Peace as a Woman's Issue

Peace as a Women’s Issue is a comprehensive history of the feminist peace movement in the United States during the last two centuries. This absorbing history traces the development of the women’s campaign for peace from its roots in nineteenth-century abolitionist and suffrage movements to its expression during the recent war in the Middle East.

The development of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) takes center stage, but many other groups, ranging from the Women’s Peace Union of the 1920s to later movements such as Women Strike for Peace, Women for Racial and Economic Equality, and the peace encampments of the 1980s arc all examined. Here too one will read about the many prominent figures who have had major roles in this history: Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt of the Woman’s Peace Party; Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Greene Balch; Dorothy Detzer of the WILPF; and Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women.

This much-needed history of the feminist peace movement in the United States makes possible a fuller, better nuanced, and more balanced treatment of the history of the entire US peace movement.