in the metropole, although not in all the territories of its extensive empire, finally received the vote on equal terms as men as the franchise finally extended across class and gender lines in 1928.' These words have inspired generations of women and are both meaningless (because women do live and have lived in countries, states and nations and under political regimes, whether or not they choose them) and yet speak to something that has been at the root of feminism historically. Even in the decidedly national campaigns for women’s suffrage, such as those of the United Kingdom illuminated in this volume, the exclusion of women from full political rights based on their perceived biology is truly a global story. For this essay, Pm using Woolf’s famous phrase as a touchstone because I want briefly to think aloud about some aspects of feminist internationalism as connected to feminist anti-militarism. I do so in order to address some of the meanings of the winning of partial suffrage for British women in 1918 as the first modern, total war came to an end. ‘The editors, Lyndsey Jenkins and Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, have done an excellent job of stating why the chapters that follow contribute to the

* Tam grateful to the editors for inviting me to participate in this exciting volume and for their feedback, as well as to Nadja Durbach, Nicky Gullace, Tammy Proctor and Michelle Tusan for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

© Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938, rpt. Harmondworth, 1982). For crucial work on women’s suffrage across the British Empire, see Ian Christopher Fletcher, Philippa Levine and Laura E. Nym Mayhall (eds.), Womens Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (London, 2000).

ix history of suffrage as a core aspect of Britain’s political history. I can only concur and share my admiration for the compelling new research in this volume, which takes us from feminist organizing in local communities to engagement with the global movements for rights and justice, from the nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. I hope to offer a way to help us appreciate how they might fit into some aspects of a broader, global history of women’s politics.

One thing to note at the outset is the diversity of motivating factors for women to become involved in conventional politics. The essays in this volume attest to that. The modern women’s suffrage campaign brought together those concerned with the specific injustices women faced and determined to ameliorate the challenges of living life as a woman. In many cases, these issues had long motivated extra-parliamentary politics. These included, but were not limited to, the inadequacy of wages or living standards, the consequences of the double standard for what was deemed immorality, the ongoing problem of maternal and infant welfare and the inability to gain access to further education or better-paid jobs. When seeking to address what needed to be done, women ran into obstacles to achieving any of these aims because they lacked an overt political voice. For decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the International Council of Women (ICW) had avoided endorsing suffrage while helping to expose the subordination of women internationally. The International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which emerged from this group in 1904, turned to the franchise as a remedy for this.” As women began to acquire a political voice in a few states, British women could turn to their campaigns as models, as Karen Hunt illustrates so helpfully in her essay on what the landmark suffrage victory for Finnish women could mean. We have a more robust vocabulary for understanding citizenship than restricting it solely to the political sphere. However, occupying a position without access to a ballot in a democratic regime solely on the basis of gender served to unite women, despite their differing aims, agendas and, as the early twentieth-century suffrage movement makes clear, their tactics.’

> This is nicely summed up in M. Kamester and J. Vellacott, ‘Introduction to Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War (London, 1987), pp. 4—6.

3 For a useful summation of the varieties of citizenship and their meanings for women, see K. Canning and S. O. Rose, ‘Introduction to Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities, ed. K. Canning and S. O. Rose (Oxford, 2002). For an overview of feminist ideas and their response to politics in Europe, see K. Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif., 2000). For essential work on the tactics of the militant suffrage campaign, see L. E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford, 2003).

No matter their motivation, those advocating female equality ran up against anti-suffrage discourses that tended to focus on female incapacity: the ways in which women were not qualified for participation in politics or needed to be sheltered from its corrupting influences in order to safeguard their vital roles as wives and mothers. As Sharon Crozier-De Rosa reminds us in this volume, there was a deeply emotional element to women's political organizing and the responses to it. Fear of what might happen to wives and mothers certainly motivated some anti-suffragists. But fear of what would happen to future wives and mothers if they lacked adequate provisions or redress was precisely what compelled other feminists to engage with and then to enter public political life. Women’s politics then as now were intersectional, bound up with class, age, race, and sexuality, but they were also caught up in many states with their assigned roles in relation to their nation.

For instance, male participation in military action and the supposition that women were somehow naturally excluded from this formed a consistent feature of anti-women’s suffrage arguments transnationally, perhaps heightened in states with military conscription. Across many geographic areas, the nation-state saw a particular role for men as warriors, for women as mothers. While warriors in modern states needed a voice in the decision making process, what mothers were thought mainly to need was protection. Yet, as sociologist Dorit Geva has pointed out, many states that implemented conscription as an obligation of male citizenship (such as France) always included an exemption for men in certain family circumstances. This meant that family roles and national roles were understood to be competing rather than complementary.‘ In the decades that witnessed the height of activism in favour of women’s suffrage, some put forward arguments based less on rejecting such binary categorization about national service than on arguing that equal rights could coexist with difference, that enfranchising women could yield a reordering of priorities for the betterment of women and of the world. Nowhere was this more evident than in women-centred and feminist campaigns against militarism.

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Feminist anti-militarism was one thread uniting activism as international campaigns for women’s suffrage were being invigorated at the turn of the

+ D. Geva, Conscription, Family and the Modern State (Cambridge, 2013). For more on the development of women’s anti-militarism, see Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History, pp. 144-6, 247-9, 257—61. For a summation of some feminist anti-militarist arguments, see S. R. Grayzel, Women’ Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), ch. 5.

xi century and the first decades of the twentieth century. This coincided with a decidedly transnational effort to promote the curtailment of war. In 1899, the same year that the first Hague Convention convened, Austrian Berta von Suttner published the internationally acclaimed, bestselling novel Lay Down Your Arms!, detailing the sufferings that war placed upon wives and mothers.’ While it would take international law a long time to recognize the status of civilians, and even longer to say anything about wartime sexual violence, the 1899 Hague Convention acknowledged, for the first time, that there should be ‘undefended’ places protected from the violence of modern war ‘even for the purposes of reprisal’.° In 1905, Suttner became the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her continued work on disarmament, and two years later, a second Hague Convention resumed to promote international efforts to regulate if not curtail war.

Following the Russo-Japanese war and further tensions between the Great Powers over their imperial holdings, the Second Hague Convention occurred against a backdrop aware of the increased potential for international conflict.” As one of the opening speeches perhaps over-optimistically asserted, ‘the whole civilized world’ felt a ‘sentiment of international amenity’ that fostered the limiting of war’s effects." Such sentiments found expression in the petitions and proposals brought forward by peace societies and other extra-governmental organizations excluded from addressing the conference and partaking in its discussions. Significantly, an exception was made to such rules in order to permit delegates of the ICW to meet with the Conference’s president. As the president then noted, this group ‘representing as it did millions of women all over the world’ deserved to be heard, and he assured them ‘that the Conference wished to reduce as much as possible the suffering which war entailed upon all, and especially upon women.”

> Bertha von Suttner is credited with persuading Albert Nobel to create the Peace Prize a few years after the publication of her novel, Die Waffen Nieder (1889) or Lay Down Your Arms, which emphasized the war-induced suffering of women and children. See D. S. Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (London, 2008), p. 7; Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History, p. 247.

See Articles 62 and 63 of the Hague Conventions of 1899, “The Avalon Project at Yale Law School <www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague> [accessed 20 Oct. 2018]. For an introductory overview of international law on such issues, see C. Eboe-Osuji,

International Law and Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts (Leiden and Boston, 2012). 7 ‘Latest News: The Second Peace Conference’, The Times, 15 June 1907. 8

Speech of President Nelidoff, cited in “The Hague Conference’, The Times, 17 June 1907. ° Quoted in “The Peace Conference’, The Times, 19 June 1907.

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As a product of the last large-scale international gathering to restrict military action before the outbreak of the First World War, the Hague Conventions of 1907 affirmed the protection of particular spaces, articulating that attack ‘by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended is prohibited’.'° Yet the Naval Convention of 1907 allowed for the bombardment by sea of ‘military works, military or naval establishments, depots of arms or war materiel, workshops or plant[s] which could be utilized for the needs of the hostile fleet or army, and the ships of war in the harbor’." In other words, one segment of the agreement protected ‘undefended’ locales (with their women and children) but another made anything that even potentially served a military purpose — anything that helped the army or navy — a legitimate target. This obviously had implications for internationalist feminist anti-war activism prior to 1914 that spoke out against the vulnerability of domestic spaces inhabited by women and children.”

Another potent strand of feminist opposition to war rooted it directly in the female, especially the maternal, body. This was articulated perhaps most forcefully at the time by South African Olive Schreiner in her 1911 Woman and Labour, whose publication notably occurred at the height of UK suffrage militancy, a movement also rooted in martyred bodies.” For Schreiner, women pay ‘the first cost on all human life’, producing the primal munitions of war as mothers and yet, she continues, such beliefs are not limited to ‘actual’ mothers; ‘there is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer’ who can look at a battlefield strewn with dead and not think ‘so many mother’s

12 Amendment of Article 25, Hague Convention 1907, in “The Laws of War’, at “The Avalon Project at Yale Law School’, <www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hagueo4> [accessed 20 Oct. 2018] and also cited in T. D. Biddle, ‘Air Power’, in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, ed. M. Howard, G. J. Andreopoulos and M. R. Shulman (New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 142.

= ‘Article 1 and Article 2’, ‘Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War (Hague IX) 18 Oct. 1907’ in “The Laws of War’, at “The Avalon Project at Yale Law School’, <www.yale. edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hagueog> [accessed 20 Oct. 2018] and also quoted in Biddle, ‘Air Power’, p. 143.

» Such activism has been discussed briefly in Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History, and for Britain in J. Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London, 1989), and most fully in S. Cooper, “The Work of Women in Nineteenth Century Continental European Peace Movements’, Peace & Change, ix (1984), 11—28 and her Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War in Europe 1815-1914 (New York, 1991).

8 Fora thoughtful critique of the militant suffrage use of hunger strikes and responses to force-feeding, see S. Pedersen, ‘A Knife to the Heart’, London Review of Books, xl (2018).

xiii sons. More significant for the discussion here is Schreiner’s equation of ‘munition’ with flesh and particularly with the bodies of soldiers; if both men and women bear the cost of war, the battle zone imagined here is laden with male combatant, not female non-combatant, bodies."

A more disturbing imagined prospect of broader, even limitless, battle zones strewn with the bodies of men, women and children came with the prospect of war in the air. A little known work by Berta von Suttner, The Barbarization of the Sky (published in 1912), pointed out what this could mean for women. Writing in response to the innovative documented use of military air power (in an imperial context by Italy in its war with Libya), von Suttner issued a call of action to all women.

But to her in whose mind this terrible question of war revolves, conscience dictates plainly! Do not remain silent and hardened and resigned; do not suppress your conscientious scruples and deepest convictions with a hopeless sigh: ‘It will be of no avail. Everything avails ... [and the] means would be so simple; it lies close at hand ... the powers must effect a union, establish an international law which forbids throwing bombs from airships and aeroplanes, as they voiced it at the first Hague Conference.”

This advocacy to prevent not merely war but to curtail specific, modern modes of war-making resonated and challenged a coterie of feminists as the First World War and its introduction of the harrowing weapons of modern war unfolded.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, a conflict that transformed the political, economic, cultural and social landscape of several continents and instituted a new era of militarization, a range of British women’s suffrage activists echoed prewar feminist ideas about women’s roles as peacemakers and natural opponents of war. In South Wales, Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) organizer Annie Williams declared: “The war ought never to have been ... If five years ago the men had enfranchised the women and given them a share in the government of the country it is possible that

4 O. Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911, rpt. London, 1978), p. 170. See Grayzel, Women’ Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War; Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820; Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History; and Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’ Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I, among other works that have noted the prevalence of linking maternity to women’s anti-war arguments during and before the war.

5 B. von Suttner, Die Barbarisierung der Luft (Berlin, 1912); contemporary translation as ‘Making the Air Barbarous’ published in Zhe Chautauquan, Mar. 1913. A new Englishlanguage translation was published in 2016 as B. von Suttner, The Barbarization of the Sky, trans. B. Cooper, ed. H. E. May (The Hague, 2016).

xiv there would have been no war to-day ... emancipating women would have resulted in the attainment of a higher state of civilization.” As Alexandra Hughes-Johnson reminds us in Chapter 5 in this volume, a belief that women needed to maintain their work for the vote during the war by ‘continuing to realise the unity of women and their task to uplift all humanity shows echoes of such sentiments.

The war split the women’s suffrage movement internationally — as has been well documented — and it did so for both militant and non-militant suffrage campaigners in the UK. As Jo Vellacott helpfully explains, there were several kinds of feminisms operating in 1914, united in the struggle for the vote, which were broken apart by their differing attitudes to the war.” Many activists for female enfranchisement turned to support the national war effort of the states to which they belonged. Others began to advocate to halt the war (a more dangerous stance in many nations). Still others focused on helping the victims of war, including those suffering domestically from the immediate economic downturn caused by the war’s outbreak, from the loss/absence of male breadwinners and failure of separation allowances to materialize, and from the transformation of warfare itself. Historians like Vellacott and Ryland Wallace have noted that women’s suffrage campaigners created workrooms to produce socks and shirts for men in the military, sewing and knitting circles and drives to fund war-related charities. Even some women who were colonial subjects contributed to their imperial states’ war efforts."

Some British suffrage activists, such as Sylvia Pankhurst and her associates in the East London Federation of Suffragettes as it morphed into the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, not only provided material aid, including to wives and mothers of men in the military locally, but also campaigned in favour of industrial action and against the war and conscription. Pankhurst’s postwar memoir, The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the First World War, appearing in 1932, details Pankhurst’s experiences from the outbreak of war in 1914 through 1916.” Its war story centres on working-class

© Free Press of Monmouthshire, 12 Feb. 1915, quoted in R. Wallace, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales (Cardiff, 2009), p. 219.

7 J. Vellacott, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War (Basingstoke, 2007).

8 Wallace, The Womens Suffrage Movement in Wales, ch. 6; Vellacott, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War. I discuss some of the transnational aspects of how the war divided feminists as well as the support of some colonized women, often for strategic reasons, in Women and the First World War (Harlow, 2002), and more fully in the forthcoming second edition.

2 E, S. Pankhurst, The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the First World War (1987, rpt. London, 1932). Her suffrage memoir appeared a year earlier: E. S. Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1977, rpt. London, 1931).

XV women and their children and calls attention to the multiple levels of violence experienced both externally and internally. Like her account of being a suffragette, it blends the personal and the social, and is unstinting in its attacks on the real enemy of non-combatants, especially women at home — war itself. Building on her prior study of Pankhurst’s activism, in this volume Katherine Connelly shows how much models of transnational, women-led activism to relieve the suffering of working-class women under ‘ordinary’ circumstances, let alone the enormous new challenges posed by a total war, contributed to new ways for Pankhurst to develop her lifelong advocacy for equity.”°

In a variety of participant states, individual women spoke out against the war and the damage it inflicted on women as feminists, albeit usually also as a minority of voices. In March 1915, a gathering of socialist women from across Europe met in Berne to condemn the war. That April, women assembled in The Hague to call fora negotiated peace. The Hague Women’s Peace Congress of 1915 gave rise to an organization, the Women’s International League (later for Peace and Freedom) that would serve as a cornerstone for actions during and after the war. The UK’s branch was among the largest, incorporating suffragists like Helena Swanwick, who had resigned her leadership position over the pro-war turn of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Despite censorship and the unpopularity of criticizing the war effort, suffragists like Catherine Marshall continued to articulate a feminism that saw itself allied with the struggle against militarism and war. In her 1915 essay “The Future of Women in Politics’, Marshall wrote that such a future depended on ‘whether the women in the different nations and the different classes’ advocate for ‘the ideal of Right, instead of Might, of cooperation instead of conflict’. What they lacked in political or business experience, they made up for ‘as mothers and heads of households’ who could best determine the path to a peaceful postwar reconstruction. As Woolf would articulate later, Marshall saw women as a group apart who, having learnt the cost of supporting a status quo that had led to war, were thus poised to support greater internationalism.”

2 See K. Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (London, 2013), as well as her chapter in this volume.

= C. Marshall, “The future of women in politics’, Labour Year Book (1916), reprinted in Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War, eds. M. Kamester and J. Vellacott (London, 1987), pp. 46-50. For more on wartime feminist anti-militarism, see Grayzel, Womens Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War; Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820; and Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’ Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I.

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Across the belligerent states, criticizing the war could prove costly, as activists who spoke out were arrested and jailed. One salient exemplar — both because of her obscurity and her defence — can be seen in the trial for the crime of ‘defeatism’ (advocating a negotiated peace settlement) in 1917 of Parisian schoolteacher Hélène Brion. She had argued that she could not be accused of a ‘political crime’ when she had no ‘political rights’. Moreover, she insisted, in language that echoed across national borders, that it was her feminism that made her an enemy of war: ‘war is the triumph of brute force; the feminist cannot triumph except by moral force and intellectual valor’.*

If women’s anti-war rhetoric were a product both of their exclusion from political rights and/or their identification as mothers, it evolved in reaction to the altered circumstances of the First World War. This was especially true as modern forms of warmaking brought the war’s relentless violence into the metropole. Air power and chemical weapons both arrived in the spring of 1915, and feminists like Sylvia Pankhurst were among the eye-witnesses to the impact that air power made on Britain. As Pankhurst describes in The Home Front, her first air raid came in a burst of noise: ‘I was writing at home one evening. On the silence arose an ominous grinding ... growing in volume ... throbbing, pulsating ... filling the air with its sound ... Then huge reports smote the ear, shattering, deafening, and the roar of falling masonry.’ Pankhurst rallied others in the house by telling them, “No use to worry; only a few houses will be struck among the thousands.’ Her own recollections are somewhat different: ‘the thought of the bombs crashing down on the densely populated city was appalling — yet for our household I had no least shade of apprehension and for myself Life had no great claim. I was only a member of the salvage corps, saving and succouring as I might amid this wreckage.’ Pankhurst’s account is far removed from the portrait of stoicism and calm emphasized in the newspaper reports on the arrival of air power, but Pankhurst did not judge anyone who lived through the attacks. Instead, she condemned air raid tourists, those ‘well-dressed people in motors, journalists, photographers, high military officials’ visiting the East End to see ‘the devastation wrought by last night’s air raid’. When they seem disappointed not to see more damage, Pankhurst reminds us that yet, if they had only looked a little closer, they could have seen ‘miserable dwellings, far from fit for human families, poorly-dressed women of working sort, with sad, worn faces; and others, sunk lower, just covered, no

2 H. Brion, Déclaration lue au premier conseil de guerre (Epéne, 1918), as quoted in Grayzel, Women’ Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, pp. 182-3.

xvii more in horrid rags ... half-clad neglected little children — sadder these even than the havoc wrought by German bombs.”

The parallels that Pankhurst evokes here between the long-term killing effects of deprivation and poverty and the new menace of aerial attack continue throughout her account of life in wartime Britain. Her insistence that it was not weaponry alone that had made things worse for those already facing poverty joins feminist anti-militarism to other struggles for equality and resources. When Pankhurst journeys to the north of England in the late autumn of 1915, arriving just after a Zeppelin raid, she finds damaged tenements and stories of orphaned children, victims who survived ‘grievously dismembered’ and, above all: “Sad-eyed mothers [who] looked out forlornly from near-by doorways, their spirits long since crushed by the drab hopelessness of the slums, stunned by the new fear that even this dreariness would tumble about their ears.” This is another way in which we need to reassess the arrival and legacy of this war, not just as expanding the spaces and victims of wartime violence, but also as confirming a sense that the most vulnerable were made unbearably so.

In short, the use of new industrialized techniques for waging war during the First World War literally altered the landscape of that conflict for those in the United Kingdom and helped to solidify for some activists the growing connectedness of feminist demands for women’s rights and against military violence. When the war came to an end, women activists demanded to be heard during the Paris Peace Conference and, as Glenda Sluga and Mona Siegel’s work has shown, women saw the international stage as one on which they could participate in new ways. Women organized a series of global protests and arranged meetings to assert their rights in 1919, and they won the ability to participate in the newly created League of Nations.” This gave some of the newly enfranchised a launching pad for continuing to link feminism with their advocacy for peace and justice.

Feminist anti-militarists, continuing prewar strains of feminist internationalism with their long-term roots in extra-parliamentary action,

3 Pankhurst, Zhe Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the First World War, pp. 191-3.

> Pankhurst, Zhe Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the First World War, P- 373-

3 G. Sluga, ‘Female and national self-determination: a gender re-reading of “the apogee of nationalism” ’, Nations and Nationalism, vi (2000), 495-521; M. L. Siegel, Peace On Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’ Rights After the First World War (New York, 2020). Sluga reminds us that the ‘international’ was an ‘important site of activity for women eager both to create a “feminine” political space and an alternative to the masculine space of nations’

xviii warned the postwar world not only of the horrors to be inflicted upon all bodies in the next conflict, but also of their consequences for domestic life. The arrival of aerial warfare provided a way for such activists to insist that all women now had a comparable experience of being exposed to danger as that of male soldiers. Several argued that the prospect of another war using the first weapons of mass destruction — chemical arms and air power — raised the stakes for the survival of humanity. This framing of disarmament as a women’s issue was not new, but the context was widening.”

The commitment of the international feminist community to recognizing the expanded stakes and territories of modern war was evident throughout the immediate postwar meetings of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). At its first postwar International Meeting in Zurich in 1919, WILPF confirmed its commitment to world disarmament, again highlighting, in the well-known words of American Jane Addams’s presidential address, that ‘women only benefit in a world based on justice not force.” Tellingly, that justice involved asking the League of Nations to take actions that encompassed both air disarmament and the endowment of motherhood.” Thus did postwar feminists confront what the warfare state might bring and promote an ideal of the welfare state. At the 1921 meeting in Zurich, Addams again pointed out the underlying logic of feminist anti-militarism. War, she argued, destroyed what mothers value most: ‘this world war mobilized not only armies but entire populations, the world has seen, as never before, what war means in the lives of little children in every country to the world’.