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Imaginative identification. Feminist critical methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1945-1975)

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Imaginative identification. Feminist critical methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1945-1975)

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Content IMAGINATIVE IDENTIFICATION.
FEMINIST CRITICAL METHODOLOGY IN
THE WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM
(1945-1975)
by
Catia Cecilia Confortini

__________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS)
May 2009
Copyright 2009 Catia Cecilia Confortini
ii
Dedication
Dedico questo lavoro ai miei genitori, Piero e Tina, e alla memoria della mia zia Anna:
il vostro affetto mi accompagna sempre.
iii
Acknowledgments
This dissertation was inspired by a personal and professional dilemma: as a peace
and feminist activist I felt challenged to reconcile my passion for social justice activism
and my love for International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. I wanted to
develop a research question that would be relevant to IR and to activists, with whom I
most identify. A collective feminist effort has sustained me along the way and inspired
my search.
First and foremost, this project owes much to my advisor, Ann Tickner, who saw
my dilemma and knew of my passion and suggested I draw from Sandra Whitworth's and
Elisabeth Prügl's works on historically-dependent ideas about gender relations in
organizations. Ann importantly pointed out to me that ideas about peace had a history too
and urged me to look into that history. She knew and had written about the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and she thought it would make an
interesting case study. Most of all, she knew that the WILPF's women would touch me in
ways I did not imagine at the time. Soon they both captured my intellectual curiosity and
inspired my activist's imagination. To those WILPFers who are no longer in this world: I
owe to their unremitting enthusiasm and endless passion for justice my persistence amid
my own difficulties. Their spirits have carried me through the completion of this project
as loving, passionate peace mothers.
Brooke Ackerly, both personally and through her work on Third World Feminist
Social Criticism, prompted me to think about the WILPF's women as theorists, who could
teach us about international relations. Brooke has inspired me to be a better researcher
iv
and a better feminist, by being at the same time more demanding of my scholarship and
more compassionate toward myself. She reminded me that as feminists we are bound to
very exacting methodological standards. Looking at the WILPF's methodology is one
way (my way) to offer practical advice to other organizations interested in emancipation
and social change.
After reading my first drafts of the empirical chapters, Cecelia Lynch helped me
finesse the theoretical argument by pointing out that, by looking at methodology, I was
making a contribution to the agent-structure debate in constructivism. As an informal
committee member, she directed me to relevant literature, helped with organizational
layout and encouraged me through and through. Her personal friendship and professional
mentorship have meant more than I can ever say.
Besides these invaluable influences, my dissertation owes much to the people that
came into my life and with encouragement and by example accompanied me to the finish
line. First and foremost I am thankful to the many WILPFers, who kindly offered their
time (often many times) to a researcher who was clumsily making her way into the
history of an organization that they so well knew and loved. I have benefited of their
knowledge of the WILPF far beyond what of their words I cited in this work: for this I
wish to thank Edith Ballantyne, Joyce McLean, Libby Frank, Dolores Taller, Krishna
Ahooja Patel, and (last but certainly not least) Elise Boulding. Many other WILPFers
were generous with their time and advice: Aliyah Strauss, Bruna Nota, Marta Benavides,
Olga Bianchi, Regina Birchem, Samira Khouri, Maria Pilar Reyes, Marjorie Boehm,
Darien DeLu, Mari Holmboe-Ruge, Linda Kaucher, Jean Gore, Mary Day Kent, Kirsty
v
Kolthoff, Barbara (Babsi) Lochbiler, Liss Schanke, Dulcy de Silva, Mary Ziesak, Silvi
Sterr, Lucinda Amara, Hanan Awwad, and Susi Snyder. For feedback on some of the
empirical material, I would like to thank Edith Ballantyne, Joyce McLean, Felicity Hill
and C.J. Minster. I thank Felicity Hill for her permission to use her interview to Edith
Ballantyne and look forward to her biography of such a gigantic figure of today's WILPF.
I thank the members of the Los Angeles branch of the WILPF (Louise Katz Sullivan,
Grace Aaron, Carol Urner, Thérèse Ballet Lynn, Jeanmarie Simpson and C.J. Minster) for
their encouragement, friendship and support; the Northern California branches for
allowing me to participate in and record their 2004 Cluster Meeting in San Jose,
California; the Swedish Section for its hospitality during the 2005 International Congress.
In addition to Ann Tickner, the members of my dissertation committee read
through several iterations of this work, and were constructive critics and ardent
supporters: Laurie Brand was a precious source of information for the Israel/Palestine
chapter and gave me helpful comments throughout; Nelly Stromquist read various drafts
of the empirical chapters and gave me useful methodological hints; when Nelly left USC
for the University of Maryland, Nancy Lutkehaus graciously stepped in at the last
moment as the third committee member.
The USC Graduate School, the USC School of International Relations (SIR) and
the USC Center for International Studies (CIS) provided much needed institutional
support: I am grateful to SIR and CIS directors Steven Lamy (SIR 2001-2006), Laurie
Brand (SIR 2007-2009; CIS 1997-2000) and Ann Tickner (CIS 200-2003) for believing
in me; to Linda Cole and Luda Spilewski for their help in navigating bureaucratic seas.
vi
David Hays at the University of Colorado, Boulder Archives helped me find my way
through the WILPF's papers and recommended I hire Amanda Chilton, whose knowledge
of the WILPF's archives made her an invaluable research assistant. Wendy Chmielewski
at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection promptly answered my inquiries on the
WILPF collection and helped me through the microfilm loan process. Wendy Arce,
Alison Walker, Lucy Braham, and Vilma Cruz transcribed my interviews with the WILPF
members.
This dissertation has benefited of the advice and constructive comments of several
friends, scholars, and colleagues: Lyn Boyd, Laura Sjoberg, Serena Simoni, Abigail
Ruane, the late Hayward Alker (for his methodological advice and enthusiastic
encouragement), Julie Mertus (for her comments on the Israel/Palestine chapter), Carol
Cohn (for pointing me to the value of Sara Ruddick's often misinterpreted work).
Discussants and participants at the International Studies Association Meetings of 2006
and 2009 helped me refine several points in my empirical chapters. Early on in the
writing process, the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the ISA gave me an
encouraging push in the form of a graduate student paper award for a version of the
Israel/Palestine chapter.
Many people provided emotional and actual nourishment, hospitality, and all
around help: Sheri and Jon Morse, Penny and Dale Hardy, Toni Blasio, Kristin and Mark
Powers, Kristi Hagans, Cynthia Olaya, Lauren Campbell, Carlo Chiarenza, Sue Giesen,
Zoila Bejarano, Margaret and Steven Lesh, Alan Kronstadt, Serena Simoni, Anita
Schjolset, Angela McCracken, Abigail Ruane, Mara Bird, Wendy Lords,Terry O'Sullivan,
vii
Bina D'Costa, Michele Budz, Sonalini Sapra, and Surupa Gupta. A huge thank you goes
to the people who, by saving my life, made it possible for me to finish what I had started:
Drs. Ryan, Meek, Kivuls, Abdalla and Giorgi; my Wellness Community Group, in
particular its facilitator Pamela Stephan, therapist extraordinaire. In Long Beach, CA, the
cheerful personnel at It's a Grind kept me warm and properly caffeinated; and my
spiritual home at St. Luke's Episcopal Church renews in me daily a love for humanity and
forgiveness for our mistakes. My spiritual sisters deserve a special mention. Giuditta
Russo, Cecelia Osborn, Diana Haye, Julie V on Pelz, Jan Dark, and Cecelia Lynch: our
Tuesday meetings have healed me, sustained me and made it possible for me to complete
this project, maintain some level of sanity and a good dose of humor and perspective.
My family in Italy housed me, fed me, helped me with child care, and loved me
unconditionally: I thank my sisters, Mariangela and Raffaella; my parents Pietro and
Martina, my late aunt Anna, my brothers-in-law Angelo and Alessandro. The children in
my life teach me every day to look at the world with hope and joy and inspire me to work
to make it a better place: my nephews Gabriele, Luca and Nate; my nieces Sofia and
Maddie; my son's closest friends Jordan, Cassidy, Felix, Marcelo, Paloma, Lauren and
Eamon; and, most of all, my son Alessandro, who has lived and loved me through all my
dissertation anxieties and gratifying moments. Finally, my husband Bruce Hardy knows I
truly could not have done this without him. I am blessed by his love and enduring loyalty.
For all the people in my life without whom this project could not have seen the
light (including those I might have forgotten to mention: you know who you are) I am
thankful. Mine, of course, remain all mistakes.
viii
Table of Contents
Dedication............................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iii
Abstract................................................................................................................................x
Chapter 1: Introduction........................................................................................................1
Introduction.....................................................................................................................1
Peace in International Relations Theories.......................................................................4
Peace, Gender and Feminist International Relations......................................................8
Historical Background..................................................................................................14
The Post-War Order and the WILPF.............................................................................20
Case Selection and Methodology..................................................................................24
Outline of the Chapters.................................................................................................27
Chapter 2: Towards A Theory of Emancipatory Social Change........................................31
Introduction...................................................................................................................31
Ontology, Epistemology, Ethics and Social Construction ............................................33
Feminism, Social Change and Emancipation................................................................38
Gender as Power.......................................................................................................39
Power and Identity of the Knower............................................................................41
Where are the Women?.............................................................................................43
Summary...................................................................................................................46
Third World Feminist Social Criticism.........................................................................47
Applying TWFSC To the WILPF..................................................................................52
Guiding Criteria........................................................................................................54
Deliberative Inquiry..................................................................................................54
Skeptical Scrutiny.....................................................................................................57
The Role of Social Critics........................................................................................59
Conclusions...................................................................................................................61
Chapter 3: The WILPF and Disarmament.........................................................................63
Introduction...................................................................................................................63
Liberal Political Thought, Gender and the WILPF.......................................................65
Autonomy, Consent and Obligation.........................................................................67
Liberalism, the WILPF and Disarmament....................................................................69
Law...........................................................................................................................71
Reason and Science..................................................................................................79
Women, Disarmament and Peace........................................................................87
Changing Ideas..............................................................................................................88
Methodology.................................................................................................................91
ix
Guiding Criteria........................................................................................................91
Deliberative Inquiry..................................................................................................93
Skeptical Scrutiny.....................................................................................................97
The Role of Social Critics......................................................................................102
Imaginative Identification......................................................................................103
Conclusions.................................................................................................................106
Chapter 4: The WILPF and Decolonization....................................................................108
Introduction.................................................................................................................108
Race, Representation and Decolonization...................................................................110
The WILPF and Decolonization..................................................................................116
The First Phase: 1946 to 1955................................................................................116
The Second Phase: 1956-1966...............................................................................126
The WILPF and The Algerian War....................................................................128
The Third Phase: Late 1960s to 1975.....................................................................140
Methodology...............................................................................................................145
Guiding Criteria......................................................................................................146
Deliberative Inquiry................................................................................................146
Skeptical Scrutiny...................................................................................................149
The Role of Social Critics......................................................................................153
Imaginative Identification......................................................................................157
Conclusions.................................................................................................................159
Chapter 5: The WILPF and Israel/Palestine....................................................................161
Introduction.................................................................................................................161
Orientalism and the WILPF........................................................................................162
Israel/Palestine and the WILPF after World War II....................................................168
Orientalism and ‘Peace’ in Palestine/Israel.................................................................171
Liberal democracy and freedom.............................................................................172
Self-determination..................................................................................................176
Economic development..........................................................................................179
Disarmament...........................................................................................................183
Methodology...............................................................................................................186
Guiding criteria.......................................................................................................189
Deliberative Inquiry................................................................................................189
Skeptical Scrutiny...................................................................................................194
The Role of Social Critics......................................................................................196
Imaginative Identification......................................................................................199
Conclusions.................................................................................................................203
Chapter 6: Conclusions....................................................................................................205
Imaginative Identification: a Feminist Critical Methodology for Social Change.......214
Conclusions.................................................................................................................217
Bibliography....................................................................................................................221
x
Abstract
This dissertation develops a theory of agency, which engages the agent-structure
debate in constructivist International Relations. I examine the policies of the oldest
international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom (WILPF), toward disarmament, decolonization and Israel/Palestine between
1945 and 1975. I argue that changes in these policies embodied different ideas about
peace. The WILPF's early understandings of peace were grounded in liberal modern
principles and inscribed in the post-war international order. Gradually, the WILPF began
identifying the limitations of its ideological foundations and of the international liberal
order, and formulating policies based on this critique. I argue that though the international
environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored these shifts, the WILPF arrived at its new
policies thanks to an increasing reliance on feminist critical methods, which the
organization consciously but largely implicitly followed, and which allowed it to break
the entrapment of the context that created and shaped it.
From the WILPF's women's activism I distill the elements of a methodology of
emancipatory social change: I argue that, as activists, the WILPF's women practiced a
theoretically-informed methodology whenever, during the course of making policy
decisions, they reflected on the relationship between their views about the world
(ontology), their understanding of how they knew what they (thought they) knew about
the world (epistemology), their ethical stances about world problems and the issue of
peace, and the ways they chose to act about them (methods). As activists they made
xi
theoretical contributions to feminist IR by proposing different ways to think about the
relationship between women, feminism and peace.
The history of the WILPF suggests that, rather than identifying a firm set of
principles about what constitutes emancipation, social change, or even peace, a critical
constructivist theory of emancipatory agency needs a methodology that favors an
inclusive decision-making process, recurrent self-criticism, the enactment of a feminist
ethics of care, and applies these practices to a set of initial, and always immanent,
criteria. I propose that feminist critical methodology helps actors challenge the
constraints and shaping powers of structures and effect emancipatory social change.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Introduction
Less than a year after the dropping of the first atomic bombs, two hundred women
from thirteen countries gathered in Luxembourg, to hold their first post-war meeting just
as they had assembled in Zürich almost 40 years earlier following the First World War.
Like that first time, North American women stared in disbelief at the devastation the war
had caused to their European friends’ bodies and spirits. And, like that first time, they
looked in vain for friends whom the conflict had not spared, with a heightened awareness
of human beings' capacity for destruction. At the 1919 Zürich meeting they had been
disillusioned about statesmen’s willingness and ability to keep the peace, but had
remained determined to raise their voices as women to prevent another such conflict.
They had formally constituted the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
(WILPF), a women’s peace organization, to accomplish this task.
At their 1946 meeting in Luxembourg they wondered whether an organization
like the WILPF still had a purpose. They wondered if the words they had used to express
their ideals of “freedom, democracy, justice, equality, peace… [had] been abused and
degraded to such an extent that these words [had] become hollow shams”
1
. They
wondered whether, as women, they had a role to fulfill in the pursuit of peace. French
delegates recounted their experiences of Nazi occupation and concluded that peace had
no meaning without freedom, that death was better than slavery, war better than
1
International Chairmen’s Letter of Invitation to National Sections cited in Gertrude Bussey and WILPF
British Section, Pioneers for Peace: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 1915-1965, ed.
Margaret Tims (London : WILPF British Section, 1980), 179.
2
servitude
2
. Like their Dutch friends, the French women had participated in the armed
resistance alongside men. Danish and Finnish women, too, had lived under occupation,
yet they had opted for nonviolent resistance and humanitarian and relief work. In neutral
and unoccupied Sweden, the WILPF women had focused on educational and
humanitarian efforts. They had also worked on their visions for the future, establishing a
Liaison Committee of Women’s Organizations and launching a movement in favor of the
United Nations
3
. The German delegates were denied travel documents, but they had
already reconstituted chapters in the Allied-occupied zone and let their friends know of
their intention to work to “make the word 'German' honorable again”
4
. Quite a few
WILPFers had perished in concentration camps or at the hands of the Nazi army. Some
others had arrived at the Congress against many odds and nearly starving.
Their concrete experience of wartime suffering made it compellingly urgent for
them to figure out how to prevent such suffering and destruction from ever happening
again. Their organization was born out of the social work and suffrage movements of the
progressive era and was founded on the principles of liberal internationalism. In
Luxembourg, they recognized the tension between their prewar liberal ideals and those
ideals' inability to prevent the Holocaust. Yet the women still believed that they had to
find some ground upon which to build the possibility of eliminating human suffering and
2
Andrée Jouve, “Reports of the National Sections: France,” in In Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946), 78-89, microfilm reel 141.2, Swarthmore College Peace Collection
(hereinafter SCPC).
3
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 184.
4
Cited in ibid., 182.
3
annihilation. Overwhelmingly they voted to continue the organization and immediately
they started deliberations on postwar planning for a future of peace.
The women who met in Luxembourg in 1946 were peace activists. Their
discussions highlight that, as activists, they were thinking theoretically about how to
reconcile their belief in peace with their identity and roles as women, with their lived
experiences of the war, and with the realization that their ideology had failed to prevent
World War II. These women peace activists were theorists who, in the course of that
debate and in the years that followed, tried to bring forth a theoretical vision of peace that
would sit on more solid grounds, while at the same time working to realize it in practice.
They were liberal activists who were questioning the extent to which their liberalism had
failed them and the world, and wondering on what other ideological and theoretical
foundations they could draw to design a more solid peace. They were Western activists
who had suffered conquest and were thinking about the dissonance between peoples'
freedom and an occupier's “peace.” They were women activists who were wondering
whether women had some different theoretical and practical contributions to make to
peace; thinking about what linked women's freedom to world peace; reflecting on the
relationship between militarism and their suffrage and feminist work.
The years that followed saw the organization wrestle with these questions, to
reformulate an idea of peace that would be both more encompassing and more attainable.
Their story can help us make sense of the practical dilemmas and theoretical struggles of
peace activists in the post-war West who were participating in the reconstruction that
followed the devastation of the Second World War, yet were skeptical of the ideological
and political bases upon which that reconstruction was being pursued. From their story
4
today's feminists can draw lessons for their own theoretical reflections on peace and its
relationship to feminism and women. Finally, their story can help us understand how
organizations and social movements expand the boundaries of the ideological and
historical milieu in which they are situated and open up possibilities for emancipatory
social change. The case of post-war WILPF's policies on peace offers an important
opportunity to explore to what extent and how the organization overcame deeply
entrenched assumptions and transformed its understanding of 'peace.'
With this study I intend to reformulate the relationship between feminism,
International Relations and Peace Studies. Because feminist IR theorists have found the
contention that women are more peaceful than men problematic, they have too often
eschewed theoretical engagement with Peace Studies and peace research. On the other
hand, International Relations has sidelined its original preoccupation with peace as both
an empirical goal and a theoretical ideal. Thus, this project aims at making feminist peace
theorizing once again part of the wider context of (feminist) IR by exploring the
possibility of a feminist theory of emancipatory social change.
Peace in International Relations Theories
The discipline of International Relations was born in the aftermath of World War I
out of a need to prevent war from breaking out again. Despite this, IR theory has not
developed theoretical accounts of peace. Oliver Richmond contends that, although peace
“was explicitly part of the institutional framework of the modern era,” IR theory tends to
deal with peace only implicitly
5
. He finds that different conceptions of peace underlie the
different approaches to International Relations. The inter-war idealist literature offered a
5
Oliver P. Richmond, Peace in International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2008).
5
normative, ethically-oriented account of peace
6
. As a precursor to contemporary
liberalism, this literature claimed that reason and international law and institutions could
enable mutual cooperation and bring about lasting peace, defined as the absence of all
interstate violence
7
.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the disillusionment with this
ideal of peace, which had been partially realized in inter-war international institutions, is
often credited with shifting the discipline's focus toward realism. In realist accounts peace
was conceived negatively as the absence of war and viewed as an anomaly, in an
international system always potentially at war. According to both classical and structural
realists, in an anarchical international system, states pursue self-interest (understood as
power maximization) and the best that can be achieved is a fragile balance-of-power of
temporary stability in between wars. Believing otherwise was not only naïve, it was also
dangerous. An idealist peace was unattainable in practice and as a concept not very useful
to understand the workings of the international system.
Though realism became the predominant approach to IR theory during the Cold
War, other approaches, which proposed their own visions of peace, co-existed with it.
Marxist approaches, for example, introduced the idea of peace as economic justice and
social emancipation, sometimes achievable only after revolutionary upheaval. Varieties of
6
I use the conventional description of this literature in calling it 'idealist' with the awareness that the label
was applied to it somewhat unfairly by self-described 'realists' in the course of the 'first debate.' To the
extent that this debate has been artificially created post-facto to serve the political and intellectual interests
of realism, it has had the effects of marginalizing liberal and normative thinking from IR. See Brian C.
Schmidt, “Anarchy, World Politics and the Birth of a Discipline,” International Relations 16, no. 1 (April,
2002), 9-32; Brian C. Schmidt, “On the History and Historiography of International Relations” In
Handbook of International Relations, eds. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse-Kappen and Beth A. Simmons
(London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 2002), 3-22; Lucian M. Ashworth, “Did the Realist-
Idealist Great Debate Ever Happen?,” International Relations 16, no. 1 (April, 2002), 33-52.
7
Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 21-39.
6
liberalism and pluralism saw peace as a consequence of the institutionalization of
universal liberal norms of global governance and international cooperation. In general,
however, peace was not theorized explicitly except within the sub-discipline of Peace
Studies (PS), which had also emerged after the Second World War.
The impetus for PS came first from the dangers that the invention and deployment
of the atomic bomb foretold. So Peace Research (or Peace Science as it was also known)
devoted itself to the prevention of interstate war and to issues of arms control and
disarmament (especially nuclear disarmament). But PS' emergence can also be seen as a
reaction to “the domination of the discipline of IR by what many peace and conflict
researchers saw as a self-fulfilling militaristic paradigm obsessed with power and
violence, interest and status”
8
.
There are today several approaches to Peace Studies. Some argue for a strictly
“scientific” approach to the study of conflict and peace, reflecting an epistemological
commitment to what is now commonly referred to as positivism in the social sciences
9
;
for others PS is a multidisciplinary and multi-epistemological field dedicated to the study
of the causes of conflict and the conditions for peace; for others yet, PS boundaries are
even broader, and they view peace education and peace action as inseparable from peace
8
Ibid., 98-99.
9
By positivism I mean the social scientific practice based on the beliefs that the social world follows
regularities not unlike the natural world; that social scientific phenomena can be explained by following the
methodologies provided by the natural sciences; and that facts can be objectively observed and described.
This epistemological stance is in general incompatible with feminist epistemologies, which center on a
deep-seated skepticism toward positivism’s claims about the neutrality of facts and the possibility of
objective research. See J. Ann Tickner, “You just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between
Feminists and IR Theorists,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4 (December, 1997), 617-623; J. Ann
Tickner, “What is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations
Methodological Questions,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (March, 2005), 1-22; Martin Hollis
and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford; New York: Clarendon
Press; Oxford University Press, 1990).
7
research, thus welcoming the cross-fertilization of the discipline with the world of
activism. A consequence of this broad range of interests has arguably been an
encompassing conceptualization of peace as absence of violence at all levels, between
states and among individuals. Though marginalized within IR, PS has introduced
concepts that have been widely utilized in international relations, such as the distinction
between structural and direct violence and between positive and negative peace
10
.
Moreover, it has contrasted with the IR tendency to value the role and agency of
individuals less than “grand scale political, economic, military, social and constitutional
peace projects undertaken beyond the ken and capacity of the individual”
11
.
By attributing equal importance to individuals' agency and their role in bringing
about peace, PS has blurred the distinction between activism and scholarship. Since its
beginnings, PS has drawn inspiration from nonviolent movements, such as Ghandian
nonviolent mobilizations in South Africa and India and the anti-nuclear movement
12
.
This, together with PS's normative agenda and its commitment to transdisciplinarity,
make PS congenial to feminism. However, although feminists have historically made
10
Johan Galtung first articulated the difference between personal (intentional violence committed by
someone ) and structural (where a subject committing it is either non-existent or not relevant.) violence. He
defined positive peace as the absence of structural violence and negative peace as the absence of personal
violence, at personal, societal or state levels (Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,”
Journal of Peace Research 6 (1969), 171). For Galtung, “violence is present when human beings are being
influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations”
(Ibid., 178. Emphasis in the original). The coining of the phrases positive and negative peace is most
commonly attributed to Galtung, who discussed it in the first issue of the Journal of Peace Research in
1964 (Johan Galtung, “An Editorial,” Journal of Peace Research 1, no. 1 (1964), 1-4). However, Kathleen
Maas Weigert traces its first formulation to Quincy Wright’s 1942 A Study of War (Kathleen Maas Weigert,
“Structural Violence” In Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace & Conflict, eds. Lester R. Kurtz and Jennifer E.
Turpin, V ol. III (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), 432). See also Quincy Wright, A Study of War
(Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago press, 1942).
11
Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 13.
12
Galtung credits Ghandi for having inspired him to think about structural violence.
8
significant contributions to the theory and practice of peace, PS has ignored or
marginalized issues that were central to feminist concerns.
Although almost 20 years ago Mary Bourgieres suggested that PS regard feminist
research as a “new frontier” for the discipline
13
, the PS community has paid only
marginal attention to these contributions. PS texts sometimes include a feminist article by
Betty Reardon or Brigit Brock-Utne, but feminist postmodernist or postcolonial scholars
are carefully avoided; Mary Caprioli’s work appears in the Journal of Peace Research
and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and some quantitative PS scholars have tested the
women/peace relationship in various ways, but work situated outside the boundaries of
positivist research has mostly been disregarded. Peace and Change, the journal of the
Peace History Society and the Peace and Justice Studies Association, is an exception
among major PS journals, as it publishes feminist articles with some regularity, but rarely
if ever do non-feminist PS scholars engage in conversations with feminism or take into
serious consideration feminist assertions that gender relations of power are implicated in
conflict and peace processes.
Peace, Gender and Feminist International Relations
Feminists define gender as a socially and symbolically constructed dichotomy,
based upon perceived or real biological sex differences, which underlies the creation and
reproduction of social relations of power. Gender, as a power relation, shapes and
naturalizes other social relations of power by assigning them to mutually exclusive
categories of super/subordination to each other. When people see the social world in
terms of binary opposites, such as public/private, rational/emotional, objective/subjective,
13
Mary K. Burguieres, “Feminist Approaches to Peace: Another Step for Peace Studies,” Millennium -
Journal of International Studies 19, no. 1 (1990), 15.
9
active/passive, they reproduce the masculine/feminine pair and the relationship of
subordination mapped into it, where “the first, masculine, term is generally valued over
the second, feminine, term”
14
. In reality, these dichotomies obscure more complex
relationships and naturalize both gender differences and the superiority in social life of
attributes associated with the masculine.
Feminists argue that gender relations of power are implicated in the social
construction of violence and war. Framing violence and war in opposition to nonviolence
and peace is a gendered move that reproduces the male/female hierarchical relation into
the social realm and, with it, the superior standing of violence over nonviolence
15
. When
realists described 'peace' in negative terms as absence of war and labeled it as ‘idealistic,’
'passive' and 'utopian' they were in fact gendering the notion (and practice) of peace
feminine and delegitimizing it
16
. Feminists have joined a number of peace researchers in
observing that, rather than being a passive concept, peace is a very destabilizing notion,
because it aims at subverting the status quo
17
. Despite this common assertion, PS has
failed to adequately look at how the concept of peace is gendered, to study the ways in
14
Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001). Sandra Whitworth defines gender as “a process that enables the
construction of other social meanings” (Sandra Whitworth, Feminism and International Relations: Towards
a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1994), 65).
15
See Catia C. Confortini, “Galtung, Violence, and Gender: The Case for a Peace Studies/Feminism
Alliance,” Peace & Change 31, no. 3 (07/18, 2006), 333-367.
16
For an insightful discussion on how gendered discourse works to delegitimize all notions associated with
the feminine, see Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War” In
Gendering War Talk, eds. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 227-246.
17
See J. Ann Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives on Peace and World Security,” in Peace and World Security
Studies: A Curriculum Guide, ed. Michael T. Klare, 6th ed. (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1993),
43-54; J. Ann Tickner, “Introducing Feminist Perspectives into Peace and World Security Courses,”
Women's Studies Quarterly 23, no. 3 (Fall, 1995), 48-57.
10
which women and men are differently affected by the presence or absence of armed
conflict, and to include women's experiences and feminist reflections about peace in its
analysis
18
.
On the other hand, feminists have been divided over whether engaging with PS
and theoretical questions about peace is useful or meaningful for feminism. Since the
1980s, feminist debates on the relationship between feminism, peace, and women’s peace
activism and scholarship have focused on one issue: whether, to what extent, and how
women are more peaceful than men. This debate was inscribed in larger and older
feminist conversations about whether, to what extent, how, and with what consequences
women were like men or different from them. On the one hand, some feminists thought
that feminist and peace projects are ‘natural’ allies, because they both promote values
and/or characteristics with which women are naturally or socially more endowed than
men
19
. On the other hand, other feminists critiqued this assumption as perpetuating the
same devaluation of both women and peace implied in realist thinking. Jean-Bethke
Elshtain argued that claims of women’s natural or cultural superiority in matters of peace
and war only serve to reproduce, if inverted, a world based on gendered dichotomies and
18
Tickner, “Introducing Feminist Perspectives.”
19
Categorized among such works are: Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1985); Betty Reardon, “Women Or Weapons?,” in The Women and War Reader, eds. Lois
Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer E. Turpin (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 289-295; Sara
Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Jodi York, “The
Truth about Women and Peace” In The Women and War Reader, eds. Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer E.
Turpin (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 19-25; Birgit Brock-Utne, Feminist Perspectives on
Peace and Peace Education (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989); Birgit Brock-Utne, Educating for Peace:
A Feminist Perspective (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985). Linda Alcoff has commented interestingly on
the accuracy of caging Sara Ruddick’s work in this framework (Linda Martín Alcoff, “Rethinking Maternal
Thinking,” AP A Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 3, no. 1 (Fall, 2003), 85-89). I will return to the
work of Sara Ruddick later in this chapter.
11
power hierarchies
20
. Echoing Elshtain’s concerns, Christine Sylvester was critical of the
assumptions about women’s homogeneity that some feminists implied when generalizing
about women’s peacefulness
21
. In agreement, Ann Tickner observed that
The association of femininity with peace lends support to an idealized masculinity
that depends on constructing women as passive victims in need of protection. It
also contributes to the claim that women are naïve in matters relating to
international politics
22
.
As a consequence feminist IR has rarely if ever engaged in theoretical questions
about peace and gender
23
(with the possible exception of some Scandinavian feminist
20
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “The Problem with Peace,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History,
Politics, and Social Theory, eds. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Savage, Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1990), 255-266.
21
Christine Sylvester, “Some Dangers in Merging Feminist and Peace Projects,” Alternatives 12, no. 4
(October, 1987), 493-509. See also Christine Sylvester, “Riding the Hyphens of Feminism, Peace, and
Place in Four- (Or More) Part Cacophony,” Women's Studies Quarterly 23, no. 3-4 (Fall, 1995), 136-146.
22
J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). See also Berenice A. Carroll, “Feminism and Pacifism:
Historical and Theoretical Connections,” in Women and Peace: Theoretical, Historical, and Practical
Perspectives, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson (London; New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 2-28.
23
Feminists have commented upon and critiqued militarism and the militarization of women’s lives
(Cynthia H. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley, Calif.;
London: University of California Press, 2000); Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making
Feminist Sense of International Politics, 1st U.S. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)); they
have drawn the attention to the role of women in conflicts (Krishna Kumar, Women and Civil War : Impact,
Organizations, and Action (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 2001)); they have traced historical and cultural
relations between women and war (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, University of Chicago Press ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)); they have discussed sustainable development as a peace
issue (Jane L. Parpart and others, Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Globallocal
World (London ; New York: Routledge, 2002)) and the links between economic globalization and
militarism (Cynthia H. Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2007)); they have pointed out connections between gender, nationalism and war (Nira Yuval-
Davis, Gender & Nation (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997); Vanaja Dhruvarajan
and Jill Vickers, Gender, Race, and Nation: A Global Perspective (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto
Press, 2002)); and they have critically questioned the way in which key IR concepts, such as security, are
gendered (Tickner, Gender in International Relations; V . Spike Peterson, Gendered States: Feminist
(Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992)). Only a few feminist
IR scholars have addressed theoretical questions related to the intersections between gender and peace
(Elshtain, “The Problem with Peace;” Tickner, Gender in International Relations; Sylvester, “Some
Dangers;” John Hoffman, Gender and Sovereignty: Feminism, the State and International Relations
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2001)).
12
peace researchers
24
). The reluctance on the part of many feminists to have their work
associated with, or labeled as, peace research ironically ends up perpetuating this
devaluation of peace and women. Yet, the many women who are engaged in social
movements for peace force us to inquire into their vision of peace and their views about
the relationship between peace and gender. The blurred boundaries between activism and
research that are characteristic of much feminist and peace research confront us with
questions of activists' contributions to theorizing. Feminist scholars, either by being
themselves activists or by cooperating with feminist movements, have deepened feminist
activism’s self-reflection and sometimes efficacy, through the development of regular
(though not always friendly or sufficient) interactions between activists and scholars.
This is true of women's peace and anti-war movements too
25
. But though women’s peace
activists have engaged in theoretical reflections on the relationship between their
identities and roles as women and their peace activism
26
, the alienation of feminist IR
theory from peace theory effectively misses the opportunity of learning from their
contributions to feminist peace theorizing.
This dissertation aims at filling this gap and showing that, not only is feminist
peace theorizing possible and necessary, but that it has also been pursued by women
peace activists for many years. In response to preoccupations about easy associations
between women and peace, it intends to take up the challenge of finding “a finely tuned
24
Of the two most prominent Scandinavian peace research centers, SIPRI (Swedish) and PRIO
(Norwegian), only PRIO has a permanent staff of “gender researchers” and consistently produces
publications on gender and peace/conflict. Among its current projects is an analysis of the linkages between
gender equality and the liberal peace (http://www.prio.no/Research-and-Publications/Gender/).
25
Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women's Activism and Feminist Analysis (London; New
York: Zed Books, 2007).
26
Ibid.
13
appreciation” of both equality and difference, “a pragmatic tolerance for ambiguity and
more than a little theoretical untidiness”
27
, to reveal the complexities of arguments
regarding women, feminism and peace. I also intend to be reflective regarding what IR
feminists have not done, what instead can be gained in IR by looking at peace from a
feminist perspective, how international politics can be influenced and changed by
thinking and acting about peace as feminists, and why it is important to do so. Adrienne
Harris and Ynestra King claim that “women peace organizing is strengthened and
transformed through confrontation with feminist questions of gender”
28
. I contend that the
reverse is equally true: women peace activists offer strong theoretical contributions to the
study of the relationship between gender, peace and feminism that should be taken into
account by feminist scholarship.
This dissertation traces the evolution of the policies of the oldest Western
international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom (WILPF), in three of its areas of work, in order to understand what ideas of
peace informed them; how they changed; and what made the changes possible. I take into
serious consideration the possibility that, in the practices of the WILPF, peace studies,
feminist IR and the discipline of International Relations can find important theoretical
contributions to the study of peace.
27
Linda Rennie Forcey, “Women as Peacemakers: Contested Terrain for Feminist Peace Studies,” Peace
and Change 16, no. 4 (October, 1991), 331-354. See also Linda Rennie Forcey, “Integrating Women's
Studies with Peace Studies: Challenges for Feminist Theory,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 2, no. 2
(1995), 211-226. Post-structuralism and Third World feminism have certainly contributed to today’s
prevailing feminist agreement on the desirability of theoretical plurality and difference, if not on the search
for some common, non-assimilationist, non-imperialist ground.
28
Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King, “Introduction,” in Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist
Peace Politics, eds. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), 2.
14
Historical Background
Different positions on the relationship between women, feminism and peace have
been present in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom since its
inception. The WILPF had originated from an international gathering of women coming
from several of the countries at war in 1915 during the First World War. The women had
assembled in The Hague with the ambitious goal of stopping the war under the initiative
of a number of US and European women, with a background in suffrage and social work.
Among them were prominent suffragists like Aletta Jacobs from Holland, Emmeline
Pethick-Lawrence from England, Rosika Schwimmer from Hungary, and Anita Augspurg
from Germany. Jane Addams, the founder of the settlement house movement in the US,
traveled to The Hague together with Emily Green Balch, who was at the time a professor
of economics at Wellesley College (but was fired in 1918 because of her pacifist work).
Addams and Balch were the first American women to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1931 and 1946 respectively. The plan that the women drafted at The Hague meeting is
often reputed to have influenced Woodrow Wilson’s famous 14-point post-war
arrangement proposal, which (together with the establishment of the League of Nations)
is viewed by some as an attempt to implement liberal ideals in the international realm
29
.
The Congress established two delegations that would travel to belligerent countries, to
present their case for the immediate cessation of hostilities and their plans for lasting
peace: between May and June 1915 seven women visited fourteen governments urging
them to end the war. Needless to say, the women’s initiatives didn’t stop the war, but they
29
J. L. Richardson, Contending Liberalisms in World Politics: Ideology and Power (Boulder, Colo.: L.
Rienner, 2001), 63; Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 33.
15
did lead to a second International Congress, held in Zürich, which gave birth to the
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
30
.
In Zürich, Swiss delegate Clara Ragaz made the following observation:
And even as we serve our country best in so far as we strive for its welfare
incorporated in the greater good of humanity, so do we also best serve the cause
of women by serving all mankind. It is a debatable question even among us
women, whether the enfranchisement of women will in itself be a weapon for the
prevention of future wars. But even if we may hold different opinions on that
head, it seems to me that one thing is undeniable, that is that woman can only
come into her full inheritance in a state, or a community life, which is founded not
on force but on justice, for where mere force dominates, the lesser part will
always fall to her share
31
.
In this speech Ragaz presented three different views of the relationship between
feminism and peace, which she thought were present among the women assembled in
Zürich: 1) women’s liberation itself will lead to peace; 2) women’s liberation will not in
itself bring peace, but is one piece of the puzzle (for the WILPF women possibly not the
most important one); 3) women’s full liberation will happen only in a world of justice and
peace. This heterogeneity of views on the relationship between peace and gender equality
30
For a fascinating and thorough insider’s account of the birth and history of the WILPF up until 1965 see
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace. This historical summary is largely derived from
Ibid.; Catherine Foster, Women for all Seasons: The Story of the Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women's
Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights, 1st ed. (Syracuse, N.Y .:
Syracuse University Press, 1993); Carrie A. Foster, The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1946, lst ed. (Syracuse, N.Y .: Syracuse
University Press, 1995); Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997);
Joyce Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom: Race and the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom, 1915-1975 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Mercedes M. Randall,
Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Peace Laureate, 1946 (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1964); Katherine C. Meerse, “Peace Activism and Social Justice: The Minnesota Branch of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom, 1939-1940,” Peace and Change 23, no. 4 (October, 1998),
500-513; Erika A. Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive
Peace Movement, and the Debate Over War, 1895-1919, V ol. 160 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1997); Marie Louise Degen and Lella Secor Florence, The History of the Woman's Peace Party (New York:
B. Franklin Reprints, 1974).
31
Clara Ragaz, “Swiss Section Report,” in Report of the International Congress of Women, Zurich, May 12
to 17, 1919, English Edition (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1920), 16, microfilm reel 141.1, SCPC.
16
underlined all decisions made at the Congress and during the subsequent years, although
it would not always be made explicit.
Among the first acts of this Congress was a resolute condemnation of the
Versailles Peace Treaty, together with a cautious optimism about the nascent League of
Nations. The women found that the treaty terms could not lead to a “just and lasting
peace” because they violated fundamental principles: they imposed unfair and
unnecessary burdens on the losers, while sanctioning the victors' rights to the spoils of
war; they denied the right of self-determination; they imposed unilateral, rather than
universal, disarmament, thus continuing to sanction the use of force in international
relations. The women predicted that such terms would only increase animosities, poverty
and despair, which would eventually lead to another catastrophic war. They urged Allied
and Associated Governments to amend the treaty terms to be more in accordance with
President Wilson's Fourteen Points.
The founders intended the WILPF to be a transnational organization
32
, whose
policies would be determined by consensus at the triennial International Congress, where,
ideally, all national sections would be represented. Policies would be then carried out by
an Executive Committee, if possible in consultation with national sections, which had
relative autonomy regarding policy implementation. National sections were represented
at the Congress by delegates elected domestically. The WILPF’s official policies,
32
Here the term transnational is used in the sense employed by Jo Vellacott, that of an organization where
members are not supposed to act in representation of their own county but of the principles of the
organization as expressed in the constitution and by-laws; where national sections are bound by the
triennial congress decisions on which all national sections are represented and, in the interim, by the
International Executive Committee’s decisions; where representatives act on the mandate of the
International Congress, not of their countries of origins. Jo Vellacott, “A Place for Pacifism and
Transnationalism in Feminist Theory: The Early Work of the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom,” Women's History Review 2, no. 1 (March 1, 1993), 33. The WILPF has always preferred to use
the term “international.”
17
statements, and various kinds of pronunciations were produced (and in general they still
are) after extensive consultations among members. While stressing the centripetal
character of the organization, where policies were created at the international level and
implemented by each national section, national sections were encouraged to participate in
the League’s decision-making process at different stages and in different forms (through
study groups, committees, campaigns, etc.).Though individual sections could and did
carry out humanitarian and activist work, the founders (and in particular Emily Green
Balch, its first International Secretary) viewed relief as a distraction from the WILPF's
primary political task of eliminating the causes of war, which was to be carried out
through “the study of political and economic issues; objective fact-finding; personal
reconciliation; and the formulation of just and humane policies”
33
. Thus national sections
were expected to exercise political pressure on their governments and to approach
government delegations at international conferences directly. The international office
organized the WILPF's representation at these conferences and at the League of Nations
(and, later, at the United Nations). It also set up fact-finding missions to travel to areas of
conflict: for example, it was one of the first organizations to investigate the effects of the
US occupation of Haiti in 1926, and in 1927 a WILPF delegation visited China and Indo-
China to assess the political situation and seek contacts with women's groups
34
.
33
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 35. See also Jo Vellacott, “Women, Peace and
Internationalism, 1914-1920: 'Finding New Words and Creating New Methods',” in Peace Movements and
Political Cultures, eds. Charles Chatfield, Peter Van den Dungen and Council on Peace Research in
History, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 106-124.
34
As a result of that first fact-finding trip to China, the WILPF urged support for the Kuomintang as the
legitimate government of China on the ground that “Chiang Kai-Shek [was] definitely working with
committees and cabinet and [was] trying to build up a civil Government” (Edith Pye's Report cited in
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 62).
18
During the 1930s the WILPF was predominantly engaged in pushing for
economic and arms embargoes and convening international peace conferences to
counteract the rise of the fascist regimes and to prevent or stop the wars that broke out
prior to World War II. Political differences came to the fore in the mid 1930s, when the
French and German members clashed with British, US, and Scandinavian women over
economic justice, the use of violence and the WILPF's methods of work. On the one
hand, the French and Germans favored more radical involvement in issues of social
justice, cooperation with mass movements, and justified the use of violence in response
to injustice. Other groups prioritized nonviolence and the conviction that no one social
order would lead to peace, arguing that “peace is a method and not a state and... under
every system there will be causes for clash”
35
. These disagreements are particularly
significant because they have constituted a defining characteristic of the WILPF since its
origins. They have surfaced time and again in later years, particularly during debates on
revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s, a point that will be made clear and
analyzed in the empirical chapters. In fact, since its beginning, the organization has been
composed of women with very different political views, united by the belief that warfare
needed to be eliminated and that economic and social justice was part and parcel of a
system of peace. Its members did not identify with pacifism, though many were pacifists;
they did not identify with feminism though many were feminist; some were guided by
secular humanist principles, some by a religious ethic (the Quaker and Jewish
constituencies were particularly strong). They mostly belonged to the upper/middle class,
and the vast majority of them were white.
35
Kathleen Innes cited in ibid., 121. Emphases in the original.
19
The organization was, however, grounded in the principles of liberal
internationalism. While there have been WILPF members who have described themselves
as socialists, WILPF’s ideology and policies have generally reflected its founders’ faith in
liberal ideals. The WILPF’s principles, raisons d’être and objectives were spelled out in
their constitution and by-laws, which have changed relatively little throughout their
existence. Yet, their understandings of ‘peace’ were embedded in (and thus defined and
delimited by) the historical and ideological structure they inhabited. For the WILPF the
preconditions and elements of a just peace centered around: 1) freedom (loosely
identified with the establishment of liberal democracy); 2) self-determination (an element
of freedom); 3) total and universal disarmament; 4) economic development and
prosperity to satisfy human needs. WILPF's idea of peace thus rested on liberal ideals, on
the essentially liberal belief in the institutionalization of liberal norms of social, political
and economic cooperation and governance, based on liberal values, shared norms and
legal frameworks that would guarantee the rights and needs of people
36
.
The Second World War put the organization in limbo, but even as it raged the
women had started postwar planning, stressing the need for a stronger international
organization, a human rights charter, “constructive measures of world co-operation to
prevent aggression” and a “new concept of 'security', not based on military power and
prestige”
37
. When they assembled in Luxembourg in 1946, however, their first debate
36
Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 21-39. The WILPF favored the strengthening the League of
Nations (and since 1945 the United Nations), advocating for universality of membership, for the
establishment of machinery for international peace and for total and universal disarmament. It worked on
the relationship between disarmament and economics, particularly viewing free trade as an incentive to
international peace. It declared its opposition to all forms of imperialism and colonialism.
37
Message of the Three International Chairmen to the UN President, April 1945, cited in Bussey and
WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 177.
20
centered on what kinds of contributions women could make to the cause of peace that
was different from men’s; how and whether women should speak out, as women, in
matters of war and peace; whether a transnational women’s organization speaking for
peace was relevant in a nuclear world. The vote for continuation didn't imply that the
WILPF had resolved the issues that the debate had raised. In the years between 1945 and
1975 the organization was forced to re-evaluate its role as an international women's
organization for the promotion of peace, in an international context that was itself in
transition after the watershed of World War II, through the optimism of early post-war
years, the height of the Cold War, détente, the decolonization movement, the Vietnam war
and the resurgence of world-wide feminist organizing and networking. This dissertation
addresses the ways in which the ideological, political and historical context intersected
with the WILPF's debates and unstated assumptions about the role of women and
feminism in international politics to produce different understandings of 'peace.'
The Post-War Order and the WILPF
Robert Latham calls the immediate aftermath of the Second World War a “liberal
moment,” when the destruction of the old world order gave rise to an opportunity for the
creation of a new one, within the macro-historical fabric of liberal modernity and with the
hegemonic agency of the United States
38
. Modernity, of course, did not emerge in the
mid-1900s, but it was this time that scholars alternatively characterize as “peak
38
Borrowing Fernand Braudel's terms, Latham views the post-war liberal order as the conjuncture within
the longue durée of liberal modernity. The “liberal moment” represented the “convergence of specific
historical developments, constructions of agency, and configurations of … violence and military power” in
the immediate aftermath of World War II (Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and
the Making of Postwar International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 41).
21
modernity
39
” or “high modernity”
40
. It saw liberalism join “visions of the planned
transformation of society by rational scientific means”
41
in the establishment of the
United Nations, the codification of international law along the principles of liberal
political thought, and the institutionalization of mechanisms of “embedded liberalism” in
the economy
42
.
For post-war liberals, peace would be attainable through rational planning,
organization and institution-building implemented by liberal states. A belief in progress
and the power of rational norms and institutions to tame humanity's primitive instincts
were at the core of liberalism's visions of peace. Economic, social and scientific progress
would eventually cause changes in the international system, which would induce peace.
International institutions, multilateralism and self-determination were seen as essential
elements of the rational organization of the international system, as vehicles for the
spread of the universal liberal values, norms and rights so necessary to create a peaceful
39
Ian Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity: The Nuclear Moment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 17-18.
40
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press in association with
Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1990); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity : Self and Society in
the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). Rita Felski argues that “modernity
comprises a constantly shifting sense of temporal coordinates” (Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 12). Not only do different disciplinary traditions
locate the starting point of modernity at different historical times; the set of phenomena which we might
call ‘modern’ are also sometimes defined as such retrospectively. For Felski modernity is characterized by
ambiguity and contradiction, by contrasting cultural and philosophical meanings in different areas of social
life (ibid.). According to Stephen Toulmin it was unfortunate that, starting in the seventeenth century,
modernity came to be associated almost exclusively with the natural philosophers, rather than with equally
modern Renaissance humanists of the previous century, with all the political, social, and economic
consequences that the predominance of natural philosophy entailed (Stephen Edelston Toulmin,
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992; 1990), 30-36). This further points to the highly contestable and multifarious character
of modernity.
41
Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity, 18.
42
The phrase is John Ruggie's and refers to the post-war economic system designed to avoid another “Great
Depression” by instituting a set of social and political constraints and governmental regulations of the
market, for social stability and equilibrium (John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and
Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2,
22
international structure. Free markets and trade “would build up irrevocable and peaceful
connections between states” by creating interdependence
43
.
But liberalism was multi-faceted and it “incorporate[d] a plurality of values,
among which [were] significant tensions”
44
. A “liberalism of the powerful,” while viewed
as essentially benign and good for peoples all over the world, in reality sometimes
involved the imposition of liberal “universal” values with little consideration for cultural
and historical diversity and with “the characteristic liberal blind spot concerning power,
especially the manner in which it [was] exercised in a liberal world”
45
. So the post-war
order was also characterized (at least in the West) by the hegemonic project of the United
States which, while being liberal, was not entirely benign
46
. The system created after the
Second World War had both consensual and coercive dimensions, and it entailed “a
structure of values and understandings about the nature of order that permeate[d] a whole
system of states and non-state entities”
47
. On the other hand, liberalism was never an
entirely coherent set of doctrines, values, and principles and, since the XVII century, the
“liberalism of privilege” had coexisted with an “egalitarian, social, or inclusive” strand of
liberalism
48
.
43
Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 21-39.
44
Richardson, Contending Liberalisms, 2.
45
Ibid., 9.
46
Latham, Liberal Moment.
47
This is Cox's definition of hegemony in Robert W. Cox, “Towards a Post-Hegemonic Conceptualization
of World Order: Reflections on the Relevancy of Ibn Khaldun” In Governance without Government: Order
and Change in World Politics, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst Otto Czempiel (Cambridge England; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 140. See also Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks [Quaderni del
carcere.], edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Robert W. Cox,
“Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” Millennium: Journal of
International Relations 12, no. 2 (1983), 162-175.
48
Richardson, Contending Liberalisms, 20. While it is probably true that liberalism as an intellectual
tradition didn't emerge until the eighteenth century, liberal themes appeared in the political debates of the
23
The WILPF, like other non-governmental organizations, the United Nations and
its agencies and liberal states operated within that system, which shaped practices and
ideas in the international realm
49
. It is a constructivist and feminist insight that no
knowledge can remain untouched by the context in which it is born
50
. The post-war
liberal order thus influenced and shaped the forms, purposes, and ideologies of the
organizations that worked within that order. But because it was built upon the unstable
principles of modern liberalism, that order was also inherently contestable.
It is therefore important to understand whether, to what extent and how Western
organizations could challenge and redefine the parameters of the post-war liberal order,
thereby expanding the boundaries of what was possible within it. Was the WILPF, as a
Western organization founded on the principles of liberal internationalism, embedded in
the hegemonic liberalism that characterized the post-war order, or was it an organization
that expanded liberalism's boundaries and its own? To the extent that it was a critical
voice within the liberal order, what made it possible for it to be so? Answers to these
questions have important implications beyond the confines of the geo-historical scope of
this dissertation. They can help us understand how individuals and groups can transcend
ideological, historical and structural limits and effect social change.
Therefore, in this dissertation I intend to answer the following questions: How did
the WILPF resolve questions about the relationship between women, feminism and
peace? Were its answers consistent through different historical circumstances or did they
English Civil War (ibid.).
49
Latham, Liberal Moment, 62.
50
See for example Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988), 575-599.
24
vary along with the international context? If they varied, were different responses solely
influenced by the external environment or was something else at play? In other words,
how did the historical, social, political, economic and ideological context interact with
the WILPF women’s agency to determine different ideas about peace and its relationship
with feminism and/or women? Moreover, to the extent that their ideas and policies
challenged, rather than reproduced, the ideological milieu in which they were situated
and that defined them, what compelled, favored or helped the organization in this move?
Finally, what lessons can we learn from the WILPF that might be relevant to actors
interested in emancipatory social change? In the next chapter I use insights from both
feminism and constructivism to address these questions.
Case Selection and Methodology
The WILPF is the oldest international Western women's peace organization, with
national sections on all continents. As a non-government organization (NGO), it has
enjoyed consultative status with ECOSOC and a number of other UN agencies since the
early post-war years, maintaining open channels of communication with national
governments represented at the UN. In this sense, it is a ‘mainstream’ NGO (i.e., not a
radical social movement). In fact at times, it has been considered ‘too mainstream’ or
entrenched in the post-war international system by organizations and social movements
critical of this system
51
. Yet it has also been considered ‘too radical’ when its policies
have challenged certain governments’ actions. It is an organization that navigates within
the international system according to the parameters of liberalism, yet it is guided by
principles, rules, and behaviors that are sometimes at odds with them. Therefore, it is well
51
Catia C. Confortini, “Women, Feminism, and Peace: Highlights from the 2005 World Social Forum,”
Peace and Freedom, Spring, 2005, 18.
25
suited to an inquiry exploring to what extent, when, and how ideas and practices
reproduce or challenge the milieu in which such an organization is situated. Moreover,
the WILPF was an organization created to provide an avenue for the expression of
women's ideas about peace. While not expressly feminist, the WILPF has at times
embraced feminism; while not expressly pacifist, it has at times embraced pacifism. In
many ways, its policies and ideas overlap with other internationally-oriented Western
women's NGOs working for peace, with which it has at times (but not always)
cooperated. However, these organizations have been short-lived (e.g., Women Strike for
Peace), marginal in the international arena (e.g., Women's International Democratic
Federation), single-focus (e.g., Voice of Women) and/or lacked accessible or reliable
historical records for a number of different reasons (e.g., Greenham Common, Women In
Black). WILPF is the only multi-focus international non-governmental women's peace
organization with the kind of life-span and moderately well-documented archival record
that allow for historical inquiry. Because its origins are Western, it well suited to serve as
a case for the study of the gender-peace-liberalism nexus. It is a bridge organization
between women’s organizations and peace organizations, thus it is also well positioned to
answer the question of how it negotiates the relation between gender and peace in the
context of the liberal Western order. To the extent that an organization which owed its
very origins to liberalism as a modern doctrine was able to transcend it, I can trace the
historical trajectory of such changes and the practices that underpinned them. To the
extent that it wasn't, it will force a re-evaluation of the assumptions I start with, that
structural change can be effected and that there are practices that make such change both
more likely and more emancipatory.
26
I focus my attention on three areas of the WILPF's work: disarmament,
decolonization and Israel/Palestine. The three areas have been central for the WILPF in
the post WWII period, and disarmament and decolonization have been essential elements
of their definition of 'peace.' They have been two of its most prioritized areas, especially
since 1945; thus they are best suited to a historical tracing of the organization’s ideas
about peace. Because they overlap at times with other issues, they can also highlight to
what extent and with what kinds of rationale the WILPF chose to relate them (or not) to
other issues. Atomic energy and the demise of colonial empires gave new impetus and
provided the opportunity for the organization to offer input into decisions being made in
the international arena. The conflict in Israel/Palestine was a newer topic of attention, and
was raised to prominence only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This area of
WILPF's work represents a more grounded, more specific case that shows the overlap
between disarmament and decolonization, and with other areas of WILPF’s work, and
can shed light on how ideas about peace translated practically in a specific geo-political
context. A full discussion of WILPF’s adherence or resistance to liberal modernity would
naturally require at the least a more complete analysis of WILPF’s policies in areas such
as the economy or human rights (including women’s rights), which also were important
for the ideology and context of liberal modernity. These three cases nevertheless offer the
opportunity to reflect on the relationship between ideas entrenched in a structural context
and actors' intentionality and ability to challenge that context. Specifically, they allow me
to evaluate the extent to which the WILPF's practices allowed it to push the boundaries of
the ideological context that defined and limited their possibilities.
27
My specific methodology uses a combination of interpretive tools: historical
narrative (a form of interpretive process-tracing) employs a mixture of secondary sources
and archives to outline a storyline that highlights both continuities and discontinuities in
the WILPF's ideas and policies with particular attention to the broader context in which
they were situated
52
. I cross-checked my findings and exegesis through interviews, which
allowed me to relate directly to those activists who were involved with major decisions.
Unfortunately, only a few of those personalities are alive today (which points to
important limits of my interpretation). Their memories have helped me to better capture
debates and disagreements, who said what and when, sharpen my interpretation, fill gaps,
point me in different and important directions that I might have sidelined, and sometimes
correct me when I misinterpreted some documents. I have also integrated primary sources
and interviews with secondary sources, such as histories and biographies. The
combination of these three sources guarantees a measure of accuracy in my interpretation
of the changes, through which the WILPF ideas and policies on peace went from 1945 to
1975.
Outline of the Chapters
The arguments of this dissertation are presented in Chapter 2. I start with a
discussion of the limitations of understanding feminist debates about peace around
equality/difference divides. I then ground my theoretical analysis in a constructivist
ontology of social construction and suggest the need for moving beyond epistemological
and ontological differences to focus on methodology to develop a theory of emancipatory
agency. After describing what feminists would require of such a theory, I summarize
52
Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations
(Armonk, N. Y .: M.E. Sharpe, 2007).
28
Third World Feminist Social Criticism as a point of departure. I highlight its
contributions and outline its weaknesses for a theory of emancipatory agency and suggest
that its methodological tools are not sufficient to compel action in the direction of
emancipation.
The first empirical chapter follows the policies of the WILPF on disarmament
from 1945 to 1975. I show that the WILPF’s worldview about the causes of war,
militarization, the arms buildup and their elimination went through two distinct phases,
from an emphasis on legal and political agreements as first steps in making nuclear arms
unnecessary, a focus on nuclear abolition and an optimistic view of the use of nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes to the articulation of a harsher economic critique of the war
system. The WILPF's critique emphasized that the nuclear arms buildup, together with
nuclear energy use and traffic in small arms, were cornerstones of an economic system
based on profits, rather than needs. Thus, between 1945 and 1975 the WILPF constructed
its idea of peace around different ideologies, each imbued with its own sets of gender
assumptions. I argue that shifts in the international environment are not enough to
understand how or why the WILPF formulated different ideas and policies about peace as
related to disarmament issues in the 1970s. I show that the international environment
favored increasingly self-reflective practices, which led to the articulation of more far-
reaching peace and disarmament arguments.
The second empirical chapter follows the WILPF's policies on decolonization. I
will argue that an early 1970s’ resolution on the inevitability of violent revolutions,
unprecedented until then, resulted from a shift in ideological beliefs. Though the
international environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored this shift, the WILPF arrived at
29
their new policies thanks to an increasing reliance on feminist critical methods. I
highlight the origins of the profound disagreements within the organization on this issue
and the practices that allowed for their resolution.
The third empirical chapter explores the policy shifts of the WILPF toward the
long-standing international conflict in Israel/Palestine. In the mid-seventies, the WILPF
declared its support for a two-state solution, a peace conference under UN auspices, and
the creation of a WMD-free zone in the area. With that declaration, and increasingly in
subsequent years, the WILPF went from being timidly pro-Israel (1947-1974) to
assertively questioning Israel’s policies, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and
the democratic nature of the Israeli state. I argue that the WILPF leadership’s changing
ideas about Arab women and their roles, identities, and cultural norms influenced a
change in policy. This policy change occurred despite its unpopularity with some
important constituencies, especially in the US, indicating continuing contestations over
the meaning of peace.
My conclusions will summarize the empirical findings and assess the extent to
which Brooke Ackerly's theory of TWFSC adequately represents the WILPF's
methodology in the context of the post-war liberal West. Drawing on and expanding
Ackerly's theory I will outline a methodology of emancipatory social change that better
adapts to the context in which the WILPF, like many other Western peace organizations,
operate.
The chapter that follows introduces my theoretical framework: starting with a
discussion of feminist debates about peace, I outline their inadequacy in understanding
the WILPF's own internal struggles and point to the need for a theory of agency in
30
International Relations, which outlines the possibilities for emancipatory action in the
context of constraining and defining structures.
31
Chapter 2: Towards A Theory of Emancipatory Social Change
Introduction
As suggested in the previous chapter, focusing on equality/difference debates as if
they were the only point of contention in feminist thinking about peace subsumes under
one umbrella a number of other potentially fruitful lines of contact, disagreement and
feminist reflection. Yet recognizing differences and engaging with them is important if
we want to understand and derive lessons from the many women who also happen to be
(feminist) peace activists
53
. Jo Vellacott points out that, at least before the Second World
War, feminist debates centered less on what she calls the equality-difference dichotomy
and more on what feminists defined as a legitimate, proper or opportune role (public vs.
private issues) and sphere (public vs. private arena) of women’s political activity. In her
study of British and international women’s (peace) activism immediately after the First
World War she distinguishes between two groups. On the one hand, there were those
suffragists who convened in Paris during the Peace Conference to lobby government
delegates for women’s representation at the negotiating table and in the League of
Nations (public sphere), but aimed at including a limited number of issues (traditional
women’s concerns such as marriage, suffrage, nationality laws affecting women, etc. –
private role) in the policy-makers’ agendas. On the other hand, there were those who
convened in Zurich and demanded a place at the table to speak as women on all issues,
53
More recently Cynthia Cockburn has written about women’s antimilitarism activists and their
contributions to IR theory through reconceptualizations of the relationships between various forms of
oppression, war and peace (Cockburn, From Where We Stand). I follow in Cockburn’s footsteps and
advocate a more sustained theoretical engagement of feminist IR with peace questions in IR theory.
32
including foreign and international affairs and peace (public and private sphere and
role)
54
. The women of Zurich constituted themselves as the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom.
I build on Vellacott's argument and seek to uncover the main themes in feminist
debates on peace and its relationship with women and feminism more generally. In
particular, I propose that three separate questions are subsumed behind equality-
difference arguments and informed feminist contentions in the second half of the
twentieth century: 1) To what extent are women more peaceful than men? 2) To what
extent is peace a women's issue; that is, do women have a special interest in peace? And
3) what relationship, if any, exists between feminism and militarism? Dividing feminist
debates along these three lines allows me to underscore the complexity of feminist
arguments around peace, beyond the equality/difference divide. It also avoids fitting
women into a construction that might belong more to contemporary debates and hardly
apply to the past. If different answers to these questions percolated among the WILPF's
members, it is important then to understand how divergences reflected in their policies
around specific issues. To what extent were feminist ideological struggles imbricated in
the formulation of WILPF’s post-war policies on disarmament, decolonization and the
Middle East? And to the extent that they were, how did they intersect with the historical
context of liberal modernity between 1945 and 1975?
I am particularly concerned about defining a theory of agency that would take into
account its co-constitution with structure and outline the possibilities for emancipatory
action. If liberal modernity represented the hegemonic “mode of fashioning and
54
Vellacott, “Place for Pacifism,” 30-32.
33
sustaining aspects of social and political existence” through “practices, principles and
institutions associated with liberal governance, rights, markets, and self-determination”
55
,
to what extent did the WILPF's women's agency confront this broader historical context
that defined and limited them? Did the organization's views about peace conform to these
hegemonic forces or was the WILPF able to challenge them? And, to the extent that it
broke away from or expanded the limits of its own liberalism, what were the practices
that allowed it to do so? In other words, how did the WILPF women's intentionality
(agency) intersect with the constitutive presence of liberal modernity (structure)?
Ontology, Epistemology, Ethics and Social Construction
Of the many approaches to International Relations, constructivism has
consistently addressed and vigorously debated the relationship between structure and
agency in the international realm
56
. In fact, one of constructivism's most important
insights is precisely the co-constitution of structure and agency. For constructivists
structures are understood as seemingly enduring patterns of relations and rules reflecting
specific historical and social contexts and guiding expectations of behavior
57
.
Constructivism holds that individuals’ thinking and behavior are conditioned by
55
Latham, Liberal Moment, 14-15.
56
Following Cecelia Lynch and Audie Klotz, I group into the label ‘constructivist’ a variety of scholars who
may differ on ideological and epistemological grounds, but who share three common ontological principles:
1) the need for contextualizing the issues under analysis; 2) the belief that the social world is, for some
important part, made up of intersubjective understandings; 3) the insistence on the co-constitution of
structure and agency (Klotz and Lynch, Strategies for Research). Scholars that, at least theoretically, agree
with these three propositions include “moderate” constructivists such as Alexander Wendt, linguistic
constructivists such as Nicholas Onuf, critical theorists such as Robert Cox, and poststructuralists such as
Roxanne Doty or Maja Zehfuss. Alexander Wendt’s terminology is somewhat different: much of what
Lynch and Klotz call ‘constructivist,’ he calls ‘critical,’ while constructivism is a label he reserves for
positivist-oriented theorists of the social construction of international relations (Alexander Wendt,
“Constructing International Politics,” International Security 20, no. 1 (Summer, 1995), 71-81).
57
Klotz and Lynch, Strategies for Research, chapter 2.
34
structures, but not determined by them. Individuals retain with a certain degree of agency
the ability to change the rules and expectations that make up structures and to effect
social change.
Constructivism emerged in the late 1980s out of the necessity to explain social
change. One of the first constructivist works, Alexander Wendt's “The Agent-Structure
Problem in International Relations Theory”
58
, was motivated by the failure of
behavioralist neorealism and of structural determinist world system theory to adequately
theorize the mutual constitution of structure and agency. If, Wendt claimed, we agree with
the propositions that human beings are purposeful actors who shape society and that
society is made up of social relations that structure the interactions of agents, we cannot
assume that only structure or agents are ontologically primitive, as both are so. The
metatheoretical debate that ensued centered on ontological and epistemological
considerations that posited proponents of scientific realism against poststructuralists
59
.
58
Alexander E. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International
Organization 41, no. 3 (Summer, 1987), 335-370. Wendt did not apply the label “constructivist” to this
work. It wasn't until Nicholas Onuf's 1989 work, World of Our Making, that the label began to be applied
(and somewhat inconsistently so) to the kind if liberature that I engage with in this dissertation( Nicholas
Greenwood Onuf, World of our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations
(Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989)).
59
The agent-structure debate among constructivists has produced a vast array of literature and
conversations: Wendt, “Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations,” 335-370; Alexander Wendt,
“Bridging the Theory/Meta-Theory Gap in International Relations,” Review of International Studies 17, no.
4 (October, 1991), 383-392; Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, “Beware of Gurus: Structure and Action in
International Relations,” Review of International Studies 17, no. 4 (October, 1991), 393-410; Alexander
Wendt, “Levels of Analysis Vs. Agents and Structures: Part III,” Review of International Studies 18, no. 2
(April, 1992), 181-185; Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, “Structure and Action: Further Comment,” Review
of International Studies 18, no. 2 (April, 1992), 187-188; Hollis and Smith, Explaining and Understanding,
226; Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, “Two Stories about Structure and Agency,” Review of International
Studies 20, no. 3 (July, 1994), 241-251; Vivienne Jabri and Stephen Chan, “The Ontologist always Rings
Twice: Two More Stories about Structure and Agency in Reply to Hollis and Smith,” Review of
International Studies 22, no. 1 (January, 1996), 107-110; Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, “A Response:
Why Epistemology Matters in International Theory,” Review of International Studies 22, no. 1 (January,
1996), 111-116; David Dessler, “What's at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?,” International
Organization 43, no. 3 (Summer, 1989), 441-473; Walter Carlsnaes, “The Agency-Structure Problem in
Foreign Policy Analysis,” International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1992), 245-270; Roxanne Lynn Doty,
“Aporia: A Critical Exploration of the Agent-Structure Problematique in International Relations Theory,”
35
The first claim that structures as social formations are real though unobservable and exist
and can be known independently of the knower
60
. By constrast, poststructuralists reject a
rigid separation of object and subject, claiming that the existence and nature of the social
world are unknowable outside the knower
61
. Thus ontology (beliefs about the nature of
the world) must be secondary to epistemology (how do we know what we know)
62
.
Different epistemologies lead to different method choices and arguments about how to
reconcile social construction with methods and epistemologies.
Because of these apparently incompatible differences, reviews of constructivist
literature have often posited “conventional” against “critical” constructivism
63
. Cecelia
Lynch and Audie Klotz find this distinction overplayed in IR theory, serving the often
unstated purpose of marginalizing or downplaying the contributions of “critical”
constructivism to IR theory. However, while there are differing epistemological stakes,
there is also considerable ontological agreement among constructivists
64
. Birgit Locher
European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3 (1997), 365-392; Colin Wight, “They Shoot Dead
Horses Don't They?: Locating Agency in the Agent-Structure Problematique,” European Journal of
International Relations 5, no. 1 (1999), 109-142; Roxanne Lynn Doty, “A Reply to Colin Wight,”
European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 3 (1999), 387-390; Colin Wight, “Interpretation all the
Way Down?: A Reply to Roxanne Lynn Doty,” European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 3
(2000), 423-430.
60
On the scientific realist side, see Dessler, “What's at Stake;” Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and
International Relations: Politics as Ontology, V ol. 101 (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006); Wight, “They Shoot Dead Horses;” Wendt, “Agent-Structure Problem in International
Relations;” Wendt, “Constructing International Politics.”
61
Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality, V ol. 83 (Cambridge,
UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
62
Doty, “Aporia.” My interpretation of poststructuralism differs from Wight’s in his reply to Doty (Wight,
“Interpretation all the Way Down?”). It is also worth noticing that Wight’s claim that there is nothing that
matters but ontology in the agent-structure debate is precisely what, one may argue, makes his approach
incompatible with poststructuralism. See Wight, Politics as Ontology.
63
See for example Ted Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory,”
International Security 23, no. 1 (Summer, 1998), 171-200.
64
Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, “Translating Terminologies,” International Studies Review 8, no. 2
36
and Elisabeth Prügl agree that constructivists have in common an “ontology of
becoming:” they “describe the world not as one that is, but as one that is in the process of
becoming”
65
. This ontology allows constructivism to theorize social change without
falling into the trap of rigid behaviorism
66
. While epistemological differences between
modernists and postmodernists have in general prevented cross-fertilization, Lynch and
Klotz point out that constructivists also share the common research agenda of
understanding how and why certain ideas become institutionalized or change. Different
terminologies reflect epistemological divides, but constructivists fundamentally concur
that “agents or subjects create meanings within structures and discourses through
processes and practices”
67
. Klotz and Lynch thus propose to focus on methodology, which
they understand as the choice of the most appropriate tools for specific research
questions. Shifting attention to methodology, they argue, moves us beyond fruitless
arguments and into more relevant empirical issues that ultimately help us better
understand the world.
Among constructivists, however, there exists another important (and related) point
of contention, which was famously described by Robert Cox. He proposed a distinction
between “problem-solving” and “critical” IR theory: the first is concerned with the
understanding and smooth functioning of existing power relations and the international
(June, 2006), 357. See also Klotz and Lynch, Strategies for Research.
65
Birgit Locher and Elisabeth Prügl, “Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart Or Sharing the Middle
Ground?,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Mar., 2001), 114.
66
Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Tracing Causal Mechanisms,” International Studies Review 8, no. 2 (June, 2006),
362-370. Elsewhere Checkel questions how adequately constructivism has theorized agency (Jeffrey T.
Checkel, “Review: The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory; National Interests in
International Society; the Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics; Norms in
International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (Jan., 1998), 324-348).
67
Klotz and Lynch, “Translating Terminologies,” 357.
37
system; the second “stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that
order came about”
68
. In doing so, critical theory aims at denaturalizing and historicizing
the social order with the purpose of transforming it. Thus critical theory “not merely
describes and explains global politics but ... contributes to the transformation of global
politics through its own theoretical practice”
69
. There is in other words an essential
normative component to critical theory that is not necessarily shared by other
constructivists
70
. This normative element makes critical theory akin to feminism, but
ethical reflections are not unique to critical theory nor feminism.
Therefore I extend Lynch and Klotz' advocacy of a focus on methodology but,
following Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, I intend methodology to mean
“guiding self-conscious reflections on epistemological assumptions, ontological
perspective, ethical responsibilities, and method choices”
71
. Like Ackerly and True I am
concerned about establishing a set of practices (theoretical methods) that would compel
reflection about the relationship among ontological perspectives, epistemological
68
Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,”
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10, no. 2 (June, 1981), 129. Cox intended this distinction to
apply to IR theory in general, but it nevertheless applies to constructivism.
69
Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True, “Studying the Struggles and Wishes of the Age: Feminist Theoretical
Methodology and Feminist Theoretical Methods,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations,
eds. Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 243.
70
Tickner, “What is Your Research Program?;” J. Ann Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations:
Some Methodological Issues,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds. Brooke A.
Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 19-41; Marysia Zalewski, “Distracted Reflections on the Production, Narration and Refusal of
Feminist Knowledge in IR,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds. Brooke A.
Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 42-61.
71
Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, “Feminist Methodologies for International Relations,”
in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds. Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui
True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.
38
assumptions, and ethical dimensions, with special attention to the practical and political
consequences of actors' choices
72
. It is in a continuous self-reflecting process that
epistemology and ontology come to the fore as concrete (immanent), rather than merely
theoretical pre-givens
73
. Like Ackerly and True I draw on feminist contributions to IR
theory for insights. However, while they propose a theoretical method aimed at producing
better (more critical) IR theory
74
, I consider the possibility of identifying a method that is
relevant for activists and social movements interested in social change, particularly
emancipatory social change. This practice should facilitate the expression of an agency
that is conscious and critical of the structural constraints, which define it and under which
it operates. To the extent that such a theoretical method can be made explicit, it
contributes to the agent-structure debate in constructivism by proposing a critical
constructivist theory of agency. The following section will highlight some feminist
contributions which, I argue, need to be taken seriously in order to pursue such theory.
Feminism, Social Change and Emancipation
Most if not all feminist approaches to IR share with constructivism an “ontology
of becoming.” In this sense most, if not all, feminist IR is constructivist
75
. Because of its
explicit normative orientation and its preoccupation with emancipation, most feminist
theory can also be considered critical, in the sense identified by Robert Cox. However,
72
Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles,” 248.
73
See also Brooke A. Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge, U.K.; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
74
Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles,” 244.
75
See Locher and Prügl, “Feminism and Constructivism,” 114.
39
feminism offers distinct contributions to constructivist critical theory, which are
important to a theory of agency.
Gender as Power
For feminists gender is a central concept, indispensable in order to understand
power in the international system. In the first place, gender is a social construct, “socially
learned behavior and expectations that distinguish between masculinity and femininity”
76
.
But gender is also an analytic category, which helps to organize the way people think
about the world. People thus come to see social reality as a set of mutually exclusive
dichotomous categories, in relationship of super/sub-ordination to each other
77
. Joan
Scott’s oft-quoted definition of gender is composed of two interdependent components:
“gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences
between the sexes,” and “gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power”
78
.
Gender, intended as the socially constructed dichotomy built upon biological sex
differences, is a relation of power, feminists argue, and as such, it shapes, regulates,
rationalizes and justifies other social relations of power, which, in turn, are all gendered.
From this perspective, gender is “systemic and transformative” as “the world is
pervasively shaped by gender meanings”
79
. Therefore, not only is power intersubjectively
constituted, a proposition with which some constructivist approaches would be in
76
V . Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1999), 5.
77
Ibid., 5-10. See also Tickner, Gender in International Relations, 5-9.
78
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),
42.
79
V . Spike Peterson, “Introduction,” in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations
Theory, ed. V . Spike Peterson (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 8-9.
40
agreement
80
, but it is also inseparable from gender relations. Moreover, feminists often
locate power and oppression at the intersection of social hierarchies, rather than within
their boundaries, thus bringing out the hierarchical and power-laden web of relationships
that constitute the so-called world order
81
. This makes feminists acutely sensitive to those
who are silenced or marginalized. So, feminists are rarely, if ever, concerned about the
liberation of women only. Rather, their emancipatory project involves an understanding
of how the international system works to create, support and perpetuate all forms of
domination
82
. Feminist insights then suggest that, in order to be able to transform the
80
Many critical theorists and poststructuralists would also share this understanding of power. See Locher
and Prügl, “Feminism and Constructivism;” Elisabeth Prügl and Birgit Locher, “Feminism:
Constructivism's Other Pedigree,” in Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation, eds. K.
M. Fierke and Knud Erik Jørgensen (Armonk, N.Y .: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 76-92; Elisabeth Prügl, The
Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of
Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
81
Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles,” 246. See also for example Cynthia Enloe, “Margins,
Silences and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International
Relations,” in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds. Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia
Zalewski (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 188. Most feminists share a
preoccupation (at least theoretically) with intersectionality (“the relationships among multiple dimensions
and modalities of social relations and subject formation”), at least since they have been criticized for
claiming a facile universalism (Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30, no. 3
(Spring, 2005), 1771). See also Emily Grabham, Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics
of Location (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008). Third World feminists have
often critiqued First World feminists for downplaying or outright ignoring race/ethnicity as a category of
analysis (see for example Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women
and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)) and a few feminists have
discussed the social construction of “whiteness.” For an interesting example and discussion of the
multifaceted relation between white womanhood, feminism and racism in the context of contemporary and
nineteenth century England, see Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London;
New York: Verso, 1992). I have to point out here that post-colonial theory also makes marginalized subjects
the starting point of research. In this respect, postcolonial theory is very close to feminist IR and, in fact,
many feminist IR theorists would also call themselves ‘postcolonial’ and make the lives of ‘Third World
women’ central to their analysis. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2003); Geeta Chowdhry and
Sheila Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class
(London ; New York: Routledge, 2002); Anna M. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex:
Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004); L. H. M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the
West (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2002).
82
Enloe, “Margins, Silences and Bottom Rungs,” 190 and 200.
41
world, activists need to first be able to identify actual and potential forms of oppression
and exclusion and how they relate to each other.
Power and Identity of the Knower
As a consequence of its awareness and alertness to power relations, feminism's
central epistemological preoccupation is with questions of truth claims as related to the
knower’s identity. Birgit Locher and Elisabeth Prügl acknowledge that many
constructivists fail to “critically reflect[...] on the location from which their knowledge
issues, of thinking through the political and ethical implications of their knowledge
claims”
83
. The basic constructivist ontology of co-constitution cannot but lead to an
awareness that the theorist's agency is itself conditioned by the particular normative-
historical context in which s/he operates
84
. Critical theory specifically addresses issues of
interests and the necessary political question of whose and what purposes specific
knowledge claims serve
85
and it operates with the concept of emancipation as a principle
for judgment. Unfortunately, it fails to recognize the tension between the awareness of
this concept's own historicity and the necessity to “ground critique securely” along
standards of truth
86
. On the other hand, poststructuralism emphasizes the relativity of
83
Locher and Prügl, “Feminism and Constructivism,” 121.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid., 121-122.
86
Kimberly Hutchings, “The Nature of Critique in Critical International Theory,” in Critical Theory and
World Politics, ed. Richard Wyn Jones (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 87. Elsewhere
Hutchings claims that critical theory and poststructuralism maintain a Kantian-derived artificial distinction
between morality and politics, which condemns the theorist “either to raise contingency and historicity to
the level of a static and timeless absolute, or to judging the international in terms of an abstract and
ungrounded reading of history as progress,” hence failing to move beyond the unsatisfactory political
dilemma “between the pragmatism of the strategist, and the idealism of the moral philosopher” (Kimberly
Hutchings, “The Possibility of Judgement: Moralizing and Theorizing in International Relations,” Review
of International Studies 18, no. 1 (Jan., 1992), 62).
42
truth claims and, while not precluding moral judgments, it contends that any claim to
truth (justice or emancipation) must necessarily be provisional, contextual and open to
reinterpretation, lest it risk reproducing power/knowledge structures. Refusing to rest any
knowledge claim on solid ground, however, risks political paralysis, thus
poststructuralism sits uncomfortably with feminist normative commitment
87
.
This has important implications for a theory of agency. The question of how we
know whether a decision is emancipatory cannot be completely answered unless we 1)
scrutinize the degree to which our very definition of emancipation is structurally
conditioned and contributes to perpetuating oppression; and 2) our practices are
themselves exclusionary or oppressively assimilationist
88
. At the same time, doing away
with or sidelining normative precepts does not help us answer the practical question of
how to effect social change. A theory of agency that is cognizant of this tension will
provide tools for self-reflection, that is tools for identifying and remedying actual or
potential exclusionary and oppressive ideas and practices activists themselves might be
following. Feminist theory is well equipped to do so because it strives for provisional, not
absolute, contextual, not general, standards of justice and equality
89
. Moreover, it
87
Elisabeth M. Prügl, “Feminist Struggle as Social Construction: Changing the Gendered Rules of Home-
Based Work,” in International Relations in a Constructed World, eds. V . Kubálková, Nicholas Greenwood
Onuf and Paul Kowert (Armonk, N.Y .: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 123-146. See also Prügl, The Global
Construction of Gender.
88
Feminists are deeply concerned with the “possibility of a meaningful feminist international ethics that is
not inherently assimilative but that also does not simply collapse into moral pluralism in which there is
common vocabulary within which feminist conceptions of justice and the good may be articulated”
(Kimberly Hutchings, “From Morality to Politics and Back again: Feminist International Ethics and the
Civil-Society Argument,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 3 (06/01, 2004), 21). Elsewhere
Hutchings posits that this problem is of special concern to white Western feminists torn between a
commitment to universal moral values and the consciousness of their past and present privileges and
complicity with exploitative systems. I will return to this point later (Kimberly Hutchings, “Feminism,
Universalism, and the Ethics of International Politics,” in Women, Culture, and International Relations,
eds. Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O'Gorman (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 17-38).
89
Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles,” 246.
43
positions itself at the intersection between practice and theory. Its first and arguably most
important question “where are the women?” has important implications for a theory of
(emancipatory) agency.
Where are the Women?
Feminist IR starts with the observation that IR theory reflects the lived
experiences of men, not women
90
. Most feminist theorists view all knowledge as situated
and partial. They argue that“[p]erspective, or the situated locality of thought, is not a
limitation but a condition of its possibility”
91
. This awareness brings to the fore women's
experiences and ways of knowing. Feminist theory, however, does not confer epistemic
privilege on women, by virtue of their marginalization: it does not necessarily claim that,
because traditionally excluded from political decision-making, women have a special
claim to truth. Rather, it asks for women's epistemic authority, that is the right to speak,
be heard and listened to about international relations. Such authority, many feminists
would argue, is necessary on moral and political grounds. Starting theory from women’s
lives “provides fresh and more critical questions about how the social order works”
92
.
This simple act is an empirical move, grounded on epistemological and ontological
reflections and with practical consequences
93
:
90
Cynthia H. Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); Tickner, Gender in International Relations.
91
Alcoff, “Rethinking Maternal Thinking,” 86.
92
Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Feminist Standpoint Epistemology: What is 'Strong Objectivity'?,” in
Feminist Epistemologies, eds. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 62. For a
discussion of the difference between epistemic authority and epistemic privilege and their relation to
feminist standpoint epistemology, see Marianne Janack, “Standpoint Epistemology without the
'Standpoint'?: An Examination of Epistemic Privilege and Epistemic Authority,” Hypatia 12, no. 2 (Spring,
1997), 125-139.
93
Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
44
[F]eminist IR scholars privilege the moment of practice in the process of
theorizing and judge theories in terms of the practical possibilities they open up.
As a consequence, feminists cannot discuss the sociological dimensions of their
subject without making extensive use of women and men’s lived experiences or
gender analysis. They cannot discern the normative dimensions of their work
without considering their implications for feminist practice and social change
94
.
Moreover, feminist normative commitments are qualitatively different from other
normative IR, because feminist theory is grounded in a “political ethics of care.” Fiona
Robinson observes that
A framework of care starts from the position that the giving and receiving of care
is a vital part of all human lives, and that it must therefore be a normative guide in
the creation of decent societies. Such a framework may then be used as a basis for
discursive analysis – of policy documents, for example – as well as a critical tool
for the philosophical critique of actual human social arrangements, and,
ultimately, the creation of transformative policy
95
.
Sara Ruddick’s much misinterpreted “maternal thinking” (a heuristic concept)
also stems from a practice grounded in preservative love and sustaining a care-giving
ethics that runs counter to militaristic (and I would extend oppressive) enterprises
96
.
1979); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); Christine
Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991); Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice,” in Gendered
States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, ed. V . Spike Peterson (Boulder and London:
Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), 141-154; Tickner, Gender in International Relations; Christine Sylvester,
Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
See also Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles,” 243.
94
Ibid., 248. See also Catherine Eschle, Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), 13.
95
Fiona Robinson, “Methods of Feminist Normative Theory: A Political Ethic of Care for International
Relations,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds. Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and
Jacqui True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 222.
96
Ruddick, Maternal Thinking; Sara Ruddick, “From Maternal Thinking to Peace Politics,” in Explorations
in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice, eds. Eve Browning and Susan Margaret Coultrap-McQuin, V ol.
MB 697 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 109-127; Sara Ruddick, “Notes Toward a Feminist
Peace Politics,” in Gendering War Talk, eds. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 109-127. Linda Alcoff has offered a compelling postmodern tribute to
Ruddick’s work in Alcoff, “Rethinking Maternal Thinking,” 85-89. Kimberly Hutchings recuperates the
value of Ruddick’s ethic of care for international politics in Hutchings, “Feminism, Universalism,” 17-38.
45
The connection between theory, practice and the ethics of care leads to the
importance of drawing insights for developing theory and, particularly, for developing a
set of practices conducive to social change from women's lives and feminist activism
97
. It
also forces continual re-evaluation of one's theory in terms of its impact on those affected
by it. The import of these principles for a critical constructivist theory of agency is the
realization that, in order to be able to transcend structural constraints, actors need a
method that would compel the continual interpellation of the entire community for an
evaluation of the impact of any decision. The dialogue thus engendered needs to be aware
of power differentials within the community and also between the community and outside
critics. In particular, it is important to be aware of the degree to which power relations
imbue the very language through which attempts at dialogue are conducted
98
.
If language and power are so inextricably linked, then, a critical theory of agency
needs to provide tools that enable unhampered communication. In discussing the
possibility of conversation between the multiple schools of international relations, Lily
Ling describes the history of interactions between cultures/worlds as a “constant process
of hybrid world making to ensure survival.” In this process new, hybrid subjectivities are
created that compel the recognition that the “Other exists in part within the… Self”
99
.
Similarly, Kimberly Hutchings suggests that cross-cultural encounters need “an
attentiveness and openness in relation to the other through which both self and other may
97
It is symptomatic of theory/practice cross-fertilization that Brooke Ackerly has more recently discussed
the value of her methodology of TWFSC for IR theory itself (Brooke Ackerly, “Feminist Methodological
Reflection” In Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, eds. Audie Klotz and
Deepa Prakash (Basingstoke England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 28-42; Ackerly and True,
“Studying the Struggles”).
98
Spivak as interpreted by Hutchings in Hutchings, “From Morality to Politics,” 253.
99
L. H. M. Ling, “The Fish and the Turtle,” in Millennial Reflections on International Studies, eds. Michael
Brecher and Frank P. Harvey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 286.
46
be transformed” beyond simple information-gathering or even understanding
100
.
Hutchings relies on Gayatri Spivak’s notions of “learning to learn” and “poesis
(imaginative making)” to make the claim that cross-cultural moral engagements are
possible to the extent that they emerge “out of encounters with others without reference
to any substantive, transcendental, or teleological anchor in a 'beyond'”
101
. Moral claims
thus made “gain their authority… in the ways in which they are read by, and have
meaning for, others”
102
. Openness and attentiveness to hybridization are ethical positions
that require continuous self-reflection. A critical theory of agency needs to confront the
difficult task of extricating language from power relations and to enable hybridization.
Summary
From feminist methodological contributions I draw four requirements for a
critical constructivist theory of agency. These conditions are to be heeded for activists
and social movements to be able to transcend structural constraints and effect
emancipatory social change. Actors need a method that:
1)allows them to identify and remedy actual or potential forms of oppression and
exclusion in society and in their own practice;
2)guides them toward inclusivity and opens them to input and ideas from
(potentially) all members of society
3)compels critical self-reflection over their own assumptions, language and
embeddedness in a particular historical and ideological context;
100
Spivak as interpreted by Hutchings in Hutchings, “From Morality to Politics,” 254.
101
Ibid., 242.
102
Ibid., 255. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Gender and International Studies,” Millennium -
47
4)enables the recurrent evaluation of their practices and ideas.
My next section will draw and expand on Brooke Ackerly's theory of TWFSC to
suggest a method for emancipatory social change. I concur with Ackerly and define this
methodology as ‘feminist’ because it has been used by feminist activists all over the
world
103
. Activists can be called feminist when they “are engaged in activism… organized
by women to transform themselves and their world”
104
. My research intends to confirm
and extend Ackerly’s findings in feminist activism. I extend her and Jacqui True’s
argument that feminist methodology and feminist theoretical methods make for “more
critical, critical IR theory and practice”
105
, and propose that to the extent that a feminist
critical methodology as I outline is employed by activists, it opens up the possibility for
challenging and dismantling the ideological and political constraints under which they
(more or less consciously) operate. Thus feminist critical methodology is itself a tool for
emancipatory social change.
Third World Feminist Social Criticism
Feminist scholarship has often pointed out differences in the decision-making
styles of women's organizations vis-a-vis men's. Cynthia Cockburn's study of women's
anti-militarist organizations finds that one of the reason women create separate
organizations has to do with their (feminist) objections to bureaucratic or dogmatic
approaches dominant within male-led organizations. Women prefer inclusive non-
103
Ackerly identified it first in the practices of Third World women activists, but she also found that
feminist organizations of various sorts and geographical locations have employed this methodology.
104
Brooke A. Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 31.
105
Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles,” 244.
48
hierarchical approaches that aspire to “shared work and skills, consensual decision-
making, transparent processes and responsibility in relationships”
106
. While these are
ideals that are not always realized, the women in Cockburn's study believe that their
methods need to conform to feminist and anti-patriarchal principles for them to be
effective in challenging militarism
107
. Brooke Ackerly follows in this tradition and,
starting her observations from within a group of Bangladeshi women activists, she
proceeds to develop a model of social criticism that purports to be an improvement over
deliberative democratic theory. Ackerly’s TWFSC is the articulation of a methodology
which, while owing much to deliberative democratic theory and modernism, by virtue of
its ‘work in progress’ character and its reflexivity is also indebted to postmodernism
108
.
Ackerly faults theorists of deliberative democracy for severely underplaying
exclusions and inequalities in all societies. On the one hand deliberations and collective
decision-making are important to achieve a more broad-based and inclusive collective
knowledge. On the other hand, deliberative democrats need strategies for enabling
citizens to practice democracy in the presence of inequality. Moreover, in order to
effectively challenge inequalities and exclusions, deliberative democracy needs
mechanisms for self-criticism. Ackerly draws from Third World women (and a variety of
other feminist) activists a method that makes up for deliberative democratic theory's
shortcomings. The practice, which she labels “Third World Feminist Social Criticism,”
(hereinafter TWFSC) employs three main tools.
106
Cockburn, From Where We Stand, 157.
107
Ibid., 156-180.
108
See for example Marysia Zalewski, Feminism After Postmodernism: Theorising through Practice
(London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 63-73.
49
1) Deliberative inquiry is “the practice of generating knowledge through
collective questioning, exchange of views, and discussion among critics and members of
society”
109
. Deliberation ideally promotes inclusive and collective learning through
thoughtful reflection and discussion among social critics and members of society. 2)
Skeptical scrutiny requires the questioning of existing values, practices and norms to
expose how they “presume, reinforce, cause, or exploit power inequalities to the
detriment of the less powerful”
110
. The ultimate goal of skeptical scrutiny is to challenge
and undermine such values, practices and norms. 3) Guiding criteria are “a list of
minimum standards that critics use to challenge existing values, practices, and norms”
111
.
Ackerly distills her own list from Martha Nussbaum's human capabilities
112
, from a
variety of Third World feminist activists, and from a number of UN and other
international documents
113
. She stresses that not all lists would be equally effective, but
she offers hers as “a work in progress offered in the spirit of continued dialogue about
what it means to live a fulfilling human life”
114
. Guiding criteria help critics evaluate
“competing claims to oppression” and direct their criticisms of values, practices and
norms
115
.
109
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 10.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
112
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings” In Women, Culture, and
Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, eds. Martha Craven Nussbaum, Jonathan Glover and World
Institute for Development Economics Research (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University
Press, 1995), 61-104.
113
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 110-119.
114
Ibid., 113.
115
Ibid., 116.
50
Because it enables the inquiry of existing practices, values and norm, provides
deliberative opportunities for all members of society and promotes institutional change,
TWFSC is a necessary complement to deliberative democratic theory and represents a
model of “deliberative democracy in the real world”
116
. Within this model, social critics
represent essential facilitators of society's self-examination and provoke the examination
of their own methods, roles, qualifications and conclusions. In order to do this effectively
a variety of critics who offer multiple perspectives are necessary to collectively foster the
ongoing and self-reflective model of social criticism
117
.
Feminist social criticism's three elements make the practice “conducive to
incremental, informed, collective, and uncoerced social change”
118
toward a “more
democratic society (however envisioned)”
119
. Ackerly cautions that TWFSC does not
guarantee such change and points at structural impediments to its achievement:
“[s]uccessful social change depends on a broad range of conditions determined by the
familial, social, political, and economic context of the criticism and activism”
120
. In other
words, marginalized groups within a society may offer better, more informed proposals
for social change by following the prescriptions of TWFSC. But whether society adopts
such proposals depends on whether those groups or individuals are themselves
recognized as deliberative partners. Because she draws this method from the experiences
116
Brooke A. Ackerly, “Listening to the Silent V oices: Deliberative Democracy in the Real World,” (paper
presented at annual “Thinking Gender” Conference, UCLA. March 7, 1997).
117
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism.
118
Ibid., 14.
119
Ibid., 6.
120
Ibid., 122.
51
of feminist activists in particularly marginalized contexts, Ackerly is acutely aware of the
numerous limitations their political actions face from the outside. What, however, of
limitations from the inside? What of actors who are shaped by dominant contexts? Is
TWFSC useful or enough for them to identify exclusions and oppressions?
In partial answer to these questions Ackerly offers the further example of the
women's human rights movement and assesses its performance using TWFSC. She
claims that the achievements of the movement leading up to and at two important human
rights conferences (the 1993 UN Human Rights Conference in Vienna and the 1995
Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing - and the parallel NGO Forum in
Huairou) are to be attributed to the roles performed by women's human rights activists.
They acted as feminist social critics by promoting inquiry, deliberative opportunities and
institutional change, embodied in the Vienna Declaration on women's human rights, the
Beijing Platform of Action and the establishment of a solid international grassroots
women's network. However, for Ackerly the women's human rights movement also
showed some shortcomings that highlight the importance of self-criticism for an effective
theory of social change.
In the first place the women's human rights movement promoted inquiry around
the theme of violence against women within an anti-discrimination framework. This
obfuscated Third World women's concerns about socioeconomic justice and their analysis
and understandings of the causes of violence against women. Moreover, while the
women's human rights movements created new deliberative opportunities for non-
Western women, Western women still have disproportionate political influence on the
movement's strategies. For Ackerly, these shortcomings point to the need for self-
52
reflection: a continuous critical assessment of the achievements of the women's human
rights movement to reveal whether, where and how the institutional changes engendered
by the movement have in effect institutionalized exclusionary and oppressive practices,
values and norms
121
. In sum, Ackerly stresses that, in order to be of some effectiveness at
promoting the kind of social change she envisions, guiding criteria, deliberative inquiry
and skeptical scrutiny have to be employed together. None of these three strategies alone
can be conducive to social change.
But the example of the women's human rights movement also highlights a deeper
problem with TWFSC as a theory of (emancipatory) agency as applied to a different
context than the one she starts with (Third World activists). Nowhere in TWFSC is there
a prescription or suggestion for making the silent voices' opinions intelligible and
compelling to the dominant groups. The empirical chapters will spell out how this
shortcoming is evidenced when TWFSC is applied to the history of the WILPF. For now I
offer a number of questions that will guide my argument.
Applying TWFSC To the WILPF
The women of the WILPF paid particular attention to the interplay between their
decision-making processes, methods and policy positions from the very beginnings of the
organization. In her study of the relationship between British feminism and pacifist
transnationalism immediately after the First World War, Jo Vellacott draws a difference
121
Ibid., 136-149. See also Susan Moller Okin and Brooke A. Ackerly, “Feminist Social Criticism and the
International Movement for Women's Human Rights as Human Rights,” in Democracy's Edges, eds. Ian
Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (London ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134-162.
Ackerly's most recent inquiry into the women's human rights movement brings out the contributions of
activists to a theory of universal, yet immanent, human rights which find their basis for universal meaning
in the contestations among involved actors. Her work on human rights elaborates further the role of
deliberation and conversations in bringing about social change (Ackerly, Universal Human Rights).
53
between the militant and non-militant British suffrage organizations. According to her it
was not coincidental that the British women’s peace movement (and within it the British
section of the WILPF) was born from the latter during World War I, as they stressed
nonviolence and more democratic decision-making procedures
122
. Vellacott claims that a
thoughtful and intentional commitment to the congruence between goals (women's
suffrage) and methods (local, regional and national networks of collective decision-
making) helped the non-militant suffragists reflect on the violent and militaristic
foundations of a system that denied political equality to women
123
. To what extent and
how were those democratic procedures congruent with TWFSC? And, to the extent that
they were, what kind of impact did they have on the policies of the WILPF? Particularly,
to what extent did their understandings of ‘peace and freedom’ change through their
history and reflect in their policies? And to the extent that the WILPF used TWFSC, was
it enough to challenge the ideational and historical milieu, in which the WILPF was
situated? To the extent that its policies reflected a challenge to or departure from liberal
modernity, how did their methodology enable the changes?
122
Vellacott, “Place for Pacifism.” See also Vellacott, “Women, Peace and Internationalism.”
123
Vellacott, “Place for Pacifism,” 26-28.
54
Guiding Criteria
Guiding criteria can be arbitrary and are bound to be limited and defined by the
structure within which actors are embedded. They need to be constantly revised and
assessed through deliberation and skeptical scrutiny. Ackerly's own list is derived from
women's human rights activism and standards, and it is worked out in conjunction with
deliberative inquiry and skeptical scrutiny. But in different contexts and with different
goals in mind political actors draw up their own list.
The WILPF's guiding criteria were represented by their ideas about peace and
informed what peace looked like for the WILPF: how did they envision a world at peace?
What were the elements of peace for the organization? And, were those ideas about peace
indebted to the historical and ideological context that produced the organization itself?
Were exclusion and oppression embedded in that context and then reflected into the
WILPF's ideas of peace? If indeed this was the case, their policies would then go against
the grain of emancipation. Guiding criteria are a necessary point of departure, but there is
no guarantee that, at least initially, those criteria are 1) clear of all exclusionary and
oppressive practices, values and norms; and 2) worked out as part of a self-reflective
methodology conducive to social change. The empirical chapters will assess to what
extent the larger context of liberal modernity influenced the WILPF's ideas and policies
on peace (their guiding criteria), as reflected into the three areas of disarmament,
decolonization and the Middle East.
Deliberative Inquiry
In Ackerly's theory, the “corrective” to imperfect guiding criteria are deliberative
inquiry and skeptical scrutiny. Ackerly works under the constructivist assumption that the
55
material conditions and circumstances under which the social critic operates, her
identities, her subjectivities and her communities all contribute to shape the knowledge
she produces. But as part of her feminist methodology, Ackerly argues that knowledge
needs to be worked out in a collective process, through formal or informal discussions,
actions, evaluations and reevaluations. It needs to be constantly partial and evolving, yet
pragmatic and action-oriented, specifically oriented to the solution of problems identified
by the community as problems. Deliberation does not necessarily mean that only the
collective is responsible for final decisions and only the collective can guide practical
behavior. It does however mean that a continuous interpellation of the collective is
necessary to achieve emancipatory institutional changes.
However, the fact that all are invited at a deliberative forum, even a loosely
structured and informal one, does not guarantee that all will attend and be heard or
listened to. Deliberative inquiry as derived from Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics can
suffer from the latter’s problems in regards to cultural diversity. As Andrea Baumeister,
among others, observes, discourse ethics as proposed by Habermas is reconcilable with
diversity only insofar as groups’ or individuals’ claims to recognition are based on liberal
values. Rational consensus as an ideal guide and legitimation to deliberation rests on a
liberal conception of individual autonomy that is not shared by many communities.
Hence, consensus deliberation is unfit to accommodate the demands of culturally diverse
groups
124
. As many feminist theorists have pointed out, there are other ways in which
marginalized subjects' participation or input in deliberative fora can be hampered
125
. Most
124
Andrea T. Baumeister, “Habermas: Discourse and Cultural Diversity,” Political Studies 51, no. 4 (2003),
740-758.
125
See for example Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000); Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political
56
importantly theories of deliberative democracy suffer from a paradox: that the
preconditions to deliberation are at the same time the desired outcome of the deliberative
mode
126
. Power inequalities often render these impediments invisible. This is a problem
that Ackerly recognizes by arguing that the rules, language and site of deliberation (the
operation of power) could all work in favor of some and not other members of the
collectivity. She engages both feminist and non feminist deliberative democracy theorists
and faults them ultimately for requiring equality as a condition for participation in
democracy, which is ideally supposed to promote equality. Ackerly proposes that TWFSC
is a process that requires that “critics continually assess existing and potentially
exploitative inequalities”
127
, thus resolving the equality problem not by bracketing
inequality but by “mov[ing] toward equality”
128
.
Ideally deliberative inquiry promotes collective learning among those who have
been silenced, who can then use it in the broader society to advance their claims
129
. But
deliberative inquiry by itself does not provide tools for the broader society (or the
dominant groups within it) to understand or make the claims of silenced groups
intelligible or legitimate. Did these limitations emerge during International Congresses,
Executive Committee Meetings, letters exchanges and other formal or informal
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
126
See for example Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London; New York: Verso, 2000); Leonard
C. Feldman, Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004); Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Samantha Besson and José Luis Martí, Deliberative
Democracy and its Discontents (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).
127
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 194.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid., 78.
57
deliberative settings of the post-war WILPF? How did they reflect in their policies? What
silences did they mask and what priorities did they determine in the specific areas of my
study? Were the WILPF's leaders aware of these limitations, and if so how did they
address them? Or did their liberal ethos make other voices so alien as to be invisible, thus
perpetuating exclusions? And when other voices were heard, what were the conditions
that made their visibility possible? The empirical chapters will address these questions,
with an eye toward identifying the strategies that the women of the WILPF used to
provide deliberative opportunities, rather than denying them to voices that were otherwise
silent or unable to be heard by the organization.
Skeptical Scrutiny
Ackerly's solution to the problems of effective communication without exclusions
in deliberative situations is the strategy of skeptical scrutiny. According to Ackerly,
“skeptical scrutiny is an attitude toward existing and proposed values, practices, and
norms that requires one to examine their existing and potentially exploitable
inequalities”
130
. Thus skeptical scrutiny used in conjuction with deliberative inquiry and
guiding criteria is a tool that allows critics to continually scout for actual and potential
inequalities and how they work to silence voices. Skeptical scrutiny allows actors to
question society's practices, values and norms and also their own. Therefore it is essential
to a theory of emancipatory agency, because it is the means through which actors can
challenge structural constraints.
In deliberative settings skeptical scrutiny, as described by Ackerly, fulfills similar
tasks as the idea of “reflexivity” does in Kevin Olson's notion of “reflexive democracy”
130
Ibid., 75.
58
or “reflexive self-government”. Olson borrows from the Foucauldian notion of
governmentality the consideration that government (structure) produces a particular kind
of political subject and proposes that certain forms of government “allow people to set
some of the terms of their own subject formation”
131
. Skeptical scrutiny could then be one
such strategy which, when applied (and, optimally, institutionalized) enables actors in
deliberative settings to “set some of the terms of their own subject formation”
132
. In other
words, it allows actors to question the very conditions of their existence as political
subjects and re-define the characters and modalities of their identity. The WILPF as a
transnational organization owed its existence to liberal modernity, which in effect created
the organization as a political subject. Its characteristics, its institutional make-up and its
working procedures owed their particular form to the historical conditions that made
them possible. The women of the WILPF, as members of the organization, were equally
shaped as political subjects by the ideologies of liberal modernity. My analysis therefore
has the additional purpose of disentangling from the WILPF's constitution and by-laws,
its resolutions and statements, its publications, as well as its correspondence and meeting
minutes the occasions in which opportunities for skeptical scrutiny were seized, those
where skeptical scrutiny was not used and to assess whether skeptical scrutiny was an
effective reflexive strategy. Where it was not, or where it was not enough, I aim at
identifying what additional tools made reflexivity possible and allowed the WILPFers to
question the way liberal modernity shaped and limited the organization's identity.
131
Kevin Olson, “Constructing Citizens,” The Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (January, 2008), 47. See also
Kevin Olson, Reflexive Democracy : Political Equality and the Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2006).
132
Olson, Constructing Citizens, 47.
59
The Role of Social Critics
Without a multiplicity of critics to facilitate TWFSC, the methodological tools of
deliberative inquiry, skeptical scrutiny and guiding criteria do not sufficiently guarantee
the movement toward more equality (or emancipation) and the effective questioning of
structure’s shaping powers. In particular, they do not allow the determination of whether
one’s language, understandings and ideas are so embedded into a liberal framework that
others’ language, understandings and ideas become incommensurably unintelligible
133
.
How can people interested in emancipatory social change, in a deliberative setting, with a
provisional list of guiding criteria, and a good dose of skepticism about them, the context
that produced them and their own assumptions and methodologies, notice or understand
the language and input of those who are excluded? How can they even know of all of the
people whom their policy decisions affect? Because no one person or group can fully
assess the extent to which power inequalities and structural constraints work to the
detriment of the less powerful, a variety of critics are necessary. Critics from inside or
outside of the community, and critics that can navigate between that community and the
outside are all necessary to promote inquiry, deliberative opportunities and institutional
change.
133
This is an argument that Sandra Whitworth has used, for example, to critique the United Nations’ gender
and security policies (Sandra Whitworth, review of Women and International Peacekeeping ed. by Louise
Olsson and Torunn L. Tryggestad and Gender, Peace and Conflict ed. by Inger Skjelsbæk and Dan Smith,
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 4 (06/01, 2003), 1328-1333). Vivienne Jabri makes
similar arguments critiquing Martha Nussbaum’s liberal feminism as grounded on a notion of “agency…
situated in the rationality of the self” (Vivienne Jabri, “Feminist Ethics and Hegemonic Global Politics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 3 (06/01, 2004), 272). I have to point out that Brooke Ackerly
critiques Nussbaum’s human capabilities approach to human rights as a “method that allows her to import
into her definition of an essential human life the liberal values of autonomy and independence that may be
more culturally specific than she treats them” (Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism,
105).
60
Kimberly Hutchings posits that this problem is of special concern to white
Western feminists torn between a commitment to universal moral values and the
consciousness of their past and present privileges and complicity with exploitative
systems
134
. She claims that “the use of the moral vocabulary of liberal universalism...
reinforces the hierarchies of power between hegemonic and subaltern publics (even when
both sets of publics are in unforced agreement)”
135
. As an organization primarily
composed of white Western women, solidly grounded in the principles of liberalism,
those hierarchies might well be invisible for the WILPF if not for the presence and input
of outside and multi-sited critics. In turn, this invisibility would prevent the valuable
contributions of people or groups who might not share the WILPF's liberal values, or the
same entrenchment in liberal modernity. Their input would then help the WILPF question
the unstated (and possibly exclusionary or oppressive) assumptions upon which its policy
decisions were made.
As the following chapters will show, there is ample evidence that many of the
WILPF's women were aware of their limitations and tried to remedy them. In order to
demonstrate this, I will address the following questions: Who fulfilled the roles of critics
for the WILPF? When did they do it and where? To what extent were these critics
effective in bringing the WILPF's attention to exclusions, oppression or the way the
organization's embeddedness in an ideological and historical context prevented the
organization from seeing and understanding the silent voices? When and how were the
134
Hutchings, “Feminism, Universalism,” 17-37.
135
Hutchings, “From Morality to Politics,” 257.
61
critics effective at bringing about in the WILPF awareness of the need and a desire to
move beyond liberal modernity's boundaries?
Conclusions
This dissertation intends to be a contribution to IR theory on three fronts: 1) it
reformulates the relationship between feminism, International Relations and Peace
Studies, by situating feminist peace theorizing in feminist IR, from which it has been
excluded; 2) it proposes a feminist methodology for emancipatory social change, which
3) addresses the agent-structure problem in constructivist IR. Feminist insights for a
critical constructivist theory of agency suggest that, in order to theorize emancipatory
social change four principles need to be respected. A theory of emancipatory social
change should: 1) provide tools for identifying actual and potential exclusions and
inequalities in society and in their practice; 2) guide actors toward inclusivity and open
them to input and ideas from (potentially) all members of society; 3) compel the self-
examination of actors' own assumptions, language and embeddedness in a particular
historical and ideological context; and 4) enable the continuous reevaluation of actors'
practices, ideas and assumptions. Feminist social criticism seems to satisfy these
requirements well in theory and as applied to contemporary, especially Third World,
feminist activism, but it also raises a number of questions when applied to a different
context than the one that inspired its formulation. The empirical chapters that follow
serve to exemplify these dilemmas and suggest ways in which the theory of TWFSC can
be integrated.
In the following chapters I trace changes in the WILPF's understanding of peace
through an analysis of the organization's documents. My interpretation focuses on four
62
aspects of my sources: 1) I seek to interpret the contextual meanings of policy positions
as expressed in the WILPF's resolutions, statements and official policy documents. 2) I
use secondary sources such as biographies, historical works and theoretical critiques to
situate policies in the ideational and historical context in which they were adopted. 3) I
am particularly concerned with tracing changes, disjunctures and moments of transition
in order to 4) uncover the methodological principles that underscored the production of
policy decisions. I do so by examining meeting minutes, delegates' reports from
international gatherings where the WILPF was represented and personal recollections as
conveyed to me or others through interviews and personal biographies.
The WILPF's post-war history suggests that one methodological tool which,
borrowing from one of the WILPF's leaders' articulation, I call “imaginative
identification”
136
, is important for a theory of agency, such that deliberative inquiry,
skeptical scrutiny and guiding criteria in concert can promote emancipatory social
change. This tool was used by the WILPF and is part of the methodological repertoire of
feminist theory and overcomes TWFSC's limits when applied to a liberal modern
organization, primarily composed of white Western middle class women. I will develop
this idea in this dissertation's conclusions.
136
Dorothy Hutchinson, Chairman's Keynote Address, “The Right to be Human,” 1968, p. 7, box 25, 16th
International Congress Report 1966 and 17th International Congress Report 1968, WILPF SCPC
Accession, University of Colorado at Boulder Archives (hereinafter UCBA).
63
Chapter 3: The WILPF and Disarmament
Introduction
Disarmament was an important component of the WILPF's vision of peace and it
had formed part of the WILPF's political platform since its 1919 condemnation of the
Versailles Peace Treaty for imposing unilateral military disarmament on World War I's
losers. The WILPF never wavered from its advocacy of total and universal disarmament
but the first thirty years after the Second World War show significant, if subtle, shifts in
the WILPF’s thinking on this issue. In the first two decades in question, the WILPF
thought that the creation of an international system based on (liberal democratic) laws
would be the most important step to make the resort to war obsolete, and armaments thus
unnecessary. Starting in the 1960s, the organization increasingly referred to “the
economic and social aspects of disarmament”
137
, until it arrived at a 1974 resolution,
advocating the need for a new economic system for the achievement of peace (hence the
elimination of weapons). In most cases, new policies were advocated in conjunction with
old ones, and differently prioritized, but these subtle shifts reflected a profound
questioning of the liberal modern values that guided the organization.
During the three decades in question an analysis of WILPF’s documents shows
three interrelated ideational shifts in WILPF’s ideas about disarmament as it related to
peace:
1)From an early belief in the power of laws, liberal democracy as inscribed and
implemented in international institutions (however imperfect), and
137
WILPF International Executive Committee (hereinafter IEC), Resolutions Passed, 1961, p. 3, box 3,
folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
64
rational thinking and deliberation to bring about disarmament through
peace, the WILPF became more and more convinced that the current
economic system was the source of wars, by fueling the arms build-up.
2)From a belief that science and technology made compelling rational arguments
for the elimination of weapons, which made war possible, the WILPF
gained awareness of science’s ambiguities and the realization that
science was not politically neutral.
3)While early on the WILPF failed to see gender and feminism as relevant to
disarmament questions, the WILPF increasingly offered a feminist
critique of the arms race.
I argue that these ideational shifts reflected a departure from WILPF’s liberal
modern outlook of the 1940s and 1950s and represent a critique of its own earlier
assumptions. This departure, in turn, was influenced by the revival of the international
feminist movement, which brought with it a critique of the gendered assumptions of
liberal political thought and practice. The years from 1945 to 1975 were characterized by
other important international contingencies, such as the development and deployment of
the atomic bomb and nuclear energy, the Cold War, the decolonization movement, the
growth of international organizations, both governmental and non-governmental on a
global scale and the onset of neoliberal globalization. Such world events could not leave
the WILPF untouched, but it is important to understand how, and in what way, world
events intersected with the organization’s own setup, ideologies, and methodologies, thus
influencing its ideas about the relationship between disarmament and peace (and as a
consequence its policies). The WILPF’s ideational changes regarding disarmament issues
65
did indeed depend on historical circumstances, but such circumstances’ effects on the
organization were mediated through their methodology. The WILPF's methodology
allowed the organization to turn a reflective eye upon its values, practices and norms and
bring about a gradual, but by no means consistent, linear or total departure from liberal
modern assumptions
138
.
I divide the chapter into four parts: in the first part, I outline the theoretical
argument that describes how liberal modern ideas about democracy, rationality and
science rely on masculinist assumptions. The second part highlights the relationship
between liberal political thought, the WILPF’s ideology, and its policies toward
disarmament. I then assess to what extent the WILPF departed from liberal modern
thought in its 1970s statements and resolutions. Finally, in the fourth part I trace the
internal process through which these changes took place, pull out the methodological
tools that made them possible, and discuss the role of the international context in
influencing them.
Liberal Political Thought, Gender and the WILPF
Liberal modernity was the transnational historical context in which the WILPF
was situated. The organization owed its very existence to modernity and to modernity-
dependent principles of liberalism and liberal political thought. According to Robert
138
This chapter owes much to peace historians and women’s peace historians, who trace precisely the
parallel developments of peace organizations’ policies and world events. But while peace historians are
interested in providing historical accounts of that relationship, how in substance organizations responded to
world events and taking organizations’ setup, ideologies, and methodologies as a given, I am interested in
looking more closely at the interplay between contingencies, historical context (structure) and the
organization's agency as expressed in its methodology in the development of its ideas (in this case, the
WILPF’s ideas about disarmament), policies and organizational makeup. I need to note that an analysis of
the first 30 post-war years of a single organization can only partially and provisionally answer my
questions.
66
Latham, liberalism was as much an ideology as it was “a way to organize social life”
139
;
specifically, following the Second World War, liberalism provided the mechanisms
around which international relations were ordered, an order in which the United States
played a hegemonic role
140
. That ordering involved the construction of practices,
principles and institutions to shape international life. The WILPF, like other international
organizations, was part of the design of that construction. Not only was the WILPF
sustained on liberal modern ideology, its presence was woven into the fabric of the
postwar order.
Many feminist scholars have exposed the gendered construction of key elements
of liberalism
141
, among which are concepts central to liberal political thought and praxis.
They argue that “[l]iberal political theory…extends a particular gendering experience into
the norms of Western society”
142
. In other words, feminists claim that Western liberal
political theory’s values are inherently derived from the lived experiences of men, not
women. This has specific consequences for the content of key concepts in liberal political
thought.
139
Latham, Liberal Moment, 34.
140
Here hegemony is intended in the Gramscian (as adapted by Robert Cox for International Relations)
sense of dominance achieved through a mix of moral persuasion and consent by ruling elites over the
majority of society. See Gramsci, Prison Notebooks; Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International
Relations.”
141
Okin, Women in Western Political Thought; Pateman, Sexual Contract; Di Stefano, Configurations of
Masculinity; Elshtain, “Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice;” Tickner, Gender in International Relations.
142
Christine Sylvester, “Feminists and Realists View Autonomy and Obligation in International Relations,”
in Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 186.
67
Autonomy, Consent and Obligation
The notion of citizenship in liberal political thought is gendered insofar as it
derives from contractual theory. Carol Pateman claims that Western theories of social
contract depend on a “sexual contract” that solidified patriarchy and the subjection of
women and other categories of people. She argues that the notion of contract itself
implies the alienation of one’s body and the erasure of the distinction between freedom
and slavery. Paralleling Elshtain’s (later) argument about sovereignty, Pateman thus
claims that the very thinking in terms of contract and free will inescapably bind one into
“civil slavery”
143
. Moreover, the notions of consent and freedom underlying contractual
theory are profoundly sexist because they ignore or hide the reality and multiplicity of
ways in which consent is denied to women
144
. But they also shape and delimit
imagination, in that they don’t allow us to think outside their very terms.
Nancy Hirschmann adds that liberal doctrines' notion of obligation is based on
“voluntarist principles; that is, an obligation is a limitation on behavior, a requirement for
action or nonaction, that the actor or nonactor has chosen or agreed to
145
”. She argues that
the liberal notion of “voluntary consent” harbors a masculine bias that denies the
nonconsensual obligations that make up an important part of many women’s lives and in
fact denies them full participation in public life
146
. Although these critiques question the
143
Pateman, Sexual Contract, 39-76. Jean Bethke Elshtain critiques the modern nation-state as embedded in
sacrifical themes far from the feminist ethic of responsibility. She observes that the concept of sovereignty
presupposes a gendered understanding of power as domination. Elshtain, “Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice,”
150.
144
Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critical Analysis of Liberal Theory (Chichester;
New York: Wiley, 1979); Pateman, Sexual Contract.
145
Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Freedom, Recognition and Obligation: A Feminist Approach to Political
Theory,” The American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (December, 1989), 1227.
146
Ibid., 1229.
68
roles and expectations of individuals within the nation-state, they apply to the
international realm insofar as consent, autonomy and obligation represented some of the
organizing principles of the postwar liberal order-making
147
.
Many feminists have also observed how modern concepts of reason, rationality,
and science rely on masculinist assumptions and imagery grounded in (and justified and
rationalized through) the domination of men over women
148
. Postmodern feminists and
nonfeminists argue that liberal notions about science and rationality are based on a
peculiarly modern need to find truths and certainties
149
. In addition, for postmodern
feminists the nexus power/knowledge is essential in understanding how Western science
has been profoundly political, in the sense that political decisions have been an integral
part of science praxis
150
. Postwar international relations practices as well as theories are
infused with the modern “goals of scientific objectivity, emotional distance, and
instrumentality,” which are characteristics associated with, and defining of,
masculinity
151
.
The construction of the liberal order was thus dependent on previously existing
gender ideology. These theoretical developments can be seen in the evolution of the
WILPF’s discussions of, and motivations for their policy advocacy on the issue of
147
Ibid.
148
Evelyn Fox Keller, “Feminism and Science,” Signs 7, no. 3, Feminist Theory (Spring, 1982), 589-602;
Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino, Feminism and Science (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), chapter 4; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
Revolution, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980); Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in
Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Tickner, Gender in International Relations, 64-65 and
103-104.
149
Zalewski, Feminism After Postmodernism, 35-36.
150
See for example ibid., 55-59.
151
Hooper, Manly States, 13.
69
disarmament and how it relates to international peace and security. As long as the women
of the WILPF remained unquestioningly bound to the liberal internationalist tradition,
they also reproduced the gendered assumptions of liberal political thought.
The WILPF was, in some important ways, a privileged agent participating in the
building of the international liberal order. Its members were mostly white, upper-to-
middle class, highly educated Western women. As a consultative member in the UN
system, the WILPF also had privileged access to many of the international institutions
that had been created after the Second World War. In other ways, the WILPF was
marginal to that ordering project, however. It was not a very influential actor in the
international scene, by virtue of the scarce consideration that women's opinions and
issues or feminism ever garnered in international politics. Moreover, to the extent that
militarism and war progressively became central features of that order, the anti-
militaristic WILPF also belonged to the fringes, rather than the centers of international
political power.
Liberalism, the WILPF and Disarmament
Coming out of the Second World War, the WILPF was decimated in numbers and
spirit. The women assembled at their first post-war Congress asked themselves how it
was possible that humanity could have reached such levels of depravity as were seen
prior to and during the conflict. Having fought alongside men during those years, they
confronted the question of whether it still made sense to maintain a women’s
organization. Having witnessed the destruction caused by the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they felt stunned by the enormity of the challenges ahead for an
organization devoted to peace and freedom.
70
At the first International Congress after the war in 1946, the US section, which
despite their losses, had come out of the war as the largest and strongest section of the
WILPF, remained guided by a progressivist ideology, characterized by “a commitment to
democracy, faith in scientific ‘truth,’ a concern for morality and social justice, and an
unswerving belief in progress and the efficacy of education”
152
. On the one hand,
progressivist ideology implied a moral vision of the ideal society, which defied social,
political and economic hierarchies. On the other, as a modern ideology, progressivism
also posited a trajectory of progress from uncivilized, ignorant, irrational states of being
to the reign of logic, reason, and science, which would ultimately bring about human
well-being. Members of the European sections were no less convinced of the necessity, if
not inevitability, of such transformation, than were their US counterparts.
They remained convinced that humanity’s worst instincts, which were the
ultimate cause of war, could be tamed and controlled by a system of (liberal democratic)
international laws: they valued deliberation as the means to achieve agreements based on
rational arguments; they also stressed the principle of equality between states as the basis
for organizing international institutions and laws. While they felt that the ideal move
toward world government demanded limits to national sovereignty, they accepted
(however, not enthusiastically) the nation-state as the main actor in international relations
and the United Nations as the best avenue for the creation of a legal system that would
make the existence of national armaments obsolete.
The WILPF’s positions on disarmament in the immediate post-war years reflected
its belief in the power of law, rational thinking, and deliberation to bring about peace,
152
Foster, The Women and the Warriors, 6.
71
both as absence of armed conflict and as a degree of social justice. In addition, it reflected
a peculiarly modern belief in science's objectivity and rationality as the most appropriate
guides to political action.
Law
One of the pillars of peace ideology of the progressive era rested on the belief
“that international norms and institutions had to possess the capacity to control, in
addition to reform, states’ war-prone tendencies”
153
. Starting at the first Congress after
World War II and continuing through the mid-sixties, WILPF’s members were convinced
that laws and rational reasoning would lead to the elimination of the war system, thus of
states’ weapons’ arsenals. This position was exemplified by a 1963 widely-circulated
report, in which the US section (at the time led by Quaker pacifist Dorothy
Hutchinson
154
) interpreted Jane Addams’ thought as follows:
Jane Addams and the other founders of the Women’s International League
for Peace and Freedom ... exemplified and preached reconciliation and
compassion but they never assumed that the world community was ready
wholly to substitute these for war as a method for settling international
disputes, maintaining order, and promoting human welfare. Their political
proposals envisaged, not love, but law as the substitute for war. …
According to their analysis, wars are caused by the fact that there is no
other means to settle international disputes or bring about necessary
changes in the international status quo and war can be prevented only by
the creation of ‘an international government able to make the necessary
political and economic changes’
155
.
153
Cecelia Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Ithaca,
N.Y .: Cornell University Press, 1999), 56.
154
During the Second World War, Hutchinson had been one of the founders of the ill-fated Peace Now
Movement, which proposed a negotiated settlement with, rather than unconditional surrender of the Axis
Powers. For a brief biographical sketch of Dorothy Hutchinson, see Anonymous, Introduction to Dorothy
Hutchinson's Papers, http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG100-150/DG125DHutchinson.html
(accessed 3/10/2008).
155
WILPF US Section, “The United Nations and World Law,” 1963, p. 1, box 119, folder 7, The United
72
Therefore, liberal democratic laws and enforcement mechanisms would bring
about peace, by minimizing the need to go to war. In the absence of a necessity for war,
states would find it pointless to build up arms arsenals
156
. Disarmament would necessarily
follow the establishment of “a system of clearly defined world law and enforcement upon
the individual offender”
157
. Law and reason were more effective than (and opposed to)
emotions in bringing about peace.
The WILPF believed that, while the arms race diverted valuable resources and
failed to provide security, it was not the ultimate cause of war, which resided in the lack
of legal instruments to resolve disputes peacefully. International law would be the
antidote to the use of violence in international disputes. Thus, the 1952 International
Executive Committee (IEC) stated its support for:
The use and development of international law, engendering respect for the
decisions of impartial tribunals so that law may grow to replace methods
of violence, in international as in national conflicts
158
.
The WILPF believed that if nations agreed to talk to each other, and if they had a
permanent structure in which these talks could take place and that would compel them to
meet, then states would not resort to war to solve their disputes. As a consequence, they
would not feel the need to amass armaments. The WILPF recognized a tension between
the maintenance of the sovereign rights of states and a system of international law that
Nations and World Law, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
156
It is relevant to note the similarity of this position with that of liberal feminism, which generally points
to the need for laws to remedy gender inequalities. See Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A More
Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 10-44.
157
WILPF US Section, “The United Nations and World Law,” 1963, p. 13, box 119, folder 7, The United
Nations and World Law, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
158
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1952, p. 2, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
73
they envisaged, but stressed that states needed to voluntarily relinquish some sovereign
rights and submit themselves to international law. The only possible rational deduction
from the dangers of the atomic era would lead to consent to a system of law.
An international system based on liberal democratic principles and laws would
not only inevitably bring about peace and disarmament, but it would bring “man and
nations … to relinquish the war system, on which they have relied to protect their vital
interests or to end intolerable economic exploitation and political domination”
159
. Thus, a
system of democratic laws would constitute the solution to both political and economic
conditions that lead to war and to the perceived necessity of armaments. As a
consequence, just as they had supported the institution of the League of Nations three
decades earlier, they enthusiastically supported the creation of the United Nations as the
world's “great organ for the expression of its common purposes and the carrying out of its
common activities”
160
. The United Nations was the democratic institution that allowed
rational discussions and a site partially immune to power struggles and differences
161
.
Gertrude Baer (a German Jewish member who had been instrumental in the survival of
the WILPF during the war years) thus expressed this trust:
[O]ur aim must remain total and universal disarmament, the replacing of
war through international law and the bringing about of solutions by
negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial
159
Dorothy Hutchinson, Message to the World Council of Peace Meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, 1966,
p.1, box 12, folder 8, Releases 1955-94, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
160
WILPF IEC, Resolutions, “U.N.O.,” 1947, p. 2, box 46, folder 6, Resolutions 1948-52, WILPF Second
Accession, UCBA.
161
This optimism and faith in the UN as the best deliberative and democratic organ did not vanish in the
two decades that followed. Indeed, the WILPF has retained trust in the UN system, in principle, up to this
day, despite and against the critiques mounted against the organization from several other women’s NGOs.
But starting from the mid-1970s, trust was limited to a sense that the UN was the best that humanity could
do, given the circumstances.
74
settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or any other
peaceful means of the own choice of the parties to a dispute
162
.
Neither Gertrude Baer nor most of the WILPF leaders were unaware or uncritical
of an international system dominated and influenced by Cold War power rivalries.
Nevertheless, they did believe that choice, or consent, could be freely and autonomously
expressed and exercised in such an environment, thus leading to just agreements between
parties in conflict. Continuing throughout the 1950s, the WILPF maintained its reliance
and trust in the, admittedly imperfect, UN to encourage, promote, and sponsor
disarmament talks at international level. Only a system of “international law and order”
could be a safeguard for all countries, small and big alike
163
and “[t]he endeavors to attain
law and order are at present associated with the UN”
164
.
In 1954 support for the UN went so far as to oppose any UN reform
165
: while it
recognized that the charter was imperfect and the result of compromise, it was concerned
that a revision of the charter would lead to the dissolution of the UN
166
. While
recognizing that the newborn United Nations Organization was a far cry from the ideal
162
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Magleaas,
Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Hamburg, Germany,
July 1955, 1955, p. 9, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
163
Else Zeuthen, “Regional Pacts and Peace,” in XIth International Congress of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August 15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), 218, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
164
Ibid., 219.
165
WILPF IEC, Statement on Current Affairs, 1954, p. 2, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
166
See ibid.; Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom with United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in
Magleaas, Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Hamburg,
Germany, July 1955, 1955, p. 19, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See
also Pax et Libertas, We and the Bombs, March-May 1954, 10, box 45, folder 1, Pax et Libertas United
States 1951-59, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
75
world government that the WILPF had hoped for, they nonetheless trusted the
organization to be the best existent forum for the development and implementation of
international law and, with it, the maintenance of world peace
167
. The WILPF was
convinced that only universality of membership would be conducive to disarmament. If
states would sit down together as equals at the negotiating table, the WILPF believed,
they would be more likely to reach rational, agreed upon decisions. Hence it supported
the seating of the People’s Republic of China and the continued progress toward the
inclusion of formerly colonized countries throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
Dorothy Hutchinson (who presided over the US WILPF from 1961 to 1965 and
then served as its International Chairman until 1968
168
) was particularly insistent on the
importance of law to bring about disarmament and worked hard to keep the WILPF
focused on the study of the possibility for the establishment of UN machinery for the
peaceful settlement of conflicts.
In the triangle of related essentials for a warless world, the two sides are
Disarmament and Peace Forces. But the base of the triangle, on which
demilitarisation and peace-keeping must solidly rest, is adequate means
for the Peaceful Resolution of International Conflict
169
.
So, while the WILPF followed closely all arms reduction negotiations, it
continued to stress the need for “the establishment of a truly international constabulary
167
The 1947 International Executive Committee referred to the U.N. General Assembly as “the great forum
of one world” (WILPF IEC, Resolutions, “U.N.O.,” 1947, p. 2, box 46, folder 6, Resolutions 1948-52,
WILPF Second Accession, UCBA).
168
I refer to the WILPF's leaders's titles as they were officially specified in its Constitution and By-Laws
and used in its official documents. Significantly, the titles of Chairman and Vice-Chairmen were replaced in
1974 with President and Vice-Presidents.
169
Dorothy Hutchinson, “Developing World Community,” 1966, p. 105, box 25, 16th International
Congress Report 1966 and 17th International Congress Report 1968, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
Emphasis and capitalization in the original.
76
based upon international law, which would develop the trust and confidence needed for
healthy world reconstruction”
170
. In a 1959 Congress resolution “The WILPF urge[d] that
the United Nations present machinery for political settlement be used to the full, and that
it be strengthened wherever necessary to make it a universally acceptable and reliable
alternative to the use of violence”
171
. The WILPF felt that total and universal disarmament
was “mutually advantageous to all parties” and believed that the only solution was within
the UN system
172
.
In the 1940s and 1950s the WILPF also believed that the arms arsenals diverted
funds that could otherwise be used for “social welfare, education and cultural
progress”
173
; and the arms race was an obstacle to development insofar as it “disrupt[ed]
the economy of the whole world”
174
. In line with liberal economic thought, the WILPF
believed that global trade and the free market would be conducive to world peace:
We address a solemn appeal to all Governments to give priority to all
measures apt to promote world-wide trade and commerce, to encourage
and develop civilian production and consumption in their countries, build
and extend social welfare and raise the educational and cultural standards
of their populations
175
.
170
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1948, p. 4, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also: WILPF, International Congress Resolutions, 1959, p. 1, box 26, folder
8, Circular Letters January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA; WILPF,
Statement Issued at the Close of the Congress, “Alternatives to Violence,” 1959, p. 1, box 26, folder 8,
Circular Letters January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA; WILPF IEC,
Resolutions, 1960, pp. 1-2, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF SCPC Accession,
UCBA.
171
WILPF, International Congress Resolutions, 1959, box 26, folder 8, Circular Letters January 1958-
November 1959 & 1969-70, 1.
172
Ibid.
173
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1952, p.1, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
174
Ibid., 2.
77
The WILPF, and particularly its French members, did not disregard the social and
economic causes of war. The French section was possibly the most sympathetic to Soviet
Russia during the late 1940s and 1950s
176
, and insisted on being rather critical of
capitalism, as a system based on profits, rather than needs. But not all sections were so
sympathetic to the USSR. The US section was feeling the heat of McCarthyism and the
Red Scare. Some of its members had been associated with the Communist Party. The
section as a whole had suffered repeated harassment and the accusations of sympathizing
with Communism. Under the leadership of Mildred Scott Olmstead it tried, with mixed
results, to maintain independence from Communist-leaning organizations, without
succumbing to the Red Scare
177
.
Critiques of Communist Russia and a defense of liberal democratic nations appear
in several documents from many of the other European sections, as well as indications
that other sections were suffering the same divisions and difficulties due to the Red Scare.
For example, in the early 1950s, following the publication of a list of alleged Communist
conspirators (compiled by a “Committee of Action Against the Fifth Column”) that
included several WILPF members, the German section split in two opposing segments,
each claiming to be the official representative of the WILPF in Germany
178
. This meant
that the League was challenged to maintain the unity of the organization, in the face of
175
Ibid., 1.
176
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 192.
177
Margaret Hope Bacon, One Woman's Passion for Peace and Freedom: The Life of Mildred Scott
Olmsted, 1st ed. (Syracuse, N.Y .: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 261-267. See also Blackwell, No Peace
without Freedom, 156-160.
178
See correspondence and news clippings following the controversy in WILPF, Disinformation Folder
1948-1991, WILPF Geneva Headquarters Historical Files. Accusations of communism were not new to the
WILPF of the 1950s, but the Cold War gave them new impetus and spurred heightened internal tensions.
78
sharp and fractionalizing dissent. Chairmen, vice-chairmen or other respected
personalities of the WILPF often intervened with appeals for conciliation; and at least in
the case of Germany the International Executive Committee decided which group to
support as a formal and legally-constituted section of the League
179
.
As a consequence, the WILPF felt more reluctant to focus on economic arguments
in defense of disarmament
180
. This reluctance is exemplified by the animated discussions
around the third paragraph of the WILPF's statement of aims which, since 1934, had
referred to “the present system of exploitation, privilege and profit” as an obstacle to
“lasting peace and true freedom”
181
. While a final agreement on all changes was not
reached until 1959, it was clear, during the 1950s, that many sections were concerned that
such an explicit reference to capitalism “suggest[ed]a party programme”
182
. Other
sections apparently objected to the reference alltogether
183
. According to Edith
179
Marie Lous-Mohr, Gertrude Bussey C. and Agnes Z. Stapledon, Letter to German Section Members,
1951, WILPF Disinformation Folder 1948-1991, WILPF Geneva Headquarters Historical Files.
180
For example, in their discussions about the 1960 Freedom from Hunger Campaign, the WILPF IEC
debated the opportunity of publicly expressing the link they perceived between disarmament and
development. Indian IEC member Sushila Nayar and British IEC member Mary Nuttall were strongly in
favor of proposing and advertising the link (WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1960, p. 7, box 5, folder 11, IEC
Meeting Minutes 1960-64, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA).
181
WILPF, Constitution, by-Laws and Rules of Order, 1934, p. 2, box 6, folder 6, Constitution 1934,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
182
WILPF, Draft of Interim Report of the Constitution Committee to be Presented to the Executive of the
WILPF, 1950, p. 1, box 6 folder 7, Policy Statements 1946-54, WILPF SCPC Accession, University of
Colorado at Boulder; Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author, July 13, 2003; and Edith Ballantyne,
interview by the author (transcript revised by Edith Ballantyne), July 13th, 2003.
183
A constitution committee formed at the 1949 congress spent several years consulting national sections
about changes that they would have liked to see implemented ( WILPF, Draft of Interim Report of the
Constitution Committee to be Presented to the Executive of the WILPF, 1950, pp. 1-2, box 6 folder 7,
Policy Statements 1946-54, WILPF SCPC Accession, University of Colorado at Boulder).
79
Ballantyne, “the Cold War environment was such that all that smelled of Communism
was regarded with suspicion”
184
.
The 1959 amendment eliminated from the statement of aims all economic
references except for a general expression of hope in a future system “under which men
and women may live in peace and justice free from the fear of war and of want”
185
, in a
likely intentional reference to President Roosevelt's 1941 Four Freedoms message to the
US Congress
186
. While references to a “system of exploitation and profit” would not
return to the constitution until the early 1980s, it is important to stress that the 1960s and
1970s paved the way for a return to the economic critique of the 1930s.
Reason and Science
The belief in logical reasoning and an international system of law went hand in
hand with a distinctly modern belief in science and rationality. The WILPF of the two
immediate post-war decades believed that reason and science would ultimately show
people and world leaders alike that there was no way other than disarmament, because
the rational, reasonable, and scientifically proven way to avoid wars was to get rid of the
instruments of war. Between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, the WILPF
remained convinced that the US, the USSR and other states could willingly let go of
184
Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author (transcript revised by Edith Ballantyne), July 13th, 2003.
185
WILPF, Constitution: Statement of Aims, 1959, p. 1, box 6, Folder 8, Constitution 1956-59, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA. Emphasis mine.
186
FDR's Four Freedoms included freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion (“freedom of
every person to worship God in his own way”), freedom from want (“economic understandings which will
secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants”), and freedom from fear (“a world-wide
reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to
commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor”). The text of the entire speech, which FDR
delivered as his annual address to Congress, can be found at: Schlager Group, “Milestone Documents,”
http://www.milestonedocuments.com/document_detail.php?id=90&more=fulltext (accessed 1/23/2009).
80
power politics, if only they let themselves be guided by rationality. The WILPF didn’t
deny the existence of power politics and Cold War machinations; rather, they believed
that rational thought could lead leaders of all countries to voluntarily consent to
limitations of sovereign rights in the name of an obligation to save humanity from “the
scourge of war”
187
.
Rationality and rule of law were found to be antithetical to the existing system
based on irrationality and fear:
We do believe that it is unrealistic to expect fear of weapons to prevent
their use, for there is ample evidence that we can develop immunity to fear
and horror. But fear and peace cancel each other out. There cannot be
peace, freedom and security where there is fear and horror
188
.
The WILPF believed that, while fear ruled contemporary policies toward
disarmament, rationality and the “more civilised weapons of the mind” could bring about
the willingness to “find ways and means of discussing their differences as rational
beings”
189
. The WILPF shared with other peace movements of the time
190
, the sense that
the system of security based on fear and power politics was obsolete:
Modern scientific warfare has made it obvious that the concepts and
doctrines of security hitherto existing have become utterly obsolete and
that new measures are urgently required – measures as bold and
187
United Nations, “Charter,” http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter (accessed 1/25/2008 – the quote comes
from the Preamble to the Charter).
188
WILPF IEC, Decisions and Summary of Records, 1957, p. 20, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October
1956-December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
189
Ibid., 21.
190
This was arguably more true for early antinuclear movements of the late 1940s and early 1950s. See
Lawrence S. Wittner, One World Or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement
through 1953 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb:
A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1945-1970 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1997); Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity, 261.
81
unparalleled as the evil design of making the fantastic progress in science
and technical skill serve wholesale diabolic destruction
191
.
This statement reflected a trust in the scientific endeavor, which was corrupted by
“evil design” but in itself was “fantastic” and ultimately good. But it also reflected a
liberal modern belief in reason as the antithesis of, and superior to, emotion. Many
feminists have observed that this is a profoundly gendered false dichotomy: because
emotion has been historically associated with women and reason with men, this
dichotomy has been a foundational aspect of hierarchical social relations between men
and women
192
.
In 1946 Clara Ragaz, a historical leader from the Swiss section, expressed her
belief thus:
It is true that we have … a new ally which pleads in favor of our cause in a
more effective and pressing manner than we could do. It is the atomic
bomb.
With that I mean not only to say that the atomic bomb will pull even the
indifferent out of their lethargy; fear is a bad advisor by itself and can lead
to anything but reasonable conclusions. But it seems to me that the atomic
bomb should show even to those most indifferent and to those most
apathetic what war means, and make them understand that we are lost if
we keep putting our trust in violence
193
.
191
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the International Congress in Paris, France, July 1953 Until the WILPF
XIII International Congress, Birmingham, July 1956 (Geneva, Switzerland: 1956), p. 3, box 14, folder 3,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
192
Christine A. James, “Feminism and Masculinity: Reconceptualizing the Dichotomy of Reason and
Emotion,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 17, no. 1/2 (1997), 129-152. See also Raia
Prokhovnik, Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy, 2nd ed. (Manchester; New York:
Manchester University Press; Palgrave, 2002), 6-10 and 56-112; Tickner, Gender in International
Relations; Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Keller, “Feminism and Science;” Keller and
Longino, Feminism and Science; Donna Jeanne Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in
the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989).
193
Clara Ragaz, “Discours d'Ouverture,” in Xth International Congress of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF,
1946[?]), 17, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
82
Gertrude Bussey of the U.S. section was cautiously optimistic about nuclear
science itself. In her opinion, the discovery of atomic energy represented one of three
“really revolutionary” developments of the post-war world, one that had the potential to
benefit humankind, if “placed under a social authority” and “used for the benefit of all
men” [sic]
194
. Reason thus could only lead to one conclusion: if the possible outcome of
any war, small or big, was the resort to the atomic bomb, which carried with it the
possibility of world annihilation, then people would realize that all wars, and all
preparation for war had to be eliminated to avoid the likely consequences of the use of
the atomic bomb. “Wars on a small scale, whether civil or international, carry within
themselves the seeds of world war. A world war, even if begun with so-called
conventional weapons, would almost certainly end as a nuclear war. We must neither
begin such war deliberately, not slide into it accidently (sic)”
195
.
Because reason, not politics, guided science, the WILPF viewed science and
technology with great optimism: it was through science and technology that humanity
could be guided to salvation
196
. When reporting her work at a World Health
Organization
197
meeting in Geneva in 1954, for example, Gertrude Baer was keenly
194
Gertrude C. Bussey, “Political and Economic Cooperation,” in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 143-144, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
195
WILPF IEC, Statement on Policy, 1955, p. 1, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA. Ragaz did not conclude, however, that disarmament and the elimination of the
war system would bring about “real peace:” this could only be accomplished by guaranteeing political and
civil rights, as well as a collective right to self-determination (Clara Ragaz, “Discours d'Ouverture,” in Xth
International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg:
August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 17-18, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC).
196
In Edith Ballantyne’s words, “science and technology became the saviour” (Edith Ballantyne, email
message to author, September 24, 2006).
197
It is particularly interesting to notice here that Gertrude Baer referred to the WHO as “non-political”
83
aware of the dangers, contradictions, and political and nonpolitical problems raised by
nuclear science and technology. She presented in great detail the possible public health
consequences of radiation, the risks associated with the existence of nuclear reactors near
inhabited locations, the dilemmas of safe disposal of nuclear waste, and other questions
related to the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. However, her report also made
it clear that these were technical questions that the world scientific community could and
would address and solve
198
. Moreover, Baer was eager to see the WHO and other
international bodies discuss questions related to the use of “nuclear energy for destructive
purposes” from a “scientific” point of view. In 1954, she tried to convince Walter G.
Whitman, Secretary General of the UN Atomic Energy Conference, to give opportunity
to discussions on the public health effects of atomic weapons:
[s]cientific discussion of the questions of radiation through atomic
weapons, if put into the context of the many other aspects with which the
[UN] Conference [for Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy] is going to deal,
may bring about a relaxation of the fear now obsession of vast
populations. … We are convinced that a frank and open presentation
would strengthen the confidence in those who organize and participate in,
the Conference and lessen the profound anxiety of so many people around
the globe
199
.
Baer was not attempting to minimize the fears of potential or actual victims of
nuclear tests; on the contrary, she believed that people’s sufferings were paramount when
dealing with nuclear energy whether used for peaceful or “destructive” purposes. She
(Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Magleaas,
Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Hamburg, Germany,
July 1955, 1955, p. 7, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA).
198
Ibid., 1-8.
199
Ibid., 9.
84
was, rather, expressing her faith in the power of the truth about atomic weapons, when
expressed through the scientific, reasoned discussion of the health effects of nuclear
experiments, to vindicate and give voice to victims, and to convince everybody else of
the need to stop using nuclear power for war preparations
200
.
Trust in science and scientific reason extended to scientists in general. The
WILPF considered scientists objective, far removed from political power, and
independent of nationalist interests. In 1946 US member Annalee Stewart declared that
“[t]he scientists of the world have admitted that the problems of the bomb belong not to
the field of science, but to the field of human relationships. They have pointed out that
the difficulties lie more with politics than physics”
201
. She continued by stating that
scientists all over the world had already shown examples of peaceful cooperation by
agreeing to call for disarmament. While it is true that, ever since World War II, a
movement of atomic scientists had developed that consistently criticized atomic weapons,
Stewart did not address the contradictions inherent in the scientists’ roles as creators and
developers of the technology that made nuclear weapons possible
202
. Similarly in 1958
Else Zeuthen, International Chairman of the WILPF, commented that preliminary results
of a “conference of technicians” held in Geneva “confirm[ed] the experience that when
200
Baer also tried hard to convince the WHO Secretary General to include the issue of “the destructive use
of atomic energy” within the scope of the WHO, a suggestion which he rejected (ibid., 1).
201
Annalee Stewart, “World Security - International Control of Atomic Energy,” in Xth International
Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th,
1946 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), p. 150, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
202
For a more complete account of the political activities of atomic scientists in favor of or in opposition to
the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the scientists’ relationships with the pacifist
movement, see Wittner, One World Or None; Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity.
85
technicians meet from either side there are no great difficulties in arriving at agreement,
provided the political propaganda machine is kept at a distance”
203
.
The WILPF saw international control of atomic energy, under the guidance of
scientific and liberal democratic principles, as a sort of minimal (if not necessarily
sufficient) guarantee that its utilization would increase humanity’s well-being. Even Dr.
Hélène. Stähelin, one of the most ardent skeptics in regard to nuclear technology, while
cautioning the WILPF about the dangers inherent in such technology, nevertheless
insisted that international control and science free from military control would offer some
minimal safeguards against its destructive uses
204
.
So, in 1946 the WILPF passed a resolution on atomic energy, which called for
destruction of all atomic bombs, the need for international control and creation of a
civilian “Atomic Development Authority” with complete control over supply of nuclear
material and “directing all production for civilian purposes only, controlling power
development and research activities, and encouraging the beneficial uses of atomic
energy, especially in the healing of diseases and in industrial development”
205
. In 1948 the
IEC supported the 1946 United Nations General Assembly’s resolution calling for the
establishment of international control of atomic agency to insure that it be used for
peaceful purposes
206
. In 1957 again the WILPF IEC reiterated its confidence in the
203
Else Zeuthen, International Chairman's Report, 1958, p. 5, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
204
H. Stähelin, “L’énérgie Atomique et Ses Applications Scientifiques,” in Xth International Congress of
the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 151-154, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
205
WILPF Tenth Congress Resolutions and Recommendations (in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 198-199, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC).
206
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1948, p. 4, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF
86
possibility of using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, provided that it was put under
international control: “We must build a world organisation which makes possible the
peaceful development of Atomic Energy and the avoidance of a military catastrophe”
207
.
The WILPF’s appeals to the objectivity and political neutrality of science and to
the power of rationality and logical reasoning to lead to disarmament were inscribed in a
distinctly modern and distinctly liberal outlook, which was grounded in specific gender
assumptions and dichotomies. This said, stigmatizing the WILPF’s position over
disarmament in the 1940s and 1950s as distinctly, invariably, and unquestioningly
modern means to stereotype its members and box them into a category that hardly does
justice to the nuances of thought within the organization, even at that time. This is
because, even in the 1940s and 1950s, the WILPF was following a critical methodology
and planting the seeds for an eventual change in ideas and policies that would become
manifest much later. However, the predominant view about disarmament in the 1940s and
1950s was one that underscored the importance of (liberal democratic) laws, international
institutions, reason and science in bringing about disarmament. This belief was modern
and liberal, but it is also to be understood in the context of the Cold War, the euphoria
about the possibility of nuclear science for peaceful purposes
208
, and in general during the
building of an international system based on precisely those modern beliefs.
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
207
WILPF IEC, Decisions and Summary of Records, 1957, p. 19, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October
1956-December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
208
Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity.
87
Women, Disarmament and Peace
The 1946 debate on whether to maintain the WILPF or dissolve it saw two
distinct positions. Some, like Dutch member J. Repelaer van Driel, argued that not only
had war shown women to be as bellicose as men (or as peaceful as men), but that
maintaining a separate women’s organization devoted to peace, after women had attained
the right to vote in almost all countries where the WILPF was represented, meant to
perpetuate the status of women as inferior. Van Driel argued:
To pull out in groups to aspire to such vast plans as that of International
Concord, women too easily “donnent prise aux hommes” who raise their
shoulders and judge those groups and their efforts as “really feminine”,
“sentimental” or “out of touch with reality”, etc. without realizing,
moreover, that they too try to hide their inferiority complex and their own
failings in the achievement of universal peace
209
.
Van Driel was essentially stating that equating women with peace devalued both
women and peace
210
. Mildred Scott Olmsted instead spoke in favor of maintaining the
WILPF, using maternalist rhetoric and depicting women as “by nature more concerned
than men with the conservation of life and the creation of conditions under which
children may grow up safely and happily”
211
. Olmstead was not quite saying that women
are more peaceful than men, but rather that they are more interested in peace because of
their traditional roles as mothers and caregivers. As a consequence, women had much to
209
J. Repelaer van Driel, “Devons-Nous Dissoudre La L.I.F.P.L.?,” in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 127, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
210
See Confortini, “Galtung, Violence, and Gender.”
211
Mildred Scott Olmsted, “Shall the W.I.L.P.F. Continue Or Dissolve?,” in Xth International Congress of
the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 126, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
88
offer to the cause of peace that couldn't be offered by men-only or mixed organizations,
in which women had only marginal roles.
This debate mirrored much later feminist debates, but, after the 1946 Congress
had accepted Olmsted's argument and had voted overwhelmingly to maintain the WILPF,
during the rest of the 1940s and continuing in the 1950s it rarely, if ever, entertained
discussions on the relationship between women and peace. While it worked on women’s
rights and equal representation at the UN, for example, feminist-inspired reflections on
disarmament, peace and gender were notably absent from WILPF documents of the first
two decades after the war. This absence partly reflected the lack of input from a feminist
movement that in those years was rather dormant in much of the Western world
212
.
Changing Ideas
The 1972 IEC meeting, and more strongly the 1974 International Congress,
approved resolutions which indicate that, by that time, the WILPF had radically
reassessed its position toward the relationship between disarmament and peace. The 1974
resolutions, in particular: 1) indicted “an economic system based on production for profit
rather than production for human needs” as ultimately responsible for the arms build-up
and called for “fundamental economic change by non-violent means” as the only way to
“eliminate war, racism, violence, repression and social injustice”
213
; 2) strongly
condemned nuclear power, “whether used for weaponry or peaceful purposes,” as a threat
to peace and asked for the cessation of nuclear arms testing as well as of the use of
212
See Foster, Women for all Seasons, 32.
213
WILPF, International Congress Resolutions, 1974, http://www.wilpf.int.ch/statements/1974.htm
(accessed 10/17/07).
89
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes; and 3) linked women’s emancipation with “the
achievement of peace and the relaxation of international tension”
214
.
These resolutions represented a switch in emphasis from a reliance on and faith in
international law, arrived at through voluntary agreements, to a more sustained critique of
the international economic system. They reflected an increased skepticism toward the
rules of liberal democracy. This skepticism led them to contest the idea that international
laws based on voluntary consent and rational deliberation would be enough to guarantee
disarmament. It led them to view peace as both the result of international mechanisms
and machinery for the peaceful resolution of conflicts (these initiatives were never
abandoned) and most fundamentally as the outcome of a restructuring of an international
economic system, which provoked, fueled and perpetuated a state of constant violence.
The WILPF had by this time initiated a radical reassessment of the role of power
in international relations: by shifting its focus to the recognition of the power inherent in
a “system of exploitation” the WILPF was also starting to doubt that principles of liberal
democracy and democratic deliberation were in themselves sufficient to bring about
peace, in the context of unequal power relations. Thus, it came to see the world as divided
into “three political blocs [US-, USSR- and non-aligned) and two economic blocs (rich
countries and poor countries)”
215
. Moreover, the WILPF had begun to critique those
elements of the international system that made impossible or negated, in the WILPF’s
views, human obligations to each other (including laws and agreements).
214
Ibid.
215
Yvonne Sée, “On WILPF Aims and Purposes,” 1972, p. 1, box 2, folder 8, IEC Meeting Switzerland
August 1972, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
90
Developing an economic critique of the arms race went hand in hand with
revisiting the WILPF’s early support of the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
This reversion of policies was made possible by an increasing skepticism toward the
supposed ‘neutrality’ of science. In fact, references to scientists and ‘experts’ as the
‘saviors’ of humanity disappear almost entirely from the WILPF's documents of the
1970s.
Finally the mid-1970s also saw a change in WILPF’s attitudes toward gender,
women and disarmament, where the WILPF started to systematically address women’s
contributions to peace work and disarmament issues and discuss the incompatibility
between feminism and militarism. The WILPF had come to believe that women had the
obligation of active political participation and a special interest in questions of peace.
Swedish member Aja Selander, addressing the Conference of Women’s Organizations on
European Cooperation and Security in 1973, proclaimed:
Our task as European women is not only to work for equality and
development. We should not hesitate to deal with all political questions
that have impact on the future of mankind
216
.
Not only did women possess a special obligation toward peace. They also were
uniquely apt at peacework: “women have ways of overcoming difficulties and reaching
agreement, and that women show understanding and tolerance”
217
.
216
Aja Selander, Address to the Conference of Women's Organizations on European Cooperation and
Security, 1973, p. 2, box 7, folder 7, Correspondence Meetings Seminars Elsinki 1973, WILPF Second
Accession, UCBA.
217
Pax et Libertas, Meeting in Preparation for the World Congress for the International Women’s Year,
December 1974, 22, box 162, folder 1, Pax et Libertas (published edition) 1971-79, WILPF Second
Accession, UCBA.
91
In 1975 Kay Camp, as President of the WILPF, proposed the inclusion of the
following statement in the UN Plan of Action for the International Women’s Year:
Equality is impossible and development gravely hampered in a world
wrecked by wars and impoverished by preparation for war. In our day,
women are increasingly involved in warfare and increasingly victimized
by it. The peril and cost of militarism must be ended. Likewise, racism and
sexism on which militarism thrives must go
218
.
Camp, and with her much of the WILPF, had undertaken a critique of militarism
as antithetical to feminism and women's equality and as fueled by other harmful and
related forms of social inequality.
How did the WILPF arrive at these three ideological and policy changes? I will
now offer an account of the methodological tools that allowed social and self criticism to
emerge and the WILPF to move beyond its entrenchment in liberalism.
Methodology
Elements of a feminist critical methodology throughout the three decades that
followed World War II made it possible for the WILPF to maintain a vibrant interaction
with the external environment and the structural and ideological constraints it presented.
During these years, the WILPF carved out its own agency within a structure that bounded
it. It did so by continually applying elements of a feminist critical methodology.
Guiding Criteria
The WILPF’s guiding criteria regarding disarmament had been enshrined in its
constitution in 1919 and unambiguously stated that WILPF stood for: total and universal
disarmament; the support for international law; the peaceful settlement of conflicts; and
218
Pax et Libertas, Proposed Addition to the UN Plan of Action Section IIA, December 1975, 3, box 162,
folder 1, Pax et Libertas (published edition) 1971-79, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
92
the development of a world organization. In 1948 the WILPF IEC issued a resolution
restating its “belief in the complete abolition of the war method and the universal
acceptance of disarmament as the only assurance for the preservation of the human
race”
219
. As seen in the previous section, the WILPF's policies regarding disarmament
only partially, but in very important ways, embodied liberal modern ideas about the role
of states and international institutions to bring about peace. Moreover, they also reflected
the WILPF's make-up as a primarily Western, upper-to-middle class, white women's
organization. In fact, while the WILPF consistently condemned the production,
stockpiling and trade of conventional, nuclear, biological, bacteriological and chemical
arms (referring to them as “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as early as 1948
220
) it never
mentioned, for example, the trade in small arms until the 1980s. The 1940s and 1950s
were also characterized by the notable absence of reflections on the relationship between
women, feminism and peace.
In general, the WILPF saw the arms race as a problem that could be solved in
theory by science and in practice by law. Consent, rationality and autonomy as concepts
enshrined in liberal political thought underpinned a postwar liberal order, which included
(though it was not limited to) the militarization of international relations embedded in the
East-West rivalry. So the replication of those tenets went with the grain of a militarized
order even as the WILPF aimed at a contrary objective. But the WILPF was not
unquestioningly replicating those tenets. In reality, debates were going on all the time,
and this shows that the WILPF was consciously employing critical methodological tools,
219
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1948, p. 4, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
220
Ibid.
93
which eventually allowed a more extensive critique of the international system and the
arms race.
Deliberative Inquiry
The 1930s WILPF had employed different forms of direct protest as political
tactics, which often offered the opportunity to cooperate with other international
organizations. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, the leaders of the organization had felt
the need to shift away from those tactics:
The mass protests, manifestoes and petitions of the 1930s were no longer
adequate, although they were still being used by some organizations. The
need now was not so much to protest when an international crime had
been committed, as to anticipate the crisis and offer an alternative,
practicable policy
221
.
But the shift was due as much to the atmosphere of paranoia generated by the
Cold War as to strategic assessments of what political actions would be most effective.
The Cold War effects on the organization's methods are exemplified by the consistent
refusal to engage in any sustained and institutional way in cooperative efforts with other
women's organizations. The Red Scare had made the WILPF wary particularly of Eastern
European organizations
222
. In 1957 it rejected an invitation from the Women's
International Democratic Federation (WIDF) to attend its conference in Potsdam out of
(the not entirely unfounded) concern that the WIDF was aligned with Soviet Russia
223
.
221
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 203 – talking of the mid-1950s.
222
For an overview of “Communist-led peace movements” see Wittner, One World Or None, 183
223
WILPF IEC, Decisions and Summary of Records, 1957, p. 17, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October
1956-December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
94
The 1960s and 1970s saw the intensification of concerted actions with peace and
women’s NGOs and the more deliberate and consistent use of direct protest as a form of
political action. In the second half of the 1960s Dorothy Hutchinson initiated a debate on
the “effectiveness of [the] organization”
224
. Some members were openly questioning both
the WILPF’s methods and its principles, which they saw as linked. Some critiqued the
WILPF’s continued reliance on “methods of reason and persuasion”
225
, on public
diplomacy efforts and on government lobbying especially in the context of international
government organizations. They favored more direct forms of action and public protest.
Still others rejected these methods as not quite appropriate to the WILPF or in harmony
with the WILPF's traditions
226
.
By 1967 the Red Scare had subsided and many were ready to involve the WILPF
more actively in the transnational disarmament movement, outside the framework of the
UN. At the IEC meeting of that year, disagreements centered on whether the WILPF
should join the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace. On one side of
the debate Elise Boulding (joined by the Australian section) thought it imperative that the
WILPF strengthen contacts with organizations on the other side of the Iron Curtain; on
the other, Gertrude Baer (with French member Yvonne Sée and Japanese member Fujiko
Isono) wanted the WILPF to maintain independence from organizations with a “partisan
224
Dorothy Hutchinson, Chairman's Report to International Executive Committee, 1967, p.1, box 2, folder
4, IEC Meeting 1967, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
225
Ibid., 2.
226
Part of this discussion was also the issue about the use of force in liberation struggles, which I will
address in the decolonization and racism chapter.
95
agenda” and reserve the right to decide whether to join their efforts until the WILPF
Congress would meet
227
.
A decision was tabled in this instance but the discussion is relevant because it was
starting to become clear that some leaders of the WILPF were getting progressively
uncomfortable with a position of distance from other organizations. The WILPF so far
had participated as observers at other organizations’ meetings. Sometimes it had
maintained some loose form of association with umbrella organizations, but leaders
favoring a stricter and more consistent form of cooperation with other organizations faced
the opposition of others (most notably Gertrude Baer) who wanted to maintain
independence. Elise Boulding and other WILPF officials continued to press for greater
cooperation with other organizations and by the 1970s cooperation with other peace
organizations, particularly with women’s organizations, became a central feature of
WILPF’s activities
228
.
Individual (especially younger) WILPFers had participated in Women Strike for
Peace (WSP) since the early 1960s. This movement was born on November 1, 1961,
when thousands of US housewives in sixty cities refused to work for one day and called
for an end to the arms race. WSP was one of the first to protest against the Vietnam War
and initiate contacts with Soviet and Vietnamese women. While this movement employed
227
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1967, pp. 15-16, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA. Interestingly, Gertrude Baer was herself instrumental later in bringing about an
International NGO Conference on Disarmament (Patricia Shannon, Working Paper, “Aims and Objectives
of WILPF in our Time, Future Direction and Action,” 1972, p. 1, box 2, folder 8, IEC Meeting Switzerland
August 1972, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA).
228
The 1970 IEC discussed the issue once more: some of the IEC members insisted that “the WILPF seek
wider cooperation with other women’s groups, especially those in the East which have contact with women
in developing areas.” Others, again, “felt that WILPF must be careful to maintain its independence”
(WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1970, pp. 1-2, box 5, folder 13, IEC Meeting Minutes 1970-77, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA).
96
maternalist rhetoric to call for disarmament (at least this was true in the US), it had also
very deliberatively developed into a horizontal, non-hierarchical organization. Horizontal
and collective decision-making has been a mainstay of feminism, though WSP members
did not uniformly identify as feminists
229
. So it was those younger members who were the
most ardent critics of both the WILPF’s methods and its ideological entrenchment in
liberalism
230
. Participation in WSP actions was important in favoring the WILPF's future
ideational and policy shifts.
In fact, the 1960s’ revival of the feminist movement brought the WILPF to debate
its relationship with feminism. Starting in the 1970s and continuing throughout the 80s
the WILPF became more and more engaged in various forms of direct protest,
participating in the Greenham Common camps, for example. While these actions had
been marginal to the WILPF’s activities in earlier years, they became increasingly
prevalent in the 70s and 80s. Led by International President Kay Camp, for example, the
WILPF actively participated in the preparations for the first UN World Conference on the
Status of Women that took place in Mexico City in 1975. It also helped launch a series of
disarmament campaigns and meetings which focused on women’s role in disarmament
and peace. For example, on the occasion of the International Women's Year in 1975, the
WIDF and the WILPF co-sponsored a seminar on disarmament and peace, which was
attended by several peace and women's NGOs from different parts of the world
231
. In
1975, the IEC decided to undertake disarmament actions on International Women’s Day.
229
See Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 250-253.
230
See Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 244-245; Foster, Women for all Seasons,
27-28.
231
Pax et Libertas, International Women's Year Seminar on Disarmament and Peace, January-March 1975,
3, box 162, folder 1, Pax et Libertas (published edition) 1971-79, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
97
Finally it declared disarmament issues to be the WILPF's first priorities for the year to
come
232
. These new initiatives were not simply the consequence of the WILPF's new
thinking on disarmament. Rather, they made new thinking possible by delivering the
contact with outside critics and the opportunity for listening and empathizing with
marginalized voices.
Direct protest and cooperation with other NGOs, as forms of deliberative inquiry,
represented methodological choices that helped change ideologies and policies. Choosing
these forms of political action was itself made possible by a changing historical context,
but it also had an effect on the WILPF's ideology. More inclusive deliberative
opportunities by themselves, however, could potentially cause no change of ideas and
policies if not for a willingness on the part of the WILPF to put into question both those
ideas and the organization's own methodologies.
Skeptical Scrutiny
The debates over whether or not to cooperate with other organizations are an
example of the use of the methodological tool that Brooke Ackerly names “skeptical
scrutiny” as applied to the WILPF's own methods. In 1972 French member Yvonne Sée
described the strengths and weaknesses of the WILPF's modus operandi. While she
stressed elements of continuity in WILPF’s work, she also considered it a strength that
the WILPF “re-evaluate and … adjust to new situations”
233
. Thus, she saw the WILPF
work as at the same time focused on the objectives enshrined in its constitution, as well
232
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1975, p. 8, box 2, folder 10, IEC Meeting Germany October 1975, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
233
Yvonne Sée, “On WILPF Aims and Purposes,” 1972, p.1, box 2, folder 8, IEC Meeting Switzerland
August 1972, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
98
as continually in progress, and critical of established knowledge. She particularly
expressed skepticism toward ideologies (which she saw “as brainwash in order to serve
the establishment”) and the “universal status quo (boundaries, political and national
ideologies)” and the need to “not feel bound to a particular viewpoint”
234
. The
deliberative opportunities created in the 1960s and 1970s favored the expression of
skeptical scrutiny of the WILPF's thoughts on disarmament.
Though changes in the WILPF’s thinking about disarmament began to manifest
themselves more visibly in the late 1960s, thanks to a more favorable international
environment, there had been many occasions in which dissenting opinions had emerged
in internal WILPF debates. Reflections about the economic impediments to disarmament
and the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes had never entirely disappeared from
the WILPF, even at the height of the Cold War. Gertrud Woker, a leading Swiss authority
on chemical and biological warfare had been leading the WILPF's efforts “against the
misappropriation of science for military purposes since 1924”
235
. In 1957, as head of the
Committee against Scientific Warfare, she convinced the IEC to issue a resolution
condemning “those who profit from the war industry” and asking that governments
in all circumstances, even in relation to the “peaceful uses of atomic
energy”, … consider the life and health of the peoples above the economic
advantages and profit interests of a reactor industry which may develop
without any such inhibitions
236
.
234
Ibid.
235
Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 212.
236
Cf. Resolution of the WILPF Committee against Scientific Warfare (WILPF IEC, Decisions and
Summary of Records, 1957, p. 3, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October 1956-December 1957, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA) with Resolutions and Statements Adopted (ibid., 22).
99
The resolution further advocated the exploration of alternative sources of energy,
other than nuclear
237
. Though worded more mildly than the resolutions of the late 1960s
and especially of the 1970s, it is indicative of the kinds of skeptical input that the WILPF
was accepting from some executive members on the political economy of nuclear energy
and the potential dangers of nuclear science.
The divisions which started more clearly manifesting themselves in the late 1960s
over the relationship between world economy and disarmament centered on whether it
was the absence of a legal and political structure for the solution of conflicts that caused
the need to arm; or whether the arms themselves, and the market that produced them,
were the origins of violent conflict. These issues were intensely and openly debated
within national sections. The Italian section, for example, was divided between those who
believed that wars and the necessity for arming were fostered by the absence of legal and
political mechanisms to peacefully solve disputes among states and those who believed
that “the necessity to market the arms incessantly produced by the industries” caused and
fed wars
238
.
In 1961 the WILPF started undertaking a “serious study of the economic and
social aspects of disarmament”
239
. While this initiative was borne out of the concern that
disarmament would lead to unemployment
240
, it also reflected the extent to which the
237
Gertrude Baer had suggested to study the utilization of solar energy as early as 1955 at the WHO (Foster,
Women for all Seasons, 27).
238
Marina Della Seta, Letter to Dorothy Hutchinson and Sybil Morrison, Appendix I in Dorothy
Hutchinson, D. H. Circular Letter no. 3/1968, 1968, WILPF International 1968-75, p. 7, Dolores Taller
Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
239
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Passed, 1961, p. 3, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
240
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Magleaas,
100
WILPF was willing to inquire into how disarmament and the economy interacted at
different levels. Tellingly, the wording of the final document had been changed from
“economic consequences” to “economic aspects”
241
. Dorothy Hutchinson who later
initiated the WILPF's debates on methods and was prominent in supporting the view that
the arms race was a consequence of the absence of legal mechanisms for the prevention
of war, also strongly believed that a world without violence and war could not be
achieved as long as hunger, illiteracy and a widening gap between the have and the have-
nots existed. Though the eventual development of “democratic political institutions” was
desirable and conducive to peace in the long run, it could come about only after economic
under-development was addressed. In turn, this could not be possible in the presence of
the arms race and of economic policies used as “instrument[s] … against the Communist
bloc rather than for the recipients of that aid”
242
.
By 1966 the WILPF had recognized the existence of powerful economic interests
behind the urge to arm, but it was not yet ready to let go of its belief that rational
deliberation and education could convince political and economic leaders of the fact that
disarmament was in everyone’s interest. In 1966 another IEC resolution condemned
“military-industrial interests”’ blockage of disarmament negotiations, and urged the
drafting of a United Nations’ Convention against the export of arms across borders
243
. The
Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Hamburg, Germany,
July 1955, 1955, pp. 8-9, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
241
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Passed, 1961, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
242
Dorothy Hutchinson, “Political Settlements,” in 14th International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom, Stockholm, Sweden, 27th to 31st July 1959: [Proceedings]
(Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1959[?]), 33, microfilm, reel 141.3, SCPC.
243
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1966, p. 4, box 2, folder 3, IEC Meeting 1966, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
101
IEC also considered the possibility of “convince[ing] industrialists that disarmament was
not to their disadvantage”
244
.
Gertrude Baer had closely followed most UN-sponsored disarmament talks and
negotiations on behalf of the WILPF. In 1972 she expressed frustration and skepticism
toward public declarations of goodwill and inter-state agreements (specifically the SALT
I) as public displays with little practical effectiveness, and a dissatisfaction with limited-
objective agreements that she felt hampered, rather than facilitated, what the WILPF had
advocated since its birth - universal and total disarmament. Further, she put forward her
realization that international politics could not be separated from “certain world-wide
industrial monopolies, which control military research, development and policy”
245
.
The 1960s and 1970s reassessment of the WILPF's thinking about the relationship
between women, feminism and peace was continuously subject to skeptical scrutiny. For
example, in 1968 British member Margaret Tims critiqued the WILPF’s attention to
‘women’s issues:’
… the two causes – of peace and freedom in the general sense and of
women’s freedom in the particular sense – are no longer synonymous and
should be treated separately. By continuing to link them together, the
WILPF is falling between two stools and being effective in neither cause.
The WILPF should therefore decide whether it is to concern itself
specifically with women’s freedom, or, as it is now called, the status of
women, with a much greater emphasis on the needs of women in the
under-developed countries; or whether it is to go on pursuing the general
aims of peace and freedom, from a broadly political viewpoint
246
.
244
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1966, p. 7, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
245
Gertrude Baer, Report on Disarmament, 1972, p. 2, box 2, folder 8, IEC Meeting Switzerland August
1972, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
246
Tim’s Circular Letter, cited in Foster, Women for all Seasons, 55.
102
Tims’ letter shows that the WILPF did not passively absorb or reproduce the
ideological and policy changes that a reinvigorated international feminist movement
brought about. Rather, its methodological commitment to skeptical scrutiny made it
possible for the WILPF to reflect on what kind of relation, if any, there was between
“women’s freedom” and “the general aims of peace and freedom.” This reflection
manifested itself in the policy statements and initiatives of the 1970s
247
and it indicated
continuous self-examination of the WILPF's ideas, policies and methods.
The Role of Social Critics
Many members of the WILPF fulfilled the role of inside critics at different times :
from Swiss member Hélène Stähelin in 1946 who advocated caution against nuclear
energy and the possibilities of science, to Gertrud Woker and her Committee against
Scientific Warfare, to Elise Boulding and Edith Ballantyne who pushed for increased
contacts and cooperation among women’s and peace organizations. As seen earlier, the
women of the French section were more insistent than others in bringing out economic
arguments whenever they spoke about disarmament. For example, at the first
International Congress after the war, French member G. Duchêne expressed her view that
“true democracy” was diametrically opposed to an economic system dominated by the
power of money (i.e., capitalism)
248
. It is important to note that the critics' collective
efforts favored ideational and policy changes in the WILPF. Individual members who
247
The internal debate continued through the 1970s and 1980s, and the organization’s relation with
feminism remains ambiguous to this day.
248
G. Duchêne, “La Situation Politique et les Conditions de la Paix,” in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946), 139-142, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
103
promoted deliberative opportunities, initiated crucial dialogues or institutional change
were not necessarily ardent supporters of all new policies, ideas or methods.
Increased participation in NGO meetings and increased involvement in joint
activities with other organizations meant increased contacts with outside critics,
especially people whose views would not otherwise be represented in the WILPF.
Occasions for such contacts were more rare in the 1950s, though the WILPF had been in
touch with several Japanese women and organizations since the war. In the 1960s Soviet
and in the 1970s Vietnamese women fulfilled the roles of outside critics when the WILPF
actively pursued dialogues with them that had profound impacts on the organization.
Finally, the WILPF's members who also participated in WSP fulfilled the roles of multi-
sited critics in that they promoted sustained discussions over the WILPF's own methods.
The WILPF remained (and remains) plagued by a chronic paucity of Third World
members, which might have contributed to the relative absence of policies and
discussions regarding small arms, during this period. Third World members did not
appear with any regularity or importance in the organization’s discussions and memos
around disarmament questions, as they were framed by the WILPF.
Imaginative Identification
Meetings with women from the non-Western world could have led the WILPF
nowhere if not for another methodological tool, which Dorothy Hutchinson described in
detail during her speech as outgoing WILPF Chairman to the 1968 Congress. Her
description warrants a lengthy quote:
JaneAddam's greatness lay in her rare combination of two qualities...
These are Intelligence – the mental capability which sets man apart, and
104
Compassion – the emotional capability which enables Man, by an effort of
his imagination, to feel suffering which is not his own, so acutely that he is
compelled to act to relieve it. … The function of the WILPF has always
been to study public policy, to make moral judgments based on
imaginative identification with those who are victimized by inhuman
public policies, and to educate ourselves and others for effective political
action to change these policies. … We have demonstrated that an
enlightened and courageous minority can be the seed of social progress by
consistently opposing laws, institutions and customs which glorify power
and prestige above human values. We have thus enabled our members to
exercise their right to be fully human. 'To express and to implement
intelligent compassion is a human right'”
249
.
This kind of “imaginative identification” described by Hutchinson is not unlike a
methodology that Christine Sylvester has called “empathetic cooperation” in feminist
international relations
250
, and is part of the methodological repertoire of feminist social
scientists in general
251
. I would also argue that “imaginative identification” is a necessary
element of a feminist critical methodology for social change, as it compels “the silent
voices” to come to the fore.
249
Dorothy Hutchinson, Chairman's Keynote Address, “The Right to be Human,” 1968, pp. 7-8, box 25,
16th International Congress Report 1966 and 17th International Congress Report 1968, WILPF SCPC
Accession, University of Colorado at Boulder Archives (hereinafter UCBA).
250
Sylvester, “Empathetic Cooperation: A Feminist Method for IR,” Millennium: Journal of International
Studies 23, no. 2 (1994), 315-334. Sylvester has so defined “empathetic cooperation” in IR: “a process of
positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is
unaccustomed to heeding when building social theory, taking on board rather than dismissing, finding in
the concerns of others borderlands of one’s own concerns and fears” (ibid., 317) The article was reprinted
in Christine Sylvester, “Empathetic Cooperation: A Feminist Method for IR,” in Feminist International
Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242-264.
251
See for example Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook, Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship
as Lived Research (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Bina D'Costa, “Marginalized Identity:
New Frontiers of Research for IR?,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds. Brooke A.
Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 129-152; Diane L. Wolf, Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996);
Rosalind Edwards, Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research: Public Knowledge and Private Lives
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997); Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose
Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, N.Y .: Cornell University Press, 1991); Sandra G.
Harding, Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press, 1998).
105
Whenever the women of the WILPF met with outside critics they often applied
this practice . My interview with Elise Boulding, who recalled the first meetings with
Soviet women, illustrates this:
in 1961 the WILPF was invited to participate in hosting a group of Soviet
women ... And so that was an extraordinary occasion because we came to
see the real heroism of these women who had all survived the war under
great, great difficulties, and seen very, very much suffering. And they had
violence, more than we in the United States. We hadn’t really seen that
kind of violence. We hadn’t been overseas. And they spoke with such—
they had such a strong sense of their role and what they had to do and their
calling to build a peaceful society. And they were so open to listening. We
were all learning from each other. But we were so impressed with their
character, and who they were as people. And so that was an amazing
experience
252
.
Those meetings, as well as earlier meetings with Japanese women and the late
1960s and 1970s encounters with Vietnamese women, produced lasting changes in the
WILPF. For example, African American members’ exchanges with Soviet women at their
second meeting in 1964 highlighted for them the connections they saw between racial
relations in the US and international tensions that contributed to a continued arms
buildup:
At the Moscow Conference, we discussed disarmament ways to strengthen
cooperation in the United Nations, and the German problem. But after a
school was burned in Alabama, we talked about how the racial turmoil in
the United States affects international tension
253
.
Although initially wary of the way Soviet women seemed “reluctant to speak in
any way but generalities about their government's actions toward peace”
254
, those African
252
Elise Boulding, interview by the author, May 21, 2005.
253
Erna P. Harris, cited in Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom, 174.
254
Edna Harris cited in Ibid.
106
American WILPFers exited the meeting with the feeling that the US “could learn
something about race relations from them”
255
. It is also worth noting that African
American members from the US section exerted an influence far beyond their marginal
representation in the ranks of the WILPF
256
.
Conclusions
The WILPF’s early confidence in liberal laws and international institutions was
underpinned by a specific gender ideology, which privileged a particular conception of
both human nature and the international system grounded on masculinist notions of
autonomy, freedom, consent, science and rationality. This, in turn, led the WILPF to
underplay the role of economic and other structural constraints in shaping states’ policies
toward disarmament. This chapter has asked to what extent the WILPF participated in the
construction of an international order, which was becoming heavily reliant on the arms
race, even while ostensibly working against it. To the extent that the WILPF did not
question the normative underpinnings of that order, it paradoxically played a part in it. At
the same time, it was its Achilles' heel insofar as it was able to question its ideological
foundations. In the years from 1945 to 1975 the WILPF underwent a shift from its
entrenchment in liberal modern thought and belief in its institutions, to more radical
critiques of the international system.
However, the WILPF did not arrive at this radical revision of its beliefs and
policies suddenly in 1974. Rather, the change was the result of a 3-decade-long process,
nurtured by the organization’s reliance on a feminist critical methodology in its four
255
Ibid.
256
See Ibid., 165-194.
107
components (guiding criteria, deliberative inquiry, skeptical scrutiny and imaginative
identification). Feminist critical methodology allowed the WILPF not to abandon, but to
identify and critique, the limitations of its ideological foundations in liberalism, thus
enabling it to question an international order, which was becoming increasingly reliant on
the arms race and militarism. In the meantime, the WILPF came to recognize law and
science as a part of a gender-biased structure of global politics, the deconstruction of
which was key to the deconstruction of the arms race.
Certainly ideational changes in disarmament questions were not drastic, nor were
the old policies and ideas totally abandoned. However, the decade following the 1974
resolution saw an increase of work relating disarmament to questions of economic justice
and of women-centered initiatives
257
. Small arms and their impact on women's lives also
became a more consistent preoccupation of the WILPF starting in the 1980s, and it
persists today. While it continued to follow and mostly support and urged the
intensification of UN-linked disarmament negotiations and conferences, the WILPF
increasingly shifted its attention toward non-governmental actions, and focused on public
initiatives to spread information on the political economy of the arms race.
257
See Foster, Women for all Seasons, 72-73.
108
Chapter 4: The WILPF and Decolonization
Introduction
In the years between 1945 and 1975 the WILPF, while supporting the self-
determination of all people, remained paralyzed on the issue of revolutions, the use of
violence by liberation movements, and the methods, degrees, and timing of self-rule for
colonial territories. This chapter discusses how the organization worked to try to
reconcile its positions on self-determination, as an element of peace, with both its ideas
about non-violence (also fundamental to its idea of peace) and its entrenched, but largely
unconscious, assumptions about race. It was a 1971 resolution, controversial within the
WILPF to this day, that openly declared the WILPF’s support for national liberation
struggles while trying to maintain the superiority of non-violence over violence. This
resolution also marked the beginning of heightened self-reflection on issues of race.
This chapter will examine to what extent views about race and the non-European
“other” permeated the WILPF’s views on decolonization, what influence racial ideology
had on the WILPF’s policies toward decolonization throughout the years, and to what
extent the WILPF’s change in policies meant a departure from underlying assumptions
about race. My purpose is to show that, lacking an intentional and sustained effort at
empathetic understanding, feminist critical methodology cannot be truly self-reflective
and inclusive. Thus its ability to effect emancipatory social change is severely curtailed.
The WILPF’s position on the issue of decolonization between 1945 and 1971
passed through three main phases. In the first period, roughly between 1945 and the mid-
1950s, the WILPF expressed a cautious optimism toward the decolonization process, the
109
Trusteeship system and the future of world community in the wake of decolonization. I
argue that this optimism reflected a trust in the liberal international order, which
embodied contradictions about the subjects entitled to liberal rights and freedoms and
racial assumptions about non-European others. The decolonization movement’s growing
strength between the late 1950s and the late 1960s found the WILPF divided between
those who supported a gradual process toward decolonization and those who advocated
the immediate withdrawal of colonizing powers from their remaining colonies and
trusteeship territories. Discussions in this period made racial assumptions come to light
more explicitly, and at the same time enabled members to openly challenge them. Finally,
in the late 1960s, the WILPF reached consensus in support of struggles for independence,
and that consensus manifested itself in the resolution of 1971. Feminist critical
methodology had facilitated the WILPF's critical evaluation of its own ideas, assumptions
and policies. While voices of dissent continued to be present and vocal within the WILPF,
the 1971 resolution was never repealed and it stands to this day.
The chapter is divided into three parts: in the first part I summarize the theoretical
argument that attributes to racial representations the possibility of certain international
policies and the separation between legitimate and illegitimate demands to self-
determination on the part of colonial peoples. I then present the evolution of the WILPF's
policies on decolonization, which I divide into three sections: first, I give an assessment
of WILPF’s position on decolonization in the 1940s and early 1950s, paying particular
attention to the underlying ideology of its policies; the second part describes the changes
and debates that characterized the late 1950s to the late 1960s; the third part highlights
the shifts the WILPF underwent in the third phase, from the mid-1960s to 1975. Finally,
110
following the chronology, I offer a descriptive assessment of the WILPF’s
methodological tools, and analyze to what extent these contributed to ideological and
policy changes. I show that methodology interacted with the international political milieu
to facilitate change in the organization and its ideas and policies about peace, as
expressed in its positions on decolonization.
Race, Representation and Decolonization
Many scholars have pointed out that European colonial expansion to areas outside
of Europe, which started with the 1492 “discovery” of the Americas and continued and
intensified through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, was made possible
by representational practices, which depicted pre-colonized people and history as
“primitive, underdeveloped, impoverished, and barbarous and characterized [the
colonizers'] own activities as progressive and transformative”
258
. Sandra Halperin
contends that certain foundational myths about the rise of Europe formed the basis and
justification for European expansion and colonization of areas outside of Europe.
According to this myth, a European spirit of discovery and exploration gave rise to both
internal economic expansion and development and extra-European voyages, which led to
the “discovery” of a “backward” world in need of the civilizing mission and of the
technological and institutional advances that the Europeans could and should share with
them. Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui further argues that post-“discovery” Western constructs
of non-Europeans (as primitive, naïve and endowed with various other characteristics that
engendered the need for European guidance) have informed European-African (and by
258
Sandra Halperin, “International Relations Theory and the Hegemony of Western Conceptions of
Modernity,” in Decolonizing International Relations, ed. Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2006), 46.
111
extension other non-European peoples) relations well beyond the colonization era
259
. The
nineteenth century doctrine of “the sacred trust of civilization,” which expressed the
“white man's burden” to extend civilization to “backward areas,” was codified in
international law through article 22 of the League of Nations
260
, which established the
mandate system, and after the Second World War underpinned the trusteeship system.
These systems were more the means by which European powers maintained a measure of
control over former colonies than a step toward self-government, as they were publicly
portrayed
261
.
The construction of the ‘native’ as in need of European guidance thus allowed the
maintenance of imperial relations at least through the 1940s and 1950s. To the extent that
racial representations constituted an important element of colonial relations and a further
justification of imperialism
262
, their use made even anti-colonial activists in the West
259
Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in
International Law (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3. Antony Anghie argues
that international law has been itself animated by the civilizing mission of Europeans (Antony Anghie,
Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, V ol. 37 (Cambridge, UK; New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press, 2005)).
260
See Michael D. Callahan, A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929-1946 (Brighton ;
Portland, Or.: Sussex Academic Press, 2004); Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International
Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
261
Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, 180. See also: Branwen Gruffydd Jones, “Introduction:
International Relations, Eurocentrism, and Imperialism,” in Decolonizing International Relations, ed.
Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 1-19; Uday Singh Mehta,
Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999).
262
The literature on gender and imperialism is rather rich: see for example Clare Midgley, Gender and
Imperialism (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; St. Martin's Press, 1998); Julia Ann
Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French
and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, V A: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Angela Woollacott,
Gender and Empire: (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006); Ware,
Beyond the Pale; Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab and Judith Whitehead, Of Property and Propriety: The
Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001);
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:
Routledge, 1995); Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on
Gender, Race, and War, 1st ed. (New York, N.Y .: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
112
unaware accomplices to the colonial and imperialist enterprise. For example, an analysis
of the WILPF's interwar documents show that the idea of an evolution from ‘backward’
to ‘more advanced’ races underpinned its support for the mandate system, while it was
nominally espousing the principle of equality of all races
263
. The WILPF also did not
question the organization of territories into mandates of different classes (A to C) with
different degrees of capability to self-govern
264
. Finally, the WILPF advocated immediate
independence only on an ad hoc basis in a few resolutions up to the Second World War
265
.
Mark Salter points out that in the symbolic framework of what he calls the
“European geopolitical imaginary,” which he traces back to Enlightenment thinkers,
humanity is divided into three categories each at different stages of civilizational
development. This is part of a discourse that assigns to people essential characteristics,
framing some as barbarians or savages and others as civilized, hence entitled to different
treatments based on those supposedly immutable traits
266
. Many feminists highlight that
symbolically separating people into hierarchical, mutually exclusive and unchanging
categories is a gendered move, which replicates the perceived dichotomy and hierarchical
263
Referring to the international order established post the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, Siba N’Zatioula
Grovogui states that emancipationists (i.e., those opposed to the exploitation of African colonies and their
“integration… into the global political economy”) shared with colonialists “the systematic belief in black
inferiority.” Therefore, while they advocated for the “well-being” of Africans, they mostly rejected the idea
of complete self-government. Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, 77-81.
264
Mark B. Salter interprets the establishment of categories of mandate as the embodiment of a hierarchy of
non-European peoples: from the ‘savages’ to the ‘barbarians.’ Mark B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization
in International Relations (London; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 2002).
265
For example, the 1921 Congress called “attention to other urgent claims for self-determination, besides
those of Ireland, for example those of Armenia, Georgia, the Ukraine, India, and Egypt.” WILPF,
International Congress Resolutions, 1921, http://www.wilpf.int.ch/statements/1921.htm (accessed
11/28/07); and the 1926 Dublin Congress demanded immediate independence for the Philippines. WILPF,
International Congress Resolutions, 1926, http://www.wilpf.int.ch/statements/1926.htm (accessed
11/27/07).
266
Salter, Barbarians and Civilization, 23.
113
relationship between men and women, thus allowing the reproduction of social relations
of super/subordination. Mutually dependent but concurrently opposed pairs such as
culture/nature, rational/emotional, progress/tradition, strong/weak,
independent/dependent, civilized/uncivilized
267
, are embedded in Western modern
thought and have served the interests of imperialism insofar as they have been used to
characterize non-Western ‘others’, thus justifying oppression but also the implementation
of different policies for people differently sexualized
268
.
For example, Mrinalini Sinha shows how a Victorian ideal of manliness and the
corresponding construction of Bengali men as effeminate, primitive, and incapable of
self-government served to legitimize and justify continued British colonialism in
nineteenth century Bengal. Gender relations were also implicated in the strategic
construction of hierarchies of people among the colonized, so that “effeminate” Bengali
men were represented as inferior to more “masculine” Punjabi and Northern Indian men,
who were thus assigned higher political positions
269
. And Jennifer Milliken and David
Sylvan show how, in the conduct of the Vietnam War, policy and strategy options against
South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese adversaries depended on the gender order,
insofar as the gender imaginary/discourse of US policy-makers determined different
treatments for adversaries identified with a different sex: female-identified South
Vietnamese adversaries were viewed as bodies to dominate, while annihilation was the
267
See for example: Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender
Issues; Tickner, Gender in International Relations; Confortini, “Galtung, Violence, and Gender;” J. Ann
Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001).
268
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, 48-49.
269
Mrinalini Sinha, “Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in
Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity,
ed. Michael S. Kimmel (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987); Hooper, Manly States, chapter 2.
114
policy option toward male-identified north-Vietnamese targets, who were viewed as
sources of competition
270
.
Roxanne Doty observes that in various North-South encounters practices of
oppression were contradictorily present alongside humanistic and Enlightenment values.
This “uneasy coexistence” was made possible by representational practices that
constructed hierarchical classifications of human beings, with different degrees of
entitlement to the ethical standards of the Enlightenment
271
. During decolonization such
representational hierarchies allowed colonial authorities to make some anti-colonial
movements acceptable while making deviant and unacceptable those which demanded
access to democracy, liberty and independence outside a colonial framework. For
example, themes of political immaturity, evil and irrationality that pervaded British
writings on the Mau Mau rebellion in mid-twentieth-century Kenya “performed a
delegitimating function” for a movement, which refused to accept claims to European
superiority and called for the return of stolen lands and the maintenance of indigenous
cultural traditions
272
.
It is important to underscore that imperial and colonial representations have been
particularly powerful to the degree to which they have appealed to people outside of or
opposed to colonialist/imperialist efforts
273
. In fact, to the extent that advocates of self-
determination and opponents of colonialism uncritically accepted and reproduced the
270
Jennifer Milliken and David Sylvan, “Soft Bodies, Hard Targets, and Chic Theories: US Bombing Policy
in Indochina,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 25 (June 1, 1996), 321-360.
271
Doty, Imperial Encounters, 23-25.
272
Ibid., 99-121. Edward Said distinguishes between nationalist movements, which acted within a Western
cultural framework, and liberation movements, whose claims hardly fit into Western categories. Edward W.
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1993), 263-264.
115
mutually dependent myths of European modernity and non-European backwardness, they
contributed to the perpetuation of the hierarchical and exploitative system, of which these
myths are constituent part
274
. In doing so, they also reproduced the gender order that
legitimized these myths.
In this chapter I will show the degree to which the WILPF's policies (or the lack
of policies) on decolonization depended on its belief in hierarchical gender(ed) and racial
ideologies. I claim that, to the extent that the WILPF definition of peace rested on the
liberal concept of self-determination, as expressed in and limited by international law and
international institutions, the WILPF’s idea of peace was itself gendered. Finally I argue
that it was through the practice of a consciously feminist critical methodology that the
WILPF began a process (as yet unfinished) of engagement with anticolonialism and a
critical awareness of “'the intimate enemy' that colonialism becomes, so thoroughly
investing all social relations that even opposition to it remains framed by it”
275
. In the
next section I outline the three phases in the development of the WILPF’s thinking about
decolonization between the end of the Second World War and 1971; I will then illustrate
how its feminist critical methodology worked to open for the WILPF spaces of critical
questioning and allowed it to begin a journey beyond Eurocentrism.
273
Roxanne Doty illustrates this point while examining the case of the annexation of the Philippines to the
U.S. at the turn of the XX century. See Doty, Imperial Encounters, 27-49. See also Jane Haggis, “White
Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-Recuperative History,” in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare
Midgley (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; St. Martin's Press, 1998), 63-64.
274
This is convincingly proposed by Sandra Halperin in reference to International Relations theory in
Halperin, “Hegemony of Western Conceptions of Modernity,” 58.
275
Shampa Biswas, “Patriotism in the U.S. Peace Movement: The Limits of Nationalist Resistance to
Global Imperialism,” in Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War, eds. Robin L.
Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, 1st ed. (New York, N.Y .: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 64.
116
The WILPF and Decolonization
The First Phase: 1946 to 1955
According to some historians, the period between the initiation of the Second
World War and the beginning of the Cold War in 1950 was a unique instance of
“openness to pluralism and tolerance for experimentation,” a period when (together with
the atrocities of the war) empires were “unhinged,” when there was no global hegemon or
power, and when colonial entities participated in discussions about international
questions together with their colonizers
276
. After two European-initiated world wars, the
idea of Europe as progressive and good became indefensible, at least for the time; hence
“[t]he discourse of ‘civilized/barbarian’ unraveled [and] [f]or the first time, Europeans
described themselves as barbaric and doubted their capacity for civilization”
277
.
The WILPF, too, lived in this moment; disillusioned about the goodness of
Europe after what the WILPF women had seen and experienced during the war, they
framed the future as the rising of the “common man” and with him
278
of “the dependent
people of the world”
279
. In the first years after the end of the war, paradoxically there was
much optimism about the possibilities of world peace. “No reasonable person can now
276
Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and
Institutions, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 9.
277
Salter, Barbarians and Civilization, 91.
278
It is inevitable to notice the use of the noun “man” when referring to humankind. It would be too
simplistic, however, to overspeculate over this common practice on the part of the WILPF and read into it
what the women neither intended nor implied.
279
Gertrude C. Bussey, “Political and Economic Cooperation,” in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 144, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
117
think of war as a solution”
280
, Gertrude Bussey proclaimed at the first post-war
International Congress. With her, much of what was left of the leadership of the WILPF
believed that a new phase of international relations had started with the invention of the
atomic bomb, which made the avoidance of war at all costs all the more imperative.
Optimism about the conduct of international relations extended to optimism about the
development of international law and, especially, of international organizations, in
particular (as we have seen) the United Nations.
The WILPF understood that, in the upsetting of empires following the war, the
opportunity for creating a world of “peace and freedom” involved the recognition of the
“just demands” of colonized people and the WILPF found consensus on both the
righteousness and inevitability of self-determination: “We are not so blind as to suppose
that when colonialism is overthrown, utopia will emerge, but we maintain both that this
demand for national independence is right, and that it is impossible to oppose it
successfully”
281
. Accordingly, International Congress Resolutions condemned military
interventions in dependent territories, expressed support for their political and economic
280
Ibid., 147.
281
Gertrude Bussey C., “Reflections on the World Situation,” 1952, p. 2, box 14, folder 2, Reports 1952-54,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
118
independence and consistently denounced racial discrimination
282
. For instance, the 1949
Congress had harsh words for French military attacks in Vietnam:
considering … that no prejudice of color, no idea of so-called superiority
of the white race should be taken into account, [the WILPF] energetically
condemns the present military interventions, and requests the French
Government to open negotiations without any further delay with the
Government of President Ho Chi Minh, the peoples of Viet Nam always
remaining free to elect a government of their choice
283
.
Support for the self-determination of peoples was, however, neither unconditional
nor unlimited. In particular, limitations concerned the timing, methods and, at times,
degrees of self-determination. The WILPF was unequivocal in its support for the
Trusteeship Council and urged
that all member States, having recognized the right of Self Government for
all Non Self Governing Territories, shall place these territories under the
administration of the Trusteeship Council for a limited period of five to ten
years, during which time they should gain their complete independence
284
.
282
Following a U.N. General Assembly Resolution, the twelfth Congress affirmed the WILPF’s belief in
“the right to exploit freely natural wealth,” lest “the dangerous discrepancy now developing between…
political emancipation on the one hand and…economic dependence on the other hand creates constant
serious tension and must eventually lead to major conflict and war.” WILPF, International Congress
Resolutions, 1953, http://www.wilpf.int.ch/statements/1953.htm (accessed 1/30/08). Moreover, as early as
1952 the WILPF condemned the practice of apartheid that had just been institutionalized in the Union of
South Africa and praised “the non-white population” for its non-violent and “self-respecting resistance.”
The WILPF would not cease to condemn South Africa’s system of racial discrimination in the years to
come. Resolution on Racial Discrimination in WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1952, p.3, box 3, folder
16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also the WILPF IEC's Letter to
the President of the UN General Assembly and to the Secretary General of the UN on the Union of South
Africa in WILPF IEC, Resolutions, 1960, p. 3, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
283
WILPF, Resolutions, Recommendations and Declarations, In XIth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August
15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), 261-262, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
284
Ibid., 263-264. The phrase “Non Self Governing Territories” referred to areas under colonial
administration, over which the U.N. had no effective oversight mechanism. In this resolution, the WILPF
intended to urge colonial powers to hand over all such territories to the U.N. Trusteeship Council, as a
means to both ensure their “advancement” and to guarantee their ultimate independence, once the
conditions were ripe. See Gertrude Baer, “LOWUN no. 2/1949 with a Study of the Trusteeship System,”
1949, box 92, folder 17, Circular Letters/Reports re: WILPF and UN 1949/1961-69, WILPF Second
119
In fact, the WILPF could not see any way to attain complete independence for
colonial territories other than its gradual achievement under international tutelage. So
self-determination went hand-in-hand with U.N.-managed economic and political reforms
that, by improving the standard of living in colonial territories, would avoid “disastrous
consequences”
285
. While colonial rule was to be dismantled, the WILPF believed that the
colonial enterprise had carried with it some positive outcomes “in the spheres of health,
education and the normal development of the colonial territories” and that it was up to
“the mother country” to prepare “the subject races…to assume the complete
responsibilities of self-government”
286
. Immediate withdrawal could be deleterious for
colonized territories and result in chaos
287
.
Support for the Trusteeship Council and the notion of gradual independence were
based on two assumptions: that there existed some categories of people whose
civilization was in more advanced stages of development than others; and that the former
possessed the obligation to “guide” the latter toward modernity and independence. Only
Accession, UCBA. The two types of territories were dealt with in separate chapters of the U.N. Charter:
Chapter XI (articles 73 and 74) included provisions specifically directed at Non Self Governing Territories;
Trusteeships were covered under Chapter XII (articles 75-85). See: United Nations, “Charter,”
http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter (accessed 1/25/2008). It has to be noted that the post-war WILPF’s
understanding of the concept of self-determination, as embodied in the U.N. Charter, extended beyond what
the signatories of the Charter had intended, for whom the right to self-determination clearly did not mean
the right to achieve independence (Antonio Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal
(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37-43).
285
See Gertrude C. Bussey, “Political and Economic Cooperation,” in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), 144-147, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
286
WILPF IEC, Resolutions, 1948, p. 1, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
287
See C.P. Bal’s assessment of the situation in Indonesia in C. P. Bal, “The Dutch-Indonesian Situation,” in
XIth International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen,
Christiansboro Castle, August 15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), p. 230, microfilm reel
141.2, SCPC.
120
once properly prepared would the “subject races” be then ready to assume the full
responsibility of self-government and the conditions be ripe for the development of
peaceful and prosperous democracies. These underlying assumptions are evident in many
of the official resolutions of the WILPF and in the reports of the WILPF’s leaders at
International Congresses and Executive Committee Meetings.
The 1949 resolution on Vietnam quote above, for example, was preceded by the
following preamble:
considering: that all colonial powers have promised to guide and orientate
gradually the indigenous population towards political independence, that
several such territories, among others the Viet Nam, have arrived at a self-
governing state and now request such independence
288
…
It is also instructive in this regard that a 1953 Congress Report on Race Relations,
while critical of notions of racial superiority and their role in producing and justifying
colonialism and slavery, also referred to “the extreme backwardness of the Kenya
natives” and the need to separate races that could not live together without conflict
289
.
In calling for United Nations’ assistance to “under-developed” countries, the 1952
IEC compared national liberation movements in the Third World to the bourgeois
revolutions of eighteenth century Europe:
The revolutionary movements that are taking place at present in many
parts of the continents are comparable to the European agrarian and
industrial movements developing since the revolutionary period at the end
of the 18
th
century. In most places such movements have achieved
288
WILPF, Resolutions, Recommendations and Declarations, In XIth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August
15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), 261-262, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
289
G. McGregor Wood, “Race Relations,” in XIIth International Congress of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom, at Paris, Mairie De Montrouge (Seine), August 4th-8th, 1953 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1953), 252, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
121
considerable results by raising the standard of living and the cultural
possibilities of the groups involved
290
.
While on the one hand many contemporary historians have indeed emphasized
similarities in the political and economic trajectories of post-Industrial Revolution Europe
and twentieth century Third World, the contention that the Industrial Revolution brought
about almost exclusively political, social and economic advances in Europe is, on the
other hand, part of a historiographic myth developed in the XIX and XX century to
justify European political and economic domination over the Third World. Instead,
capitalism in Europe, as in the contemporary Third World, “produced a socioeconomic
system that was capitalist in many institutional aspects of production but feudal in its
social relations”
291
. While in the 1940s and 1950s the WILPF was not a willing
participant in the continuation of imperial linkages, by perpetuating such a myth and, as a
consequence, by faithfully relying on United Nations’ machinery for the achievement of
self-determination for colonial entities, it effectively allowed such linkages to stand, at
least for the time being.
Together with the myth of European cultural superiority came the belief in a
hierarchy of dependent peoples: those more “evolved” based their demands for
independence on Roosevelt’s liberalism; those more “modest” asked for a limited
political participation “for the most enlightened” among their people
292
. The views of this
290
Resolution on UN Assistance to Under-Developed Countries in WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1952,
p.3, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
291
Sandra Halperin contends that the transition from a universally-intended traditional society to an equally
universally-intended modern society “described by liberal and modernization theories bear no resemblance
to processes of change in the contemporary developing world” or to XVIII century Europe for that matters
(Sandra Halperin, In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe (Ithaca,
N.Y .: Cornell University Press, 1997), 189 and 195).
292
Isabelle Pontheil, “Indochine,” In XIth International Congress of the Women's International League for
Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August 15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva, Switzerland:
122
French delegate to the 1949 WILPF Congress were shared by Gertrude Baer, the
WILPF’s representative to the U.N. in Geneva at the time, who closely followed the work
of the Trusteeship Council on behalf of the WILPF
293
. Her reports formed the basis for
the WILPF’s resolutions in matters of self-determination in this decade, indicating that
there was widespread agreement among leading members of the WILPF on matters of
self-determination at this point. Baer thought that the reports of five administering
authorities to the Trusteeship Council gave “evidence of a genuine effort on the part of
the [Administering Authorities] to develop the territory and to improve existing
conditions,” although political, economic, social and educational “advancements” were
limited at best
294
.
Baer also thought that a qualitative difference existed between the Trusteeship
system and the League of Nations’ Mandate system, in that the mere existence and
participation of former colonies like the Philippines and Iraq for example compelled
some compliance with international regulations on the part of administering authorities.
Moreover, Baer thought that the Trusteeship system had already proved that it could
“make a contribution to the development of political consciousness and responsibility
among the natives”
295
. In fact, colonial relationships worsened during the trusteeship
period, when “natives” who petitioned the Trusteeship Council denounced increased
WILPF, 1949), 221-222, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
293
Gertrude Baer’s correspondence is voluminous and quite detailed but does not follow a consistent
pattern: in some years she reported her work bi-monthly via international letters, in some other years she
wrote extensive annual reports to the IEC. In the 1950s her title changed from “Liaison Officer” to WILPF
Representative to the U.N. From October 1950 to August 1952 Baer worked as Director of International
Headquarters in Geneva, while retaining her role as WILPF Representative to the U.N.
294
Gertrude Baer, “LOWUN no. 2/1949 with a Study of the Trusteeship System,” 1949, box 92, folder 17,
Circular Letters/Reports re: WILPF and UN 1949/1961-69, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
295
Ibid., 16.
123
exploitation of their territories
296
. While they were evidently conscious and bitterly
critical of the colonial powers and Administering Authorities’ methods and intentions,
Orientalist and gendered beliefs about the progress of civilizations interacted with a belief
in international law and institutions and prevented the WILPF from questioning the
existence and motivation of the Trusteeship system
297
.
The WILPF was also extremely concerned about the possibility that quests for
national independence could result in international or civil wars. The women thought it
paramount that violence be avoided at all costs: hence they strongly condemned the use
of force and military intervention to maintain or conquer dependent territories, and they
supported negotiations and international talks. They were particularly impressed by
Mahatma Ghandi’s leadership in South Africa and India and, prompted by Emily Green
Balch (who at the time held the title of Honorary President), in 1951 the IEC established
a Committee to study non-violent resistance, in view of supporting “those movements
within each nation which seek to resolve tensions and to work by non-violent means for
those conditions in their own countries which can assure peace and freedom”
298
. But, in
this first post-war decade, the WILPF had only just started to re-examine the relationship
between non-violence, peace and freedom: the WILPF pondered whether peace and
296
Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, 153.
297
See also Gladys Walser’s report on her work at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, where she expressed
approval of the General Assembly’s rebuke of the Trusteeship Council for “its lagging efforts in furthering
self-government or independence for subject peoples” and of its call “for reports on social and community
developments as well as scholarships to train leaders and speed the capacity for independence” in other
colonial areas. Walser too refrained from questioning the adequateness of the system to the stated goal of
the WILPF regarding the self-determination of peoples as a fundamental element of its idea of peace
(Gladys Walser, Work with the United Nations at U.N. Headquarters in New York, In 13th International
Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: Birmingham, England, 23rd-28th
July, 1956 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1956), p. 60, microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC.
298
Statement on Non-Violent Methods in WILPF, International Congress Resolutions, 1953, p. 10, box 3,
folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
124
freedom could be achieved by violent methods, or whether only non-violence could
guarantee lasting peace and freedom for all
299
. In fact, while they supported non-violent
liberation movements, they refrained from issuing condemnations of specific military-
inspired nationalist movements
300
. In the following years the WILPF was to divide along
the violence versus non-violence line and, for some, the choice of violent versus non-
violent methods would become a litmus test for judging the legitimacy of national
liberation movements.
In the early 1950s, when tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. showed
no signs of abating, the WILPF became increasingly disillusioned about the intentions of
colonial powers. In fact, as the Cold War dragged on, the women decried that the East-
West division framed, delimited, and determined all other international issues, including
the national independence question for the colonized
301
, and praised the watershed that
the First Asian-African Conference, held in Bandoeng in 1955, represented for the
299
These were not new debates within the WILPF. In fact, the 1930s rise of dictatorships in Europe had
prompted similar discussions, but they were new to the post-World War II period and framed in somewhat
different terms, precisely because at stake, this time, was the freedom of people under European colonial
liberal rule.
300
For Gertrude Baer the responsibility for violence rested on the colonial and imperial powers: “It depends
on the white man whether the emancipation of the colored races will come about by violent or peaceful
means. Self-government and Freedom liberate. They are the instruments which turn opponents into partners
in the struggle for more productivity, social and economic justice and peace” (Gertrude Baer, WILPF
Report of its Work with United Nations, in XIIth International Congress of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom, Paris, Mairie De Montrouge (Seine), August 4th-8th, 1953 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1953), 121, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC). See also Gertrude Baer, Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom: Report of its Work with the United Nations, 1953, box 14,
folder 2, Reports 1952-54, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
301
See for example: Else Zeuthen, “Eastern Situation,” 1952, box 14, folder 2, Reports 1952-54, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA; Gertrude Baer, “The Asia Conference - Negotiated Peace Or War,” Pax et
Libertas, March-May 1954, p. 3, box 45, folder 1, Pax et Libertas United States 1951-59, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA; Gertrude Bussey, “American Foreign Policy in Indochina,” Pax et Libertas, March-
May 1954, p. 8, box 45, folder 1, Pax et Libertas United States 1951-59, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA;
Gertrude Baer, G.B. International Letter no. 10 1954/1955, 1955, box 26, folder 5, Circular Letters
September 1952-May 1955, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
125
development of “newer and better forms of relationship” between newly independent
states”
302
. Calls for a loosening of colonial ties acquired new urgency:
Taking a survey of the conditions in the colonial world, the W.I.L.P.F.
thinks that it is of the utmost importance that the powers should
immediately loosen the ties between them and their colonies. Regardless
of the political and cultural development of the colonies the highest
possible degree of independence and political freedom should be
established in order to avoid bloodshed, apply universal democratic
principles and prevent subject peoples being used as pawns in political
struggles
303
.
It should be clear by now that the WILPF’s attitudes toward decolonization
reflected a struggle with inherent and sometimes unconscious contradictions: at the same
time that the organization proclaimed its support for the independence of colonies,
stemming from its belief in the equality of races, it also accepted as true the “sacred trust
of civilization” handed down from the pre-war period and its underlying assumption that
certain categories of people were less advanced than others (hence the obligation on the
part of the more advanced to guide them toward their own betterment). Thus it supported
the Trusteeship Council’s timelines and limits to the independence of colonial territories.
This support withered as the first post-war decade drew to an end. Both increased self-
criticism and the increased visibility of, and attention paid to, the voices of peoples in
newly independent regions were at the origins of this decline.
302
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Magleaas,
Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Hamburg, Germany,
July 1955, 1955, p. 22, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
303
WILPF IEC, Statement on Current Affairs, 1954, p. 2, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. Emphasis mine. It is relevant to note that at this juncture the WILPF
qualified its appeal to self-determination, by asking for “the highest possible degree of independence,” thus
failing to quite entirely commit to independence tout-court, while it had called for complete independence
five years earlier. Evidence, however, is insufficient to show that the WILPF had retreated from earlier
positions or that it no longer considered total independence as a synonym of self-determination at this
point.
126
The Second Phase: 1956-1966
Gertrude Baer’s experience of the Bandoeng Conference was transformative, but
Baer was not the only one to view the rise of a non-aligned camp with optimism: a few of
the most active members of the WILPF shared her enthusiasm for a movement which, in
their view was far from representing a “third bloc.” Rather they felt that the conference
had proved that “unanimity on important decisions” was possible in the context of
avoiding “hostility and the formation of an inimical front directed against other [s]tates”.
They viewed the group of countries represented in Bandoeng as peace brokers of a sort
between the USSR and the US, as “floating” states which on many occasions had “tried
to reconcile existing differences or declared their neutrality on any given problem”
304
.
Therefore, the growth of U.N. membership as a consequence of the
decolonization process raised some of the WILPF’s women’s hopes that the participation
of newly independent countries in world affairs, as full members of the United Nations,
would lead to a different way to conduct international politics, one in which East-West
ideological rivalries and power politics would fade as the non-aligned countries
“assume[d] the role of mediator between the great powers.” In turn, this shift would
transform the U.N. from being
304
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the International Congress in Paris, France, July 1953 Until the WILPF
XIII International Congress, Birmingham, July 1956 (Geneva, Switzerland: 1956), p. 20, box 14, folder 3,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. The women often put forward the example of Nehru’s India’s proposals
that resulted in cease-fires in Korea and Indochina. See Japanese member Tano Jodai’s intervention at the
1956 International Congress:Tano Jodai, “East-West Relations,” in 13th International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: Birmingham, England, 23rd-28th July, 1956
(Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1956), 107-108, microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC. For further evidence of many
of the WILPF’s leaders’ optimism on expanding U.N. membership, on the Bandoeng Conference, and in
the conciliatory role of newly independent countries, see Gladys Walser, Final Report of the Tenth Session
of the General Assembly, 1956, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA; and
Dorothy Hutchinson, “Political Settlements,” in 14th International Congress of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom, Stockholm, Sweden, 27th to 31st July 1959: [Proceedings] (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1959[?]), 28, microfilm, reel 141.3, SCPC.
127
primarily an instrument of collective security (which has become a series
of security systems dividing the two sides) to one which, we hope will be
used to settle disputes peacefully, and one that will be used for the
political, economic and social advancement of all people
305
.
As part of the WILPF’s leadership was increasingly stressing the urgency of
decolonization, it still maintained its fundamental trust in the U.N. system and its
eventual progress. Gladys Walser, the WILPF’s Consultant to the U.N. in New York,
found both plausible and understandable colonial powers’ claims that Africans had yet to
“awaken” and their “economic and social advancement” had to be assisted by the rest of
the world. She attributed the slow progress of decolonization only partly to “political
expediency or economic advancement.” She thought that in fact some delegates
“sincerely believe[d] that in the best interests of the indigenous populations, the changes
must not come too rapidly as they emerge from slavery to freedom”
306
.
However, while Baer, Walser, Japanese member Tano Jodai and others had begun
to support both the non-aligned movement and the Third-World-dominated General
Assembly, others started voicing concerns about nationalist struggles and the visibility of
colonialism as an issue that, in their view, inappropriately dominated the workings of the
United Nations. In fact, this decade is marked by incipient divisions within the WILPF
regarding decolonization, violence by nationalist movements, and the WILPF's
principles. On the one hand, as decolonization moved to Africa and armed conflicts
fueled by the Cold War broke out in numbers around the world some members were
starting to think about violence as both personal and structural
307
. Others’ positions,
305
Gladys Walser, Final Report of the Tenth Session of the General Assembly, 1956, p. 8, box 14, folder 3,
Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
306
Ibid., 9.
307
The distinction between personal and structural violence was most famously made explicit by peace
128
however, seemed to crystallize on this issue, and were adamant in condemning direct
violence, but minimizing the import and consequences of other forms of violence. These
two different approaches also corresponded with two attitudes toward the WILPF’s
principles, programs and priorities regarding decolonization in a Cold War context. They
are well exemplified by the disagreements that emerged over the Algerian war of
independence.
The WILPF and The Algerian War
The Algerian armed resistance to French colonization started to receive increased
attention during the second part of the 1950s. Lacking any Algerian representative in the
organization, it fell upon French members to describe and offer assessments of the
conflict to the rest of the WILPF. This task was primarily fulfilled by Andrée Jouve
308
,
who became one of the most visible and outspoken advocates of a position within the
organization that claimed that no political, economic, social or historical circumstances
could justify the recourse to violence or make it inevitable or understandable;
decolonization had to be achieved through gradual, non-violent and “intelligent” means
and did not necessarily mean total independence; colonization had produced mostly
positive effects, which needed to be preserved; decolonization’s adverse consequences
partly manifested themselves in a Third-World-dominated United Nations Organization
researcher Johan Galtung in 1969. According to Galtung, while personal or direct violence is violence with
a perpetrator, structural violence “is built into the structure, and shows up as unequal power and
consequently as unequal life chances.” It is the unequal distribution of resources, and the unequal
distribution of the “power to decide over the distribution of resources” that give rise to structural violence.
Johan Galtung, “Structural and Direct Violence: Note on Operationalization,” in Peace: Research,
Education, Action. Essays in Peace Research, V ol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejlers, 1975), 110-111. For a feminist
critic of Galtung's understanding of violence, see Confortini, Galtung, “Violence, and Gender.”
308
Jouve was among the first members of the WILPF and one of only two French women to attend the 1919
Zürich Congress. She served in the International Executive Committee from 1946 to 1949, and as the
WILPF’s representative to UNESCO for many years.
129
and its agencies; and a departure from the principles of absolute nonviolence and political
and civil rights would mean betrayal of the WILPF’s very raison d’être
309
.
In her “Report on some African Problems,” presented at the 1957 IEC, Jouve
characterized the Algerian revolt as a “murderous raid” of “isolated tribes” started in
1954 and fueled by Egypt and by the influx of arms from Tunisia. According to Jouve,
propaganda work among “the dissatisfied and the unemployed” made an increasing
percentage of the population “accomplices of 20 to 30,000 fellaghas” (the Algerian rebels
who later organized into the National Liberation Front - FLN), dedicated to terrorist
attacks against Muslims and Europeans alike and “stupid” acts of sabotage against the
infrastructure of the country. Jouve portrayed pre-colonial Algeria as a desolate land,
transformed by the agricultural and industrial engineering of the French, whose sole
mistakes had been the underestimation of the consequences of modernization (i.e.,
population growth which was disproportionate to the country’s ability to absorb
unemployment and provide food for all) and the failure to adequately promote the
French-educated indigenous elite (the évolués) to positions of responsibility in the
administration of the territory. While the FLN was a terrorist organization, the
“intransigence” of European “minorities” was a reaction to the “considerable losses of
lives and money” and to “perpetual fear and anguish.” Algerian independence would not
only be opposed by “Algerians of European descent” but also by the French of the
309
Jouve was instrumental in formulating pre-war WILPF policy on colonialism, which while opposed
“every kind of imperialism” in principle supported the Mandate system’s extension to all colonial
territories. WILPF International Congress Statement, 1926, cited in Bussey and WILPF British Section,
Pioneers for Peace, 56.
130
metropole, whose “generosity” and “great sacrifices” alone could improve Muslim
Algeria’s “situation of under-developed country”
310
.
Jouve’s views on Algeria clearly reflected her opinions of Africa, the Africans (in
particular of Muslim Africans) and the effects and consequences of colonization: Jouve
felt that colonization had mixed results, but that it was necessary (because it represented a
“revolution” required in order for Africa to develop) and had resulted in “relative good
for the primitive populations”. Jouve was ostensibly quoting 1952 Nobel Peace Prize
recipient Albert Schweitzer with the apparent intent to persuade the IEC to support her
position. The WILPF as a whole had a profound admiration for the Alsatian philosopher/
musician/physicist/theologian/pacifist, with whom they professed to share an ethics of
“reverence for life”
311
. Schweitzer was, however, a complex figure, whose writings also
reflect a “moral paternalism” toward Africans that is rarely acknowledged in Western
moral iconography, and who believed in the “moral” imperative of the European
civilizing mission to Africa
312
. Jouve clearly continued to believe in the superiority (or
higher civilizational development) of Europeans (a corollary of the historiographic myth
about European expansion that Sandra Halperin describes) and, as a consequence, in the
moral duty of Europeans to spread and “help” maintain such advances in “backward”
Africa.
310
Andrée Jouve, “Rapport Sur Quelques Problèmes Africains,” 1957, pp. 1-8, box 14, folder 4, Reports
1957-58, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
311
See Else Zeuthen, Andrée Jouve and Emily Parker Simon, Open Letter to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, 1957,
box 26, folder 7, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
312
Manuel M. Davenport, “The Moral Paternalism of Albert Schweitzer,” Ethics 84, no. 2 (Jan., 1974), 116-
127. For a discussion of African perspectives on Albert Schweitzer see Francis Higginson, “The Well-
Tempered Savage: Albert Schweitzer, Music, and Imperial Deafness,” Research in African Literatures 36,
no. 4 (Winter, 2005), 205-222.
131
Jouve’s beliefs had important gender dimensions too: African backwardness was
manifested for her in the treatment and situation of African women, who were “attached
to tribal and fetishist traditions:”
But now it would be necessary that women receive an education just as
men do; that, if they vote, they know how and why, that they don’t shy
away (they and their children) from medical care and basic hygiene. The
more the men develop, the more they will ask the women to become their
equal
313
.
African women were seen as the symbol and proof of African backwardness, as
“constituting the ‘essence’”
314
of African culture. Hence they provided the justification
for the civilizing mission of the French: by allowing Africa to be led toward the
development of liberal democratic institutions
315
, modeled after the French metropole, the
WILPF would also contribute to the goals of global sisterhood
316
. Contrary to Jouve’s
assessment, however, while the 1946 constitution of the Fourth Republic had guaranteed
women’s suffrage and nominal equality with men, French citizenship for women of the
colonies was conditional upon their father’s or husband’s consent, based on an “imperial
fantasy” that constructed African “traditional” society in opposition (and inferior) to
313
Andrée Jouve, “Rapport Sur Quelques Problèmes Africains,” 1957, p. 10, box 14, folder 4, Reports
1957-58, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
314
Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation, 43.
315
This representation selectively disregarded the specific case of Algeria, were women were active
participants to the Front de Libération Nationale whose platform included a “radical view of gender
equality” (Hamideh Sedghi, “Third World Feminist Perspectives on World Politics,” in Women, Gender,
and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects, eds. Peter R. Beckman and Francine D'Amico
(Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), 97).
316
For an investigation of similar colonial era’s representations of colonized (and/or enslaved) women by
Western feminist abolitionists see Clare Midgley, “Anti-Slavery and the Roots of 'Imperial Feminism',” in
Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; St.
Martin's Press, 1998), 161-179.
132
“modern” France
317
. Moreover, it was disingenuous (or, at the very least, erroneous) of
Jouve to proclaim that Algerians enjoyed full equality with French citizens of the
metropole. In fact, while the Lamine Guèye Law had extended rights of citizenship to
colonial subjects in 1946 and was intended by its Senegalese author as an act that
fundamentally established full equality for all subjects of France, in practice, colonial
subjects had been granted a “separate but equal” status, not unlike that of the U.S.
“Negroes”
318
. Of this Jouve must have been aware.
So, though the time had come for decolonization, Jouve thought that it was
in the interest of all, and in the first place of those who still need guidance
and collaboration, that the de-colonisation shall proceed reasonably and
without violence; that passionate propaganda against colonizers – as if
every people had not contributed to colonization at some time or other in
their history! – shall not prevent an intelligent de-colonisation with the
time necessary to do it. Long and patient work must be done in countries
which have been colonized and cannot return to their pre-colonial
conditions without the loss of many precious acquirements
319
.
As a consequence, Jouve lauded the transition to the “French-African
communauté” that had taken place in French West Africa, and she posited it in contrast to
the violence in which Algeria was mired
320
. Algerian independence by contrast would
317
For more on how colonial relations were built on “imperial fantasies,” see: McClintock, Imperial
Leather, 449.
318
James Eskridge Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in
French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956, V ol. 45 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 231.
319
Andrée Jouve, “Africa in 1958: A Brief Sketch,” 1958, p. 2, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
320
Jouve recognized that France had limited choices in regards to its AOF and AEF colonies, after a
disastrous war in Indochina and in the midst of the Algerian revolt. The acronym AOF refers to Afrique
Occidentale Française (French West Africa), which comprised the territory today roughly covered by
Mauritania, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Bourkina Faso and Benin. The acronym AEF stands
for Afrique Equatoriale Française (French Equatorial Africa) and covered the territory of today’s Gabon,
Republic of the Congo, Chad and Central African Republic. With the exception of Guinea (which chose
independence) all other states chose federation to France in a 1958 referendum proposed by Charles De
Gaulle, first President of the Fifth Republic. The French communauté was, however, short lived and all the
133
mean the abandonment of the sacred and just mission handed over by the French
Revolution’s Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789:
It was the western philosophers, from among the oldest nations, steeped in
Greco-Latin and Judeo-Christian antiquity, who first became aware of the
natural rights of man – a universal birthright for which society must
enforce respect, encouragement and development; through intelligent
measures society must create good examples and spread them over the
world. ... What was needed was to define these rights, then to enforce their
observance and application, not only in a small area bordered by the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean, but everywhere in the world
321
.
Jouve's observations were eerily similar to the rhetoric employed by
contemporary French advocates of a reformed colonialism that would include the
“political and economic emancipation of the natives”
322
. It must also be noted that French
advocates of colonization and the évolués (who for a while advocated self-determination
for Africa as autonomy in federation with France) shared ideas about French and African
“authentic” societies and their “essential” differences. These ideas were sharply criticized
AOF and AEF countries had declared their independence by 1960. See Raymond F. Betts, France and
Decolonisation: 1900-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1991); Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West
Africa: France's Successful Decolonization? (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2002), 163-221; Genova, Colonial
Ambivalence, 253-258; Patrick Manning and Inc ebrary, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880-1995, 2nd
ed. (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143-147; Raymond F. Betts,
Decolonization, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 32-33.
321
Andrée Jouve, “Respect and Application of Human Rights, Second Part: Evolution,” 1965, p. 1, box 118,
folder 3, Reports/Essays by Andrée Jouve, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA. It has to be noted that her
1959 human rights speech was so focused on individual rights that even her discussion of “the freedom of
determination” referred to a “right to take part in the government of his country” (i.e. the right to participate
in public and political affairs, elections, and universal suffrage), but never mentioned a collective right to
self-determination. Andrée Jouve, “Human Rights and Civil Liberties, First Part,” 1959, pp. 7-8, box 118,
folder 3, Reports/Essays by Andrée Jouve, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
322
One of these advocates, and the author of the quote above was Marius Monet, minister of Overseas
France during the Fourth Republic. He is cited in: Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 227 James E. Genova
claims that “that discursive web [which simultaneously affirmed the universal rights of man and the
superiority of French culture over those ‘others’ it ruled] constrained the possibilities for imperial action in
West Africa while it opened spaces for the colonized population to challenge the legitimacy of France’s
dominance in the federation.” While recognizing the ambivalence and unwanted effects of this “discursive
web”, it is important to stress that, for the French of the metropole, colonialists and anticolonialists alike,
this appeal to the 1789 declaration would have a particularly powerful draw (ibid.).
134
by anti-colonial writer, activist, and FLN revolutionary Franz Fanon, who presaged they
would lead to the “mummification” of African societies and the “valorization” of
imperialism’s roles
323
. Eventually, many of the évolués became the leaders of their
countries of origin at independence, but they did not fundamentally alter colonial
structures or implement needed social reforms, particularly in regards to labor and
women
324
.
Jouve felt that the increased membership in international governmental
organizations, which was a result of decolonization, had made them bureaucratic
monsters, unable to cope with the many differences among countries
325
. Similarly, in
1966, British member Mary Nuttall had strong doubts about the effectiveness of a larger
UN: in her report about her work at the UN Economic and Social Council meeting on
slavery, she
explained how the concern of the African countries about Apartheid and
Colonialism [was] dominating all the work of the United Nations and so
obstructing much of the steady work for social reform in many fields. The
newly independent countries [i.e. African countries] [were] now so
numerous that if they [stood] together they [could] force their own desires
on the UN to the exclusion of other members’ concerns
326
.
323
Cited in ibid., 281-282. See also: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blancs]
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [Damnés de la terre.],
trans. Richard Philcox, 1st ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
324
Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 275-277.
325
Andrée Jouve, Rapport De La Représentante De La L.I.F.P.L. Auprès De l'UNESCO, in 14th
International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Stockholm, Sweden,
27th to 31st July 1959: [Proceedings] (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1959[?]), p. 60-61, microfilm reel
141.3, SCPC. See also: Bussey and WILPF British Section, Pioneers for Peace, 228.
326
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1966, p. 8, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
135
Nuttall was concerned about the possible “misuse” of the organization, and her
report often used sarcastic tones to refer to African and Arab delegates who advocated a
definition of slavery that included colonialism and apartheid.
Other members of the WILPF were beginning to critically reformulate their
positions. From as far from Algeria and France as New York, Gladys Walser, the
WILPF’s representative to the UN General Assembly, gave a different assessment of
Algeria’s situation:
Algeria has been a crucible in which France has tried to work out her
theory of “assimilation”, which ideally is an affirmation of the
equalitarianism of the French Revolution as well as a guarantee that
people under French dominion overseas and at home would have all the
rights of citizenship. In actual practice assimilation has not worked. Real
assimilation assumes equality and that equality is denied in the
relationship of Algeria to France
327
.
Walser continued her report pointing out the many ways in which Algerian men
and women were denied equal treatment politically and economically. She also made it
clear that, since all “genuine nationalist organizations” in Algeria had been banned, it was
impossible to assess the amount of support that the FLN enjoyed from the population.
She then went on to describe the debate that had taken place in the First Committee of the
General Assembly, a debate that centered on the proposed affirmation of the “right of
self-determination of peoples as a fundamental human right”
328
, and that saw the French
327
Gladys D. Walser, The Fourth and Final Report of the Eleventh Session of the General Assembly, 1957,
p. 6, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
328
It has to be noted that, by contrast, Jouve's 1959 human rights speech was so focused on individual rights
that even her discussion of “the freedom of determination” referred to a “right to take part in the
government of his country” (i.e. the right to participate in public and political affairs, elections, and
universal suffrage), but never mentioned a collective right to self-determination Andrée Jouve, “Human
Rights and Civil Liberties, First Part,” 1959, pp. 7-8, box 118, folder 3, Reports/Essays by Andrée Jouve,
WILPF Second Accession, UCBA).
136
representative opposed to African and most of the Asian nations. Walser viewed the
Committee’s compromise resolution positively as a sign that “a greater spirit of
conciliation seemed to prevail,” but she held no illusion that it could “bring a solution [of
the conflict] any nearer”. However, it was both clear and encouraging for the WILPF
representative that
The diplomatic language cannot obscure the firm stand of the majority
against both the use of violence and the practice of outworn colonial
policies
329
.
Walser’s views of the Algerian question differed in significant ways from Jouve’s
in that, while she still held the opinion that negotiations were to be preferred to the
continuation of violence, she also thought that self-determination was a human right of
collectivities; that colonialism was a form of violence; and that no amount of rhetoric
about equality, democracy or human rights could make up for practices that denied those
very principles. By this time Gertrude Baer had also become more clearly supportive of
these views: in her 1959 report, for example, she compared the First All-African People’s
Conference with the Bandoeng Conference, and manifested her positive opinion of
African people’s struggles for independence. As with the Bandoeng Conference, Baer
expressed great confidence in the Accra event’s proceedings and results and on its
independence from power blocs
330
.
329
Gladys D. Walser, The Fourth and Final Report of the Eleventh Session of the General Assembly, 1957,
p. 11, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
330
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations and its Specialized Agencies in Geneva and Rome from the 13th International Congress in
Birmingham, July 1956 Until the 14th International Congress in Stockholm, July 1959 (Geneva,
Switzerland: 1959), pp. 26-33, box 8, folder 4, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
137
Likewise, Dorothy Hutchison viewed it as a mistake of the West to view
revolutionary movements in new countries as “Communist-inspired” and to support
dictators and colonial powers “rather than supporting the struggles for freedom and
independence”
331
. Hutchinson was part of a group of WILPF leaders who took part in the
WILPF Commission on Political Settlements at the Stockholm Congress in 1959. In
reference to the Algerian situation and to “all those countries struggling for nationhood,”
the Commission sharply criticized the racism of governments, which they viewed as an
obstacle to “give earnest consideration” to claims of self-determination. In addition,
while stressing that non-violent resistance had become necessary in a world risking
nuclear annihilation, and discussing whether nonviolence was “suited to the western
temperament and tradition
332
”, the group referred to injustice as a major cause of
violence. Hence they concluded that in order to overcome violence, injustice and “other
causes of discontent” had to be eliminated
333
.
It is important to note that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the Cold War
context significantly influenced many WILPFers' attitudes toward decolonization in
general and toward the Algerian conflict in particular. Fears of both Communism and of
being accused of Communism colored their opinions of less than absolutely nonviolent
independent movements. But while their criticisms found fertile ground with some of the
331
Dorothy Hutchinson, “Political Settlements,” in 14th International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom, Stockholm, Sweden, 27th to 31st July 1959: [Proceedings]
(Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1959[?]), 28, microfilm, reel 141.3, SCPC.
332
On this, members of the group mentioned the civil rights struggle in the US and the Black Sash
Movement in South Africa to exemplify nonviolent movements “by people of Western culture.”
333
Sushila Nayar, Dorothy Hutchinson and Margaret Tims, Reports of Commissions, “Political
Settlements,” in 14th International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom,
Stockholm, Sweden, 27th to 31st July 1959: [Proceedings] (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1959[?]), 87,
microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC.
138
women, others explicitly refused to give in to red-baiting. As a result of these differences,
the WILPF produced policies which, while trying to accommodate all views, were
worded in general and vague terms that effectively undermined the WILPF's stand on the
question of decolonization. At the 1957 IEC, where fundamental disagreements on
Algeria between Andrée Jouve and other members of the French section had emerged, a
committee drew up a compromise statement that called for the eventual creation of a
“North African Community, partly accommodating Jouve’s suggestions of a Franco—
North African Community” along the French West African model
334
. A diatribe surfaced
again in 1960 when Jouve’s attempt to have the IEC include a statement on the protection
of European minorities in the resolution on Algeria found Indian IEC member Sushila
Nayar
335
adamantly opposed. In this case the compromise wording included mention of
the “rights of all minorities” while also recognizing the Algerians’ right to self-
determination
336
.
The two positions continued to clash throughout the 1960s around other
decolonization issues. For example, in 1964 the IEC discussed supporting possible
sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Nell Greaves (a US member of the
WILPF) opposed sanctions against a government which was supported by a majority of
whites, on the ground that they would lead to civil war. In this she was opposed by
334
WILPF IEC, Decisions and Summary of Records, 1957, p. 19, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October
1956-December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
335
Besides being an influential member of the WILPF, Nayar was a prominent physician, who had been
very close to Mahatma Ghandi, a politician who served in the Delhi State Assembly and in the Lower
House of the Indian Parliament. She was Delhi Minister of Health from 1952 to 1955, and India’s Minister
of Health from 1962 to 1967. S. P. Tare, Obituaries: Dr. Sushila Nayar 1914-2001, International Journal of
Leprosy and Other Mycobacterial Diseases 69, no. 2 (June, 2001),
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3754/is_200106/ai_n8987778 (accessed 3/11/2008).
336
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1960, pp. 8-9, box 5, folder 11, IEC Meeting Minutes 1960-64, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
139
several members of the IEC, who debated the question of what kinds of sanctions would
be the most effective, but not whether to support them or not
337
. Gertrude Baer was
among the most vehement IEC members to support a total oil embargo; she also
suggested that the WILPF ask government representatives at the UN to walk out when a
South African representative spoke. Baer felt that, although this sort of action might
induce South Africa to withdraw from the UN (thus violating a 1963 WILPF resolution
against any actions that would “force or induce” a state to leave the UN), the walk out
was rendered necessary by South Africa’s “continued flagrant violation of human
rights”
338
. A walk-out was preferable to “remaining and appearing to give support” to the
apartheid state. Divisions on this were, however, deep enough to prevent a resolution on
the lines advocated by Baer at this time. WILPF passed instead a lukewarm,
compromising statement, urging
the United Nations (unless the situation in the Republic improves) strongly
to recommend all its Member States, at whatever financial sacrifice to
themselves, to apply, after November 1964, a total oil embargo on the
Republic of South Africa, in order to induce a change in its present
inhumane policies and practices
339
.
Finally, in 1966 the US section of the WILPF proposed to the IEC two resolutions
that would have reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to self-determination as a
necessary element of peace and to the principle of universality of membership in the
UN
340
. These resolutions had their origins in a 1958 report on Asia by Elizabeth
337
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1964, pp. 5-6 and 23, box 5, folder 11, IEC Meeting Minutes 1960-64, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
338
Ibid., 6.
339
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1964, p. 4, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
340
WILPF US Section, Resolution to the International Executive Committee, Meeting in Stockholm,
140
Weideman, which indicated very strongly the author’s (and the US section’s) opinion that
violence in “underdeveloped countries” would “never cease until the gap between the
‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ [was] considerably decreased”, and that the ideological
divisions between East and West were secondary to this most pressing problem
341
. As
early as 1958 then the US section was starting to undertake an economic critique of the
international system and viewing problems of structural violence as unavoidably bringing
about direct violence. Neither of these proposed resolutions was adopted by the 1966
IEC
342
, indicating the continuing presence of divisions in the organization’s leadership at
the time.
The Third Phase: Late 1960s to 1975
By the mid-1960s, national liberation movements had propelled themselves to the
forefront of the international agenda; the Johnson administration had escalated US
involvement in Vietnam; two racist regimes (Rhodesia and South Africa) were engaged in
the violent repression of their respective African nationalist movements; the civil rights
struggle in the US was in full swing, and it had garnered both the activism of the US
August 1996, “The Revolution of Rising Expectations,” 1966, box 3, folder 18, Resolutions/Statements
1965-74, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA; WILPF US Section, Alternate Resolution to the International
Executive Committee, Meeting in Stockholm, August 1966, “Universality of Membership in the United
Nations,” 1966, box 3, folder 18, Resolutions/Statements 1965-74, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
341
Elizabeth Weideman, Report on Asia, 1958, p. 2, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA. The phrase “revolution of rising expectations” was borrowed from Adlai Stevenson. In
this, Weideman concurred with the opinion of the contemporary Indian Ambassador to the US, G.L. Mehta
and with the future UN Secretary General U Thant, then Burma’s Ambassador to the UN.
342
Cf. WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1966, box 2, folder 3, IEC Meeting 1966, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA; and WILPF US Section, Alternate Resolution to the International Executive Committee,
Meeting in Stockholm, August 1966, “Universality of Membership in the United Nations,” 1966, box 3,
folder 18, Resolutions/Statements 1965-74, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA;WILPF US Section,
Resolution to the International Executive Committee, Meeting in Stockholm, August 1996, “The
Revolution of Rising Expectations,” 1966, box 3, folder 18, Resolutions/Statements 1965-74, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
141
section of the WILPF and the attention of the International WILPF. This international
context fostered the WILPF's further self-reflection on the meaning of peace as it related
to decolonization and freedom.
A 1971 statement marked one of the salient moments in a process of slow but
steady disentanglement from unquestioned assumptions about peace, freedom, race and
gender. It had been introduced on behalf of the US section by US Quaker Dorothy
Steffens at the 1970 IEC meeting, as a proposed resolution on “World Revolution”
343
.
Steffens emphasized that the proposal reaffirmed the WILPF’s traditional support for
non-violence but also “accepted that oppressed people feel a need for revolution”. The
US section was supported in this by Sushila Nayar who, after an unnamed IEC member
criticized the resolution for inaccurately and inappropriately quoting Ghandi, clarified
that “while Ghandi had been against violence, he also held that those who can be silent
witnesses to injustice will never develop the non-violence of the brave”
344
. The resolution
was somewhat revised by the resolution committee of the IEC and then sent to the
national sections for consideration, with a view to discussing it more fully during the
343
The final title, as it was approved by the Delhi Congress was “World Revolutionary Movements for
Social Change.” WILPF, Statement, in 18th Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom: New Delhi, India, 28 December 1970 to 2 January 1971 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF,
1971[?]), 31, mirofilm reel 141.3, SCPC. It is relevant to note that the WILPF approved the final wording
as a statement, which was considered as a more general declaration of principles than a resolution, which
was intended as a policy recommendation. The resolutions of that year's Congress condemned colonialism
as “an absolute violation of the Charter of the United Nations and in direct contradiction to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights” and asked for the dissolution of NATO and all military pacts, which made
citizens of the NATO countries “complicit” in the evil of colonialism and war. The WILPF further
demanded the dissolution of NATO and all military pacts (WILPF, Resolutions, in 18th Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: New Delhi, India, 28 December 1970 to 2 January
1971 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1971[?]), p. 32-33, microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC).
344
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1970, p. 5, box 5, folder 13, IEC Meeting Minutes 1970-77, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
142
following Congress
345
. The statement, which was finally issued at the WILPF’s Congress
in New Delhi, proclaimed:
A society that is military and exploitative generates movements for rapid
change towards social justice. It is a human right to resist injustice and to
be neither silent witness nor passive victim of repression. Although we
reaffirm our belief that violence creates more problems than it solves, we
recognize the inevitability of violent resistance by the oppressed when
other alternatives have failed
346
.
The same Congress denounced colonialism as “an absolute violation of the
Charter of the United Nations”
347
. In 1972, the IEC further specified that
So long as the system of exploitation, privilege and profit continues, so
long will the “have-nots” struggle for their just share and so long will the
“haves” use violence to maintain and extend their privileged position. To
end war, an economy must be built which will serve human needs rather
than private profits
348
.
345
Ibid., 4-5. It is interesting that the written records of the WILPF are somewhat in contrast with the
recollection of those who were present at the 1970 IEC meeting and at the later 1971 Congress. Edith
Ballantyne recalled that it was the German section to propose the resolution and that several U.S. branches
fought against its adoption (Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author, July 13, 2003). Similarly Elise
Boulding thought it was an initiative of the European women, who also thought of the U.S. section as naïve
in these matters (Elise Boulding, interview by the author, May 21, 2005). Although the British section had
apparently discussed the issue at their annual meeting in 1969 or 1970, it is clear that not only was the
resolution formally put forward by the U.S. section, but it was actively pushed by one of the Quaker
pacifist members of the organization. Other Quakers, including Boulding, were not in agreement and the
Baltimore branch, after the Congress, threatened to leave the WILPF if it did not renounce the statement or
they would leave WILPF. The threat never materialized. Ballantyne also recalls that the resolution
provoked heated discussions at the Congress and that the reference to violence begetting violence made it
finally possible for consensus to be reached (Edith Ballantyne, email message to author, December 19,
2008).
346
WILPF, Statement, in 18th Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: New
Delhi, India, 28 December 1970 to 2 January 1971 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1971[?]), pp. 29-31,
microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC.
347
WILPF, Resolutions, in 18th Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom:
New Delhi, India, 28 December 1970 to 2 January 1971 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1971[?]), pp. 32-
34, microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC.
348
WILPF IEC, Final Report of the International Executive Committee Meeting, 1972, box 2, folder 8, IEC
Meeting Switzerland August 1972, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. The 1972 IEC statement was
followed by a 1974 much more elaborate, but essentially similar, Congress Resolution, on which I
commented extensively in chapter 3. It is important to note that this phraseology was not completely new to
the WILPF: it very closely reproduced the statement of aims of the 1934 WILPF Constitution which, as
143
Finally, the 1974 Congress strongly pronounced itself against discrimination,
“cultural assimilation” and “neo-colonialism in all its forms and wherever it occurs,”
calling for the withdrawal of governments’ support for and aid to repressive regimes.
Moreover, it recommended that national sections and WILPF International
Promote in the overdeveloped nations from which so many of its members
come, education about the finite nature of world resources and everyone’s
responsibility to see that they will be shared equally
349
.
Several differences between these statements and previous resolutions by the
WILPF deserve note: 1) the 1970s statements unequivocally identified “injustice” (i.e.,
structural violence) as a cause of violence, rather than attributing the outbreak of violence
to a generically-stated inability to solve disputes peacefully (owing to unwillingness or
lack of proper legal and political instruments); 2) they appealed to an economic ethic
rather than political and civil rights and equated injustice with unequal distribution of
resources and material wealth across the globe (economic rights); 3) they proclaimed
resistance to injustice to be a human right rather than solely relying on the human rights
explicitly mentioned in the UN Declaration and Covenants; 4) while affirming the
superiority of nonviolence, for the first time they declared the use of violence inevitable
seen in chapter 3, had been modified in 1959. But the WILPF was not returning with this to its prewar
stance; rather, while reclaiming its roots and distancing itself from Cold-War-inspired rhetoric, it also
moved forward to a new interpretation of the international system, inspired by changed circumstances.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the first of these calls for a new economy preceded the UN General
Assembly’s Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). For a
history of NIEO ideology, see Craig Murphy, The Emergence of the NIEO Ideology (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1984). The text of the UN NIEO Declaration is available for download: United Nations,
General Assembly, “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” A/RES/S-
6/3201, 1 May 1974 http://www.un.org/ga/sessions/special.shtml (accessed 3/10/2008).
349
Pax et Libertas, Action Recommendations of the 19th Triennial Congress to WILPF Sections, 1975, p.
17, box 162, folder 2, Pax et Libertas Annual 1975-79, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
144
under certain circumstances
350
; 5) they firmly positioned the WILPF on the side of “the
oppressed,” rather than maintaining the conciliatory role it had assumed in the previous
decade; 6) they affirmed it a duty of the WILPF to reflect and educate themselves on the
privileged position of its members, rather than proclaiming the superiority of Western
culture and calling for the education of “under-developed” people.
The WILPF had effectively reached a consensus that reflected profound
ideological changes. It had not arrived at these new policies suddenly. Rather, they were
the result of a long transformative process, one that saw the WILPF leaders and its
members debate these questions while trying to understand the world around them. These
shifts in the organization’s policies reflected an increased self-awareness and critique of a
long-held ideological framework. They also intersected with changing policies about
cooperation and contacts with women and organizations across the Iron Curtain and in
conflict countries, and coincided with a resurgence of the international feminist
movement and the influx of new and younger WILPF members and leaders as a
consequence of mass mobilization in the West against the Vietnam War. But the seeds of
these changes had been planted much earlier by Gertrude Baer, Glady Walser, Dorothy
Hutchinson and others, who had reassessed their and the organization's earlier positions
anchored in the imperialist foundations of international law and organizations during the
course of the previous two decades.
350
It is also relevant that the specific circumstances under which violence would be “inevitable” for the
WILPF remained unstated. I don’t think, however, that this omission implied a lack of commitment by the
WILPF; rather, the 1971 resolution left the interpretation of each situation open, for the people who in that
situation lived, leaving to them the judgment about choices and paths to freedom and peace.
145
Methodology
The ideational and policy shift of the 1970s was the result of a gradual self-
reflexive process, facilitated by the WILPF’s commitment to a feminist critical
methodology. The organization wrestled with its own assumptions about race and
decolonization, as they related to its understanding of its fundamental beliefs about peace
and freedom, in a historical context that had profoundly changed during the 30 years of
this study. The WILPF was influenced by the international structure, but it was also able
to assert a certain degree of agency and, in doing so, affect institutional change.
The unstated assumptions of the 1940s and 1950s, which led to the WILPF’s
uncritical support of the Trusteeship Council were challenged through efforts to exercise
skeptical scrutiny. However, only when the late 1960s brought a critical mass of new
members, committed to listening to the voices of outside and multi-sited critics to
partially make up for the chronic scarcity of institutionalized inclusive deliberations, did
the WILPF radically change its views about peace, insofar as they related to questions of
decolonization and racism. The ideological and policy changes of the 1960s were
facilitated by some members’ commitment to subject the organization’s methods to
skeptical scrutiny, thus bringing to the fore how the absence of adequate representation of
voices outside the WILPF’s traditional constituencies influenced the WILPF’s ideologies
and policies. Moreover, the lack of representation made it imperative that skeptical
scrutiny be complemented by imaginative identification lest marginalized voices were not
understood or listened to. In this next section I will briefly illustrate how the WILPF's
feminist critical methodology related to the ideological and policy changes the
organization went through starting in the late 1960s.
146
Guiding Criteria
Self-determination was among the principles upon which the WILPF was created
and formed part of its resolutions and statements, dating back to the first International
Women’s Committee of Permanent Peace at The Hague in 1915
351
. Self-determination
was seen as an element of freedom, which was in turn indissolubly connected to peace.
The founders of the WILPF had, in fact, purposely included “freedom” in the nascent
organization’s name because, in the words of a delegate at the 1915 Congress, “only in
freedom is permanent peace possible”
352
. The WILPF’s thinking in this regard revolved
around three core beliefs: 1) peace was conditional on the achievement of equality
between races (as well as between men and women); 2) peace was conditional on the
achievement of freedom; 3) freedom meant the realization of both self-determination and
human rights. As I have shown, the WILPF’s articulation and interpretation of these three
belief underwent several changes and was subject to numerous debates between the late
1940s and the mid-1970s.
Deliberative Inquiry
As a primarily Western organization, whose membership was organized according
to nation-states, the WILPF was not well-equipped for inclusivity in deliberations
regarding decolonization. As an organization with consultative status with the United
351
The 1915 resolutions did not yet use the specific phrase “self-determination,” which will make its first
appearance only in the resolutions and statements of the subsequent Congress; it rather referred to “the
right of the people to self-government,… autonomy and a democratic parliament.” WILPF, International
Congress Resolutions, 1915, http://www.wilpf.int.ch/resolutions/1915.htm (accessed 1/15/08).
352
Cited in Randall, Improper Bostonian, 271. Most of the founders of the WILPF came from the women’s
suffrage movement, social work and/or Social Democratic activism. They “had long worked in social
movements that aimed to free mankind not only from war, but from the restrictions of undemocratic
governments, from discrimination against women, and from the tentacles of a competitive economic
system” (ibid.).
147
Nations, it had access to a variety of views, but only to the extent that these views were
represented at the UN. Before the 1960s, however, the UN was itself hardly a mirror of
the world's population, and after decolonization was completed its state-centered liberal
framework also limited inclusive deliberative possibilities.
Nevertheless, many of the WILPF's leaders were conscious of the implications of
these limitations and consistently sought out input from a variety of sources. Gertrude
Baer, for example, was indefatigable in her efforts to have the WILPF represented at the
largest possible number of international governmental meetings, most notably the
Bandoeng and Accra Conferences.
A Rome seminar on Women and Public Life in 1966 prompted Gertrude Baer to
harshly criticize WILPF’s sections for having lost the ability to communicate and interact
with women like the ones that were represented in Rome, women whom she described as
“people outside their social circle.” She added: “this kind of contacts are the stimulus and
enrichment which is now completely lacking in our own WILPF International. This is
one of the many other reasons why we circle around our tiny circles, alas!”
353
. As seen in
the previous chapter, though Baer had opposed cooperation with women's organizations,
the WILPF increasingly sought it out through the 1960s and 1970s. Such cooperation and
the establishment of regular contacts across the Iron Curtain partially made up for the
WILPF's chronic paucity of members from the Third World.
Similarly, the US WILPF contacts with Vietnamese women, Dorothy
Hutchinson's friendship with Coretta Scott King and the influence of African American
353
Gertrude Baer, Confidential Evaluation Requested on Oct. 28/66, 1966, p. 1, box 92, folder 17, Circular
Letters/Reports re: WILPF and UN 1949/1961-69, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
148
women
354
brought about a critique of the Vietnam war, which connected it to racial and
economic injustice in the US and emphasized both the adverse consequence of war for
women and their moral responsibility to bring about peace
355
. In fact, the argument,
which was clearly indebted to and expanded Martin Luther King Jr.'s, had not been
entirely clear to non-US WILPF members, whose requests for clarifications at the 1967
IEC Meeting spurred yet another deliberative opportunity
356
.
So while increasingly inclusive deliberative opportunities favored the WILPF's
reflection about the intersection between race, gender, economic justice and peace, alone
they could not be enough to provoke institutional or personal change. A case in point is
Andrée Jouve who had the opportunity of listening to a range of arguments on
decolonization at the many UNESCO meetings she attended as the WILPF's
representative. Because unwilling to subject her own assumptions to skeptical scrutiny
354
An African American member of the WILPF, Flemmie Kittrell was on the WILPF’s International
Executive Committee of the WILPF between 1959 and 1962 and, together with Gertrude Baer and Sushila
Nayar, part of the official WILPF delegation to the Second United Nations’ Conference of
Nongovernmental Organizations on the Eradication of Prejudice and Discrimination in Geneva in 1959.
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1959, p. 8, box 5, folder 10, IEC Meeting Minutes 1955-59, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA. Several African American women served in position of leadership within the US
WILPF from after the Second World War and into the 1970s. Their numbers dwindled considerably after
that decade. Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom, 177 and 191-192.
355
See for example WILPF US Section and Vietnamese Women's Movement for the Right to Live, Joint
Peace Declaration, 1971, box 39 folder 4, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also Dorothy Hutchinson,
“Most Dangerous Moment in U.S. History,” Pax et Libertas, April-June 1966, p. 14, box 45, folder 3,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. The Indian section had also been increasingly working within a more
explicitly feminist framework, at least insofar as it proclaimed it a special responsibility of women to bring
about “peace and prosperity” (Dorothy Hutchinson, D. H. Circular Letter no. 3/1968, 1968, WILPF
International 1968-75, p. 5, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA).
356
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1967, p. 6, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA. By 1970 the WILPF had abandoned its previous plea for an “honorable peace” and
called instead for immediate U.S. withdrawal. WILPF International Office, letter to US President Nixon,
reproduced in Pax et Libertas, Viet Nam, April-June 1970, p. 23, box 45, folder 3, Pax et Libertas 1966-68,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
149
she had remained unchanged by those opportunities and, rather than welcome more
inclusivity at UN forums as the decolonization process went on, she had decried it.
Skeptical Scrutiny
To the extent that the WILPF women were willing to subject their unstated
assumptions about race, liberal political thought, and the international economic system
to a self-reflexive process (hence exercising skeptical scrutiny), they also felt compelled
to challenge and modify their interpretation of their guiding criteria. The WILPF had not
been blind to the racism and classism inherent in a group composed overwhelmingly of
older middle-to-upper-class, white Western women. At the 1946 Congress, Gertrude
Bussey stated:
It is hard for people who look as most of us in this group look to accept
the fact that the white race is not naturally superior. We may theoretically
accept this fact on the basis of both science and religion, but actually there
is usually hidden in the back of our minds some vestige of prejudice which
is likely to reveal itself in action
357
.
The women of the WILPF knew that awareness of racism would not necessarily
translate into policy changes, unless that awareness brought about a willingness to
continuously scrutinize their own actions. Gertrude Baer summed up this urge as follows:
It seems sometimes that the WILPF, too, might do a little more to help
maintain flexibility in a world which is growing increasingly uniform, dull
and inflexible. This very inflexibility of thought and action is a real threat
to Freedom since Freedom derives from and grows and develops in
differentiation. Therefore we want constant revision and re-shaping of
what we are doing. Sterility is the death of all movement. But it has, alas,
crept into our own work, our own International Center
358
.
357
Gertrude C. Bussey, “Political and Economic Cooperation,” in Xth International Congress of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1946[?]), p. 144, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
150
And a Hutchinson-initiated dialogue about the organization’s effectiveness
brought to the fore the criticism that the WILPF had compromised its principles by
diluting its critiques of the capitalist system, the abolishment of which was the only hope
to create “the economic conditions necessary for both peace and freedom”. The same
debate also highlighted the fact that some members were asking themselves and the
WILPF to what extent peace and freedom could at times be at odds, and whether it was in
fact necessary to prioritize freedom over peace, in cases where war was the only way to
restore freedom
359
.
Elise Boulding’s election as International Chairman and Sushila Nayar as one of
the Vice-Chairmen in 1968 also marked heightened efforts at expanding the WILPF to
other areas of the world and engaging in discussions on how the WILPF’s own structure,
methods, and ideology hampered the participation of women outside the traditional
geographical, racial, and class limitations of WILPF’s member base
360
. Skeptical scrutiny
further reinforced the awareness of the need to expand deliberative opportunities. For
instance, Elise Boulding's correspondence with Dorothy Steffens (a fellow US Quaker
and WILPF member who had moved to Nigeria in 1968
361
) and her efforts to share such
358
Gertrude Baer, WILPF Work at Geneva, October 1950-May 1951, 1951, p. 6, box 14, folder 1, Reports
1949-51, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
359
Dorothy Hutchinson, Chairman's Report to International Executive Committee, 1967, pp. 2-3, box 2,
folder 4, IEC Meeting 1967, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
360
In 1968 the WILPF formed a Committee on Contacts and Sections. See Elise Boulding, “From Rhetoric
to Reality,” Pax et Libertas, July-September 1968, p. 36, box 45, folder 3, Pax et Libertas 1966-68, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
361
In Nigeria Steffens followed up on the 1968 Congress Recommendation to look for avenues for WILPF
work in Africa, a task that was actively supported and encouraged by Elise Boulding, as new International
Chairman. Steffens would later be hired as the U.S. WILPF Executive Director, a position that she held
from 1971 to 1977. U.S. WILPF personnel records are held at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection
and a list of contents is accessible online at: SCPC, “Records of Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom,” DG 043, Series H,3: Personnel Records, http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/DG026-
050/dg043wilpf/SeriesH3-Personnel.htm (accessed 3/13/2008).
151
correspondence with the Executive Committee aimed, not at giving the WILPF a portrait
of the essential or typical “African woman,” but at educating themselves on the
complexities of African societies, at understanding African perspectives on “white men,”
and at exploring the possible avenues of cooperation with women in Africa
362
.
At the 1968 Congress Steffens pointed out that it was “symptomatic of the
problems” of the WILPF that “a white woman from North America” like herself should
be asked to speak about “new ways of working in Africa”
363
. In Steffens’ view, the
League was failing to be relevant to most women, and especially to women in the
developing world, due to both organizational weaknesses and to inadequate program
priorities. Organizationally, the WILPF was lacking in mechanisms to guarantee the
continuity of contacts between Congresses, to cultivate the leadership of younger women,
and to increase and maintain contacts and cooperation with women’s groups in countries
not yet represented in the WILPF. She was unsure whether it was appropriate or timely
for the WILPF to try to expand its membership to the continent, but she felt very strongly
that any work done there had to be done in such a way as to respect and encourage the
expression of local knowledge, skills, and cultures.
Programmatically, Steffens opined that the WILPF had lost its original dual focus
on both peace and freedom: recalling Jane Addams’ beginnings as a social worker, she
criticized WILPF’s apparent disdain for “’Social-Work’ type of activities.” Rather, she
362
It was through the correspondence in 1968 and 1969 that Steffens put forward the idea of approaching
other international women’s organizations to push for the creation of an International Women’s
Development Fund; Elise Boulding further suggested that the UN Commission on the Status of Women
might welcome the proposal (Elise Boulding, Memo on Possible WILPF Work in Africa, 1968, box 10,
folder 7, Literature 1965-87, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA). These first steps eventually led to the
creation by the UN General Assembly of the United Nations Development Fund for Women in 1976.
363
With this observation Steffens anticipated feminist theoretical debates on the problems and questions of
speaking on behalf of marginalized groups. See Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, Who can Speak?:
Authority and Critical Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
152
felt that those “close-to-home” activities indicated a focus on “individual freedom” that
was clear to the WILPF’s founder, but lost to the contemporary WILPF. As a
consequence, the WILPF suffered from “intellectual elitism” that distanced it from the
women of the world:
We speak in the language of statesmen and wonder that our refined voices
do not become audible – from our safe distance – to the struggling women
of the world. While, as an internationalist, I applaud our continuing focus
on international peace activities, I submit to this Congress that we can
only be effective in this word if we concentrate at least equal energy and
resources on the “gut issues” of rural and urban development. In other
words, become the “garbage collectors” of the world. And we must tool
ourselves organizationally to do it effectively with modern technology and
flexibility and all the intelligence we possess.
Steffens added that it was not by chance that the U.S. section was the most rapidly
growing national section, and it had begun to grow after it had re-prioritized its work on
domestic issues, as well as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam
364
.
The issues raised by the Steffens’ 1968 report resonated in the discussions of the
Commission on Future Directions of the WILPF which, partly reflecting Steffens’
recommendations, proposed the implementation of organizational reforms and
programmatic studies. Among these, the Commission encouraged the WILPF to “think
out afresh the ways in which we relate to revolutionary movements which espouse
violence in the pursuit of peace and freedom”
365
. The same commission was once again
364
Dorothy Steffens, “New Ways of Working in Africa,” 1968, pp. 2-3, box 118, folder 13, Reports on
Africa 1968-70/1994, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA. With the phrase “garbage collectors” Steffens
was referring to Jane Addams’ first public office (and the only paid position she ever held in her life) as
inspector of garbage for the city of Chicago in 1895 (Victoria Brown, The Education of Jane Addams
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 4).
365
Elise Boulding, Summary of Discussions, Commission I, “Future Directions of WILPF,” in 17th
International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: Nyborg Strand,
Denmark, 18th to 24th August, 1968 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1968), p. 14, microfilm reel 141.3,
SCPC.
153
reflecting about the opportunity to maintain the WILPF as a women's organization and
concluded that a women's organization would help women find “a meaningful identity in
public and international work, and … [find] ways of working effectively in their
respective countries in the light of whatever cultural limitations may be placed on their
role”
366
.
These discussions and reflections also constituted skeptical scrutiny, which was
directed both at the WILPF’s guiding criteria and at its methodology. Subjecting
methodology itself to skeptical scrutiny allowed the organization to correct (though not
eliminate) the methodological obstacles to wider organizational reach.
The Role of Social Critics
The role of social critics was of notable importance in helping the WILPF make
better informed decisions, by stimulating skeptical scrutiny and by providing avenues of
expression for marginalized voices. For example, outside critics included the participants
and observers to the international governmental conferences and meetings where the
WILPF was represented. As we have seen, the Bandoeng and Accra conferences had been
of particular influence for Gertrude Baer's views in regards to decolonization. Outside
critics also included the World Council of Churches or the Friends’ Service Council,
whose policies Dorothy Steffens closely followed and indicated as examples to her
colleagues in several occasions
367
.
366
Ibid., 13.
367
See Dorothy Steffens, “Africa: No Freedom, no Peace,” 1970, box 118, folder 13, Reports on Africa
1968-70/1994, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA. See also Dorothy Steffens' telegram reprinted in Elise
Boulding, Addendum to E.B. Circular Letter, “Last-Minute Nigeria Advice from Dorothy Steffens,” 1969,
WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
154
Multi-sited critics included Coretta Scott King, who promoted skeptical scrutiny
on the Vietnam War and the role of women in the peace process. Sushila Nayar was a
member of the WILPF who had been closely connected to Mahatma Ghandi: she spoke
up to ask the WILPF for a firmer stand against South Africa and insisted that the WILPF
formulate a program that would respond to the need of developing countries
368
.
Inside critics were also of decisive import in promoting inquiry and skeptical
scrutiny. Dorothy Steffens, for example, was instrumental in facilitating British section
Chair Sybil Cookson's self-reflection and cracking some of her preconceived
assumptions. In 1969 Cookson had traveled to Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana, where
she visited Steffens and with her had attended a UN Seminar for African Women
Leaders
369
. Cookson's account of her trip can be juxtaposed with Steffens' report on
Africa, which I discussed in the previous section. Where Steffens criticized the ways in
which the WILPF failed to meet the needs of women in the Third World, Cookson
pointed to the unreasonableness of “expecting [Africa] to move too fast, to achieve in two
decades what Europe took centuries over”. On the other hand, Cookson was clearly
influenced by Steffens, as she tried to articulate her suggestions in such a way as to refer
to historic and cultural specificities of the countries she visited and to assert Westerners’
obligation to “never feel any superiority”
370
.
368
Sushila Nayar at WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1967, pp. 7-8 and 10, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting Minutes
1965-69, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
369
Dorothy Steffens, “WILPF Presence in Africa,” 1969, box 2, folder 6, IEC Meeting 1969, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
370
Sybil Cookson, Report on Africa: Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria, 1969, pp. 1-2, box 2, folder 6, IEC
Meeting 1969, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
155
At the 1970 IEC, it was Steffens who, among other proposals, asked the WILPF
to clearly state a position on “liberation movements;” to investigate the use of WILPF’s
financial investments “to support white supremacist governments;” and to allocate “funds
to bring some of our African members to Congress.” As an inside critic, Steffens
promoted inquiry. During the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria, for instance,
Steffens made it clear that in her opinion the WILPF should not take sides nor support a
total arms embargo, which might result in giving the advantage to “the big-business
forces … behind neo-colonialist attempts to balkanize Africa”
371
. She argued that while
“the liberal white world” was meddling in an internal struggle in Nigeria, oppressive
regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies were consolidating their
power and the repression of African blacks. To Steffens it was “crystal clear that the
white governments [would] not relinquish control without an armed struggle”
372
. For
Steffens revolutionary movements raised a question that the WILPF could no longer
afford to ignore:
The nitty-gritty question for WILPF right now is whether to ally ourselves
with the African freedom fighters in what is already, and is certain to
371
Steffens, Dorothy Steffens, “WILPF Presence in Africa,” 1969, p. 4, box 2, folder 6, IEC Meeting 1969,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1969, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting
Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. In a short communication sent in March 1969 Steffens
suggested that the members of the IEC “read Frantz Fanon, especially the section in which he speaks of the
ways in which tribalism will be used to promote neo-colonialism (Dorothy Steffens' telegram reprinted in
Elise Boulding, Addendum to E.B. Circular Letter, “Last-Minute Nigeria Advice from Dorothy Steffens,”
1969, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA). This position
antagonized some other members of the WILPF to Steffens in 1969, who took issue with Steffens' wording
against the WILPF's actions on Africa (WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1969, pp. 1-14, box 5, folder 12, IEC
Meeting Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA). Nevertheless, Steffens had promoted
reflection, inquiry and scrutiny about arms embargoes in the specific Nigerian conflict and in a 1970 report
to the IEC she expressed her pleasure that the WILPF had maintained official neutrality on the conflict
(Dorothy Steffens, “African Outreach,” 1970, p. 1, box 9, folder 2, WILPF Statements 1967-90, WILPF
Second Accession, UCBA).
372
Dorothy Steffens, “African Outreach,” 1970, pp. 2-3, box 9, folder 2, WILPF Statements 1967-90,
WILPF Second Accession, UCBA
156
become increasingly, a military struggle. … [G]iven a situation such as
exists in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Africa and in the
minority-ruled white nations there, and recognizing that they will not give
up their repressive, immoral dominance over millions of black people,
how far are we willing to go in support of the freedom principle in our
name when securing freedom conflicts with our peace aim
373
?
In Steffens’ view, the liberation struggles in Africa forced the WILPF to confront
the tension between peace and freedom
374
. In the discussion that followed her
intervention, the IEC members asked themselves how it was possible for them to
“reconcile [their] sympathy with the need to change the status quo with [their] faith in
non-violence.” For some of them it was clear that
violence took different forms. Structural violence and behavioral violence
were different. Killing was not the only form of violence; suppressive
government’s [sic] structural violence also killed and destroyed. Our
opposition to violence must not mean acceptance of the status quo
375
.
Although the minutes do not indicate the author (or authors) of these comments,
they are evocative of a paper that Gertrude Baer delivered at the 1968 Congress, in which
she urged “fundamental structural change” and “radical economic and social measures.”
Though asserting the superiority of non-violence, as a “revolutionary creed and
revolutionary deed,” Baer had alerted the WILPF “to beware of the danger lest non-
violent action lead to the indefinite prolongation of the status quo ante”
376
.
373
Ibid., 3.
374
See also Dorothy Steffens, “Africa: No Freedom, no Peace,” 1970, pp. 1-3, box 118, folder 13, Reports
on Africa 1968-70/1994, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
375
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1970, p. 3, box 5, folder 13, IEC Meeting Minutes 1970-77, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
376
Gertrude Baer, “Revolution: The Rsponsibility for Peace,” 1968, pp. 62-67, box 25, 16th International
Congress Report 1966 and 17th International Congress Report 1968, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
157
In outlining a collective methodology for feminist IR, Laurel Weldon has
suggested that “considering marginalized standpoints makes the limits of … dominant
frameworks more visible,” and thus results in better (more informed) theory. However,
Weldon argues that, while “descriptive representation (the physical presence of members
of marginalized groups)” is necessary, it is not sufficient in itself to ensure that their
voices are heard. For this to happen, there need to be at a minimum a critical mass of
marginalized voices
377
. This critical mass was obviously lacking in the WILPF, thus
making the presence of (outside, inside and multi-sited) social critics crucial to the
articulation of drastically new policy positions regarding decolonization.
Nevertheless the examples of Steffens and Jouve can illustrate how imaginative
identification is a methodological instrument needed to enable social critics to promote
the kinds of inquiry, inclusion and scrutiny that would be more conducive to
emancipatory social change.
Imaginative Identification
Although preconceptions about African women were all but absent throughout
Steffens’ letters and reports, it is important to note her constant efforts at learning from
the women she met during her sojourn in Africa. Although she used comparisons between
U.S. society and African society, she did so to highlight common problems while
recognizing the limits of oversimplifying and overgeneralizing arguments. When making
her argument for opposing a total arms embargo against the warring sides in the Biafra
conflict, she referred back to the Spanish Civil War, when the Western powers' arms
377
Laurel S. Weldon, “Inclusion and Understanding: A Collective Methodology for Feminist International
Relations,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds. Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and
Jacqui True, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 75-80.
158
embargo on the Spanish legitimate government effectively “was a sanctimonious way of
letting the rebels get all the arms and bombs they needed from the German and Italian
fascists”. While she explicitly cautioned against equating the two conflicts, she also
found relevant parallels, which led her to urge the WILPF's neutrality
378
. Imaginative
identification (or empathetic cooperation) had clearly informed Steffens' analysis of the
conflict.
Furthermore, although Steffens advocated training for “grass roots women” (as
opposed to “middle class women”), she did so with an awareness of power imbalances as
manifested through language
379
. In her 1969 report she stated:
Our lack of knowledge of the complexities of this vast continent makes us
easy prey to the superficial evaluation and the western judgment, and the
two weeks visit can make dangerous “instant experts” of the best of us.
Far too many visitors have come with a mind-set of western values to look
at Nigeria through our modern “sift” and see laziness where there is a
relaxed work rhythm; immorality where there are kinship rather than
marriage ties; and uneducability where there is resistance to irrelevant
teaching. It is difficult to eliminate our years of prejudice and report only
what we have seen without drawing invalid conclusions
380
.
Therefore, Steffens was critical of international agencies’ (including the UN)
development programs, which she felt were too often irrelevant or simply “bad” for
Nigerians. She saw the role of the WILPF as one of “watchdog” of UN activities in
378
Steffens, Dorothy Steffens, “WILPF Presence in Africa,” 1969, p. 4, box 2, folder 6, IEC Meeting 1969,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
379
Elise Boulding, E.B. Circular Letter no. 4/1969, 1969, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller
Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
380
Steffens, Dorothy Steffens, “WILPF Presence in Africa,” 1969, p. 2, box 2, folder 6, IEC Meeting 1969,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
159
developing countries and as “a pressure group” for effective project evaluations, and she
cautioned “march[ing] into Africa carrying the torch of enlightenment”
381
.
By contrast, because Andrée Jouve failed to empathize with the concerns of
Algerians, she missed the opportunity to identify the similarities between them and the
concerns, feelings, and ideas that the Nazi occupation had engendered in the French
people in the 1940s. Jouve's appeals to nonviolence in her reports on the Algerian war of
independence are particularly remarkable because it was precisely Jouve who, as the
French section representative at the 1946 Congress, passionately defended the military
actions of the French resistance movement against Nazi occupation, specifically
mentioning acts of sabotage and attacks against the communication infrastructure in
Vichy France. On that occasion, Jouve had argued that peace and freedom could not exist
separately and that war was better than servitude
382
.
Conclusions
Because of assumptions about race and gender, which were implicit and
entrenched in liberal political thought, the WILPF, a liberal organization, could not
381
Ibid., 2-4; Sybil Cookson, Report on Africa: Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria, 1969, pp. 1-2, box 2,
folder 6, IEC Meeting 1969, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
382
Andrée Jouve, “Reports of the National Sections: France,” in Xth International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland:
WILPF, 1946), pp. 78-89, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC. In this the French section differed from the Finnish
and Danish sections who, instead, had upheld their countries’ examples of nonviolent resistance to Nazism
and their absolute pacifism. Else Zeuthen, “Reports of the National Sections: Denmark,” in Xth
International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg:
August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1946), pp. 70-76, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC;
Anonymous, “Reports of the National Sections: Finland,” in Xth International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland:
WILPF, 1946), pp. 76-78, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC. Interestingly Mary Nuttall, who in 1966 had
regarded with a measure of antipathy the efforts by Arab and African countries to equate colonialism and
apartheid with slavery, seemed to have enjoyed a personal conversion by 1970. She concluded her 1970
report stating that “Apartheid, Racism and Discrimination are all the aftermath of slavery or the
continuation of the mentality of slave-owners” (Mary Nuttall, Report on Slavery, 1970, p. 2, box 2, folder
7, IEC Meeting 1970, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA).
160
escape from a conception of peace that was essentially failing to dismantle the structures
of oppression and injustice that they proclaimed and intended to fight against. Only as
national liberation conflicts gained increased international attention in the 1960s and
1970s, was the WILPF prompted to interpret the causes of violence and to formulate a
response in accord with its principles. Elements of a feminist critical methodology were
present throughout the post-war period, but the Cold War environment had stifled them to
a degree.
A changed international context did not automatically produce new ideologies or
new policies. It was only after a number of years that the WILPF came up with a policy
that was meant to express support for liberation movements, without sacrificing its ideals
about non-violence. The tension between stated ideology (equality, self-determination,
economic justice) and implicit racial ideologies became visible to the WILPF only as the
international environment brought it to the fore. Historical changes prompted the
WILPF's leaders to more actively seek contacts and the opinions of women outside of
their traditional membership base. These contacts, in turn, promoted skeptical scrutiny of
long-held assumptions on the part of the WILPF, and facilitated the ideological and
policy shifts of the early 1970s. However, Steffens' as well as Jouve's examples illustrate
the need for imaginative identification as a necessary tool to complement guiding criteria,
deliberative inquiry and skeptical scrutiny and allow the silent voices to come to the fore.
161
Chapter 5: The WILPF and Israel/Palestine
Introduction
The two previous chapters have shown how the WILPF progressively reframed
and redefined its policies on disarmament (chapter 3) and decolonization (chapter 4) as
two of the defining components of its ideas of peace. This chapter takes a more grounded
approach and investigates the overlapping of disarmament, decolonization and other
components of the WILPF's idea of peace into a specific geopolitical context, that of the
conflict in Palestine/Israel.
Between 1946 and 1975 the WILPF's policies regarding this area underwent a
radical transformation as the WILPF moved from timidly supporting the creation of Israel
and its domestic and international policies to assertively questioning the democratic
nature of the Israel's policies and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This policy
shift reflected a departure from and a critique of the WILPF's entrenchment in
Orientalism as a peculiarly modern ideology. An Orientalist framework underlined the
WILPF's understandings of peace and its components as applied to the Palestine/Israel
context and it entailed the marginalization of Palestinian and Arab voices. From the
beginning, Israel was posited as the ‘Western’ ‘modern’ thus more peaceful state in
contrast with a ‘backward’ ‘bellicose’ Other (the Arabs, Arab states, and the Palestinians).
Arab (particularly Muslim) women were taken as the symbol of this backwardness and
their “liberation” as a justification for the establishment of a Western democracy (Israel)
in the region. In a gradual and non-linear process, the WILPF’s feminist critical
methodology allowed a challenge to these ideological constructions and a reshaping of
162
the ideological context in which the WILPF was situated. As a consequence, the WILPF
formulated new policies and new views about ‘peace’ in the Middle East, which
recognized the legitimacy of both Jewish and Palestinian aspirations to nationhood.
This chapter is divided into four parts: first, I situate WILPF's positions on the
conflict in Israel/Palestine into the ideological and historical context that produced them
and show how an Orientalist framework influenced their ideas about Palestine and the
Arabs even before the Second World War. Second I illustrate how their postwar views of
Arabs and Palestinians continued to be shaped by their prewar preconceptions. Third I
show how this Orientalist framework translated into ideas of peace that denied legitimacy
to Palestinian concerns and only gave visibility to Israeli/Zionist claims. Finally, I
illustrate how the WILPF's implementation of the principles and practices of a feminist
critical methodology allowed it to challenge the ideological context in which it was
enmeshed, reframe the parameters of modernity and Orientalism, and review their
understanding of peace so as to include and give voice and legitimacy to Palestinian, as
well as Israeli, aspirations.
Orientalism and the WILPF
As seen in the introductory chapter, according to Rita Felski, what distinguished
modernity from other historical junctures is a symbolic-normative force as the
“enunciation of a process of differentiation, an act of separation from the past.”
Moreover, “modernity differ[ed] from other kinds of periodizations in possessing a
normative as well as a descriptive dimension.” Thus, to be ‘modern’ meant repudiating
the past and committing to embrace change and the future
383
. So the politics of modernity
383
Felski, Gender of Modernity, 13.
163
carried some ambiguity: positing the ‘modern’ in opposition to tradition legitimized the
subversion of “hierarchical social structures and prevailing modes of thought by
challenging the authority of tradition, custom, and the status quo”
384
. But modernity’s
alleged superiority also authorized a project of domination over those who were seen as
non-modern. According to Edward Said, modernity has been characterized by
technologies of global domination, exerted by one area (Europe) over all the rest (the
Orient or, geographically, the Middle East)
385
. For Said, the academic discipline of
Orientalism formed the basis for a more general, imaginative, meaning of Orientalism as
“a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made
between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident”
386
. As part of the ideological
discourse of modernity, Orientalism has been a carrier of basic Western notions of the
European self and the non-Western other that generated unfalsifiable propositions about
the superiority of Europeans to non-Europeans and was inextricably involved with
European power. Orientalism, as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient”
387
,
was about the construction and self-elaboration of “our world” as well as the
establishment of regimes of truth and knowledge about the Orient
388
. Orientalism, as an
academic discipline developed in Europe in the eighteenth century, provided the
384
Ibid., 13-14.
385
See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Abdirahman
A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London; New York: Verso, 2002).
386
Said, Orientalism, 2.
387
Ibid., 3.
388
Ibid., 12.
164
repetition and authority claims that made it possible to create unchanging “truths” about
the Orient, its peoples and its political and social customs
389
.
However, as Nicholas Thomas correctly argues, Orientalism was and is
qualitatively different from other colonialist discourses, and it most appropriately applies
to a specific geographical area during a specific historical period
390
. This is strikingly
obvious when looking at the ways in which views about gender and gender relations
(though marginalized in Said's own work) shaped Orientalism. Feminists have observed
that Arab, particularly Muslim, women became the symbols of Oriental difference and
backwardness in peculiar ways: for example, early Orientalist texts associated the East
with the harem, evoking images of despotism and sexuality
391
; contemporary Western
obsession with the veil as the paradigm of women's oppression in Islam is another case in
point
392
.
However, Western women participated in the Orientalist project in different ways,
at times contesting, at times reinforcing Western domination over the “Orient”
393
. Joyce
389
Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 23..
390
Ibid., 27.
391
Midgley, “Anti-Slavery,” 174-175.
392
Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992).
393
Feminist critiques of Orientalism (particularly in literary studies and history) are numerous, as well as
works dealing with women’s experiences of, and participation to, the Orientalist project. See for example
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996);
Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge, U.K.;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and
American Orientalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Madeleine Dobie, Foreign
Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2001); Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry
21, no. 4 (Summer, 1995), 805-821; Harriet D. Lyons, “Presences and Absences in Edward Said's Culture
and Imperialism,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 28, no.
1 (1994), 101-105; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of
165
Zonana observes that “feminist Orientalist discourse” indeed assumed and reinforced the
domination of the Orient by the Occident
394
. However, its primary motivation was to
displace the source of patriarchal oppression to Oriental societies, thus enabling Western
Christians “to contemplate local problems without questioning their own self-
definition”
395
. Feminist demands could then be seen not as a threat but as “a conservative
effort to make the West more like itself”. In other words, “feminist Orientalism” implied
that, if patriarchal oppression was Oriental, women's liberation was more truly
Occidental.
396
.
Orientalist women's travel literature also exemplifies the complexities of women's
participation in the Orientalist plan. Billie Melman examines the travel accounts of
Western middle-class women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finds them
very different from the accounts of their male counterparts. Women anthropologists,
missionaries, geographers and others who traveled to the Middle East produced a vast
array of literature (from letters to scientific papers to religious reports), which both
reinforced the ‘civilizing’ mission of the West, and was in itself an act of disruption of the
modernist discourse underlying such endeavors. These kinds of trips represented a sort of
Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London; New York: Routledge, 1991); Billie Melman, Women's
Orients--English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1992); Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy Lutkehaus, Gendered Missions:
Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
For studies on gender and imperialism in the discipline of International Relations, see for example Hooper,
Manly States; Sinha, “Gender and Imperialism,” Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly
Englishman' and the' Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester; New York:
Manchester University Press; St. Martin's Press, 1995); Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The
Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
394
Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of 'Jane Eyre',” Signs
18, no. 3 (Spring, 1993), 594.
395
Ibid., 593.
396
Ibid., 594.
166
emancipatory act for women, who were thus challenging modern assumptions about
women’s and men’s spheres of activity and the public/private split. Women’s travel
writings were highly diverse and presented heterogeneous views of the “Orient.”
Moreover, such trips and the encounters with different cultures allowed in some cases the
identification with the different and a critique of the writer’s own culture, thus possible
contestations (rather than reinforcement) of their culture’s gender norms
397
.
The WILPF had a long-standing practice of “fact-finding” missions, which (in the
Middle East context) can be viewed as inscribed in the tradition of Orientalist travels and
which had similar ambiguous implications
398
. As far back as 1931 Swedish member
Elisabeth Waern-Bugge had undertaken the WILPF's first official trip to Palestine. Its
purpose was to recruit new members for the League and establish a mixed Arab/Jewish
WILPF section. The WILPF’s delegates to the Middle East, beginning with Waern-Bugge
in 1931, were to provide one of the main sets of lenses through which the WILPF viewed
the Palestine question. They did indeed show some heterogeneity of views, but up until
1975 they all shared a modernist ideology that constructed ‘the Arab’ as antithetically
different from, and inferior to, ‘the West’ (and the Jews).
Waern-Bugge’s report of her trip was to set the background and the precedent for
WILPF’s post-war approach to the Middle East
399
. The report offers a strikingly racist
397
Melman, Women's Orients. See also Huber and Lutkehaus, Gendered Missions.
398
I have mentioned in chapter 1 (at page17) the example of fact-finding missions to Haiti in 1926, and
China and Indochina in 1927. These, of course, were not trips to the Middle East, and the Orientalist
analogy has only limited application. However, these trips can also be seen as having the ambiguous
significance that Melman describes.
399
I found Waern-Bugge’s report amidst WILPF’s papers of the 1950s, which suggests that members who
visited the area in that period had read the earlier report in preparation for the trip, and thus had Waern-
Bugge’s particular interpretation in mind as they undertook their missions. Of course, this does not mean
that they subscribed to what Waern-Bugge said. My discovery nevertheless suggests that one of WILPF’s
members first look at the situation in Israel/Palestine was through Waern-Bugge’s eyes.
167
view of Arab people. Waerne-Bugge saw the Arabs as particularly suspicious, sensitive,
backward, chauvinistic, and charged with “the bitterest hatred against the Jews”
400
.
Moreover, Arab women (and more so Muslim women) were depicted, in sharp contrast
with Jewish and European women, as ignorant, child-like, and dependent on their
husbands and their communities’ cultural and political norms. In her narrative, Western
modernist assumptions intertwined with Orientalist assumptions about race, religion,
class and gender, in such a way as to reinforce each other. Thus, modernity stood in
opposition to tradition, in the same way that Arab (and particularly Muslim) women
differed from and were inferior to Jewish women, particularly those of European and
American ancestry. There was a marked hierarchy of modernity in Waern-Bugge’s views,
whereas Christian Arab women were more ‘advanced’ than their Muslim counterparts,
and less ‘advanced’ than Jewish or European women. Class was a less apparent, but
nevertheless present, distinction as “European education” and “higher standing”
possessed a superior status. Finally, Waern-Bugge’s report reveals a notion of history as a
linear progression from tradition to modernity, conveying both a sense of superiority of
the latter over the former, and a desirable future for the people of the Middle East. By
defining the boundaries of historical progress in the framework of modernity, and by
positioning Arab women as outside of it, Waern-Bugge was prevented from seeing the
possibility of genuine progress in relationships between Arab and Israeli women, and
ultimately in the construction of a more peaceful Palestine
401
. So, on the one hand,
Waern-Bugge desired to build groups of peaceful coexistence among Arab and Jewish
400
Elisabeth Waern-Bugge, Report on Palestine, 1931, p. 3, box 65, folder 6, Israel 1970-78, WILPF
Second Accession, UCBA.
401
Waern-Bugge never mentioned, for example, the political, social and economic ramifications of the
British mandate over Palestine.
168
women in Palestine; on the other, her Western, modern assumptions about Arab women
trapped her in a vision that prevented her from reaching that very goal. Jewish and
European mediators played an important part in hampering a full understanding of Arab
women’s political positions and socio-cultural milieu, by preventing openness to their
views and statements.
Waern-Bugge’s trip had been facilitated by European diplomats and colonial
authorities, familiar with and sympathetic to the Jewish population of Palestine, but less
so to the Arabs. Moreover, the British section of the WILPF and Emily Green Balch had
helped Waern-Bugge prepare for her trip by giving her background documents and help.
Finally, Jewish circles helped establish the first contacts between Waern-Bugge and the
WILPF and Arab women, and Waern-Bugge's trip depended heavily on Jewish upper-
class women’s acceptance of her mission’s purposes. Therefore, while Waern-Bugge
wanted to build dialogue with both Arab and Jewish women, she approached the dialogue
with pre-conceived understandings, heavily charged with an Orientalist outlook.
Israel/Palestine and the WILPF after World War II
Reports from trips undertaken after the Second World War, official documents of
the League, and my own interviews confirm that many of the WILPF’s members’ views
about Arabs remained mired in Orientalist assumptions between 1946 and the 1970s.
However, post World War II documents were both less explicit and offered more nuanced
understandings than the one-sided 1931 report. For example, in 1955 Emily Green Balch
wrote a letter to the Israeli section:
It would seem that anything that the WIL women in Palestine could do to
help would best be on Ghandi [sic] principles and on the level of high
169
magnanimity though I fear the Arabs’ chivalrous vein cannot be counted
on to respond, and I fear it would be very painful to our Jewish friends to
have our suggestions take this shape. Still it is what I find in my heart to
suggest. For the only possible steps to a way out for the Jewish women, to
whom the ethical aspect is always of supreme importance, seems to be to
invent ways of rising above the conflict
402
.
Once again, Arab supposed national character was contrasted with Jewish moral
superiority and ability to address the Middle East question pragmatically. The
responsibility for peace rested on Jewish women, as only they were capable of the
rational and moral thinking required to bring it about.
A 1958 trip report by Madeleine Bouchereau, a Haitian member of the WILPF
and wife of the Haitian consul in Hamburg, described “Arab masses” as mired in
“obscurantism”
403
. In Lebanon, democracy was “not practiced as a natural thing.
Individual Lebanese do not have respect for law”
404
. The Arabs were again juxtaposed
against the Jews, when Bouchereau stated, paraphrasing a Lebanese physician, that “the
Palestinians who have worked with Jews are excellent administrators – they learn quickly
and are in demand with business firms”
405
. Arab women also fell short of her
expectations, as Bouchereau decried their supposed lack of interest in politics, manifested
by their failure to vote (in Lebanon) and their adherence to ‘the weight of customs” in
Syria
406
. Edith Ballantyne, who became the Secretary General of the WILPF in 1971,
402
Cited in Marie Lous-Mohr, M.L.M. Circular Letter no. 2 1955/56, 1955, p. 1, box 26, folder 6, Circular
Letters November 1955-May 1956, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. In some documents the WILPF is
referred to as WIL.
403
Emily Parker Simon Report with Excerpts from the Report of Madeleine Bouchereau's Mission to the
Middle East, Spring 1958, 1959, p. 9, box 118, folder 4, Reports on the Middle East 1958-59, WILPF
Second Accession, UCBA.
404
Bouchereau citing an unnamed Lebanese professor of political science (ibid., 4).
405
Ibid., 5.
406
Ibid., 5-6. Women in other parts of the non-Western world are never mentioned with the same insistence
170
confirms that up to at least the mid-seventies, “the Palestinians were really seen as kind
of ignorant” by many of the WILPF’s leaders
407
.
Orientalism still colored the League’s postwar approach to the Palestine question,
with the result that Palestinian/Arab narratives about the conflict that erupted after the
creation of Israel were effectively silenced. Narratives about this conflict acquired
particular significance for the two people whose national identities and self-determination
aspirations (in the context of nineteenth century imperialism and twentieth century
decolonization) converged and diverged in the territory of Palestine
408
. On the one hand,
the Palestinian narrative regards Israel as a creation of the Western powers and an
extension of colonialism in the area; the Israeli/Zionist narrative conveys the view that
Israel was created despite the Western powers, with the intent of providing a safe home to
a persecuted minority, and a return to the ancestors’ land, rightfully belonging to the
Jewish people.
There are several corollary narratives deriving from or supporting those two basic
narratives. In the years following World War II and until the mid-1970s, the WILPF
privileged Zionist/Israeli narratives. For example, in 1958 and 1967 WILPF delegates to
the Middle East described Israel as a “miracle” of technological pioneering. They
unquestioningly reproduced the myth of Mandatory Palestine as an underpopulated area,
or held in the same symbolic significance as Muslim women in the Middle East. This further points to the
need to distinguish between the WILPF's Orientalist attitudes toward the Arab world from its approach to
decolonizing areas more generally.
407
Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author, August 7, 2004. It is interesting to note as well that, not unlike
the rest of the world, the WILPF did not start to mention ‘Palestinians’ and kept referring to them as
‘refugees’ until the late 1960s.
408
I am indebted to Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom for pointing out that, underlying this enduring
conflict, are radically contrasting narratives, which can, however, be reconciled (Gush Shalom, Truth
Against Truth, http://zope.gushshalom.org (accessed 01/27/2008)).
171
which the Israelis had transformed into fertile land
409
. According to this story, the
Palestinians were seen as ‘guests’ or immigrants at best, invaders at worst. Thus, before
1975 the WILPF privileged an Israeli/Zionist narrative of the conflict in Israel/Palestine,
and defined ‘peace’ according to such narrative.
Orientalism and ‘Peace’ in Palestine/Israel
As seen in chapter 1
410
, in the WILPF's own brand of “egalitarian, social, or
inclusive” liberalism
411
, the preconditions and elements of a just peace centered around:
1) freedom (loosely identified with the establishment of liberal democracy); 2) self-
determination (an element of freedom); 3) total and universal disarmament; 4) economic
development and prosperity to satisfy human needs. I have already discussed how two of
these three elements were differently interpreted during the course of the first 30 postwar
years, although the WILPF theoretically viewed them as universally valid and universally
applied. But how did they translate practically in the context of WILPF’s policies toward
Israel/Palestine? In an Orientalist framework, the WILPF employed an idea of peace that
silenced Arab and Palestinian visions, highlighted Arab and Palestinian aggressiveness,
and selectively chose to ignore or minimize the Israeli state’s own aggressive policies and
motives.
409
See Signe Höjer, Visit to Israel in February/March 1958, 1958, p. 17, box 26, folder 8, Circular Letters
January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA; Johanne Reutz Gjermoe,
Report from WILPF Middle-East Fact-Finding Mission in the Arab States and Israel, April 10-May 10,
1967, Summarized from a Report to the Nobel Committee, 1967, pp. 10-11, box 14, folder 7, Reports 1965-
69, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
410
Page 19.
411
Richardson, Contending Liberalisms, 20. Also see above in chapter 1, page 22.
172
Liberal democracy and freedom
As seen in chapter 3, at the WILPF’s first post-war Congress in 1946 in
Luxembourg, it was apparent that the leaders of the WILPF read the war and the events
leading to it not as a consequence of the failure of international institutions, but as the
failure of states to relinquish specific sovereign rights, in order to make international
institutions strong enough to prevent conflicts and achieve human progress. This, they
saw tied to the achievement of individual freedoms, self-determination, and the
satisfaction of human needs. In particular, the experiences of European women in the
prewar and war years shaped the WILPF’s priorities in the post-war world, and
determined a renewed emphasis on freedom (physical freedom, freedom of expression
and collective self-determination), as a prerequisite for peace. The WILPF had witnessed
the incarceration, torture, exile, and murder of several of its European members at the
hands of the Nazi regime. It also had to reckon with the expedient ignorance of the
Jewish Holocaust in the international community at large. These experiences helped
shape the League’s initial attitudes toward the creation of Israel.
Political and civil rights were seen as the foundation of good living and the
precondition for peace. As an organization founded on the principles of liberal
internationalism, the WILPF saw the liberal state as the only feasible and legitimate actor
and co-creator of a peaceful international order. But individual rights could not be
“conceived in the spirit of atomistic individualism but as an essential element in the new
socially organized community”
412
. International governance was thought essential to the
412
WILPF, “Address to the Representatives of the 21 Governments Assembled at the Peace Conference in
Paris (V oted Unanimously at the Opening of the Congress),” in Xth International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg: August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland:
WILPF, 1946[?]), 28, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
173
ordering of human relations and the recognition of individual rights, and thus to the
achievement of world peace.
The US delegation to the first WILPF Congress after the war in 1946 viewed US
attitudes in support of the establishment of Israel in a positive light, as “motivated in part
by moral principles”
413
. At the time, Zionist lobbyists had started influencing the US
government’s and particularly President Truman’s decisions over the fate of Palestine,
which led Truman to support the majority UNSCOP (UN Special Committee on
Palestine) partition plan in 1947
414
. While aware and critical of the US government’s
political and strategic considerations in support of a Jewish state in Palestine (as for other
international issues), the WILPF framed the issue as a question of justice for the
persecuted European Jews.
The WILPF immediately started to depict Israel as a new democratic experiment,
one that was unique to the area, and one that was to set the example for a new form of
democracy, which represented a renewed hope for peace and freedom in the region:
It was in Israel that Moslem women cast their vote for the first time in
Arab history and their response to the franchise conferred upon them as
citizens of Israel once more proves that once people are free to use the
instruments of freedom, freedom itself will soon be fully established
415
.
The WILPF thus heralded Israel’s first election as bringing freedom to Muslim
women who, in need of emancipation, found their liberty in Israel’s democracy. Later on,
413
Dorothy Detzer and Dorothy Robinson, “Reports of the National Sections: United States,” in Xth
International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Luxembourg:
August 4th-9th, 1946 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1946), 119, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
414
Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman
to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 25-28.
415
Gertrude Baer, “LOWUN no. 2/1949 with a Study of the Trusteeship System,” 1949, p. 3, box 92, folder
17, Circular Letters/Reports re: WILPF and UN 1949/1961-69, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
174
the WILPF’s visitors to several countries in the Middle East decried Arab women’s lack
of political participation (in elections) and attributed it to their cultural backwardness.
The League’s mission was then to educate Arab women:
to interest women who have newly acquired their political rights to use
their new power for the welfare of their people and the respect of human
rights in order to bring about conditions which will lead to the
establishment and the preservation of peace and freedom at home and
abroad
416
.
Arab women could thus be helped by an enlightened and progressive (more
advanced) organization to evolve into agents of liberal political change.
The WILPF leadership overlooked the creation of domestic institutions in the new
state of Israel that were incongruent with, or threatened to challenge the development of
liberal democracy in that state. Thus, they did not address the codification of the
supremacy of Jewish citizens over citizens of Arab descent, which the 1950 Law of
Return inherently expressed. This law “permitted any Jew of good character to enter
Israel and to receive citizenship,” and created circumstances in which the needs of the
existing Arab populations became subordinate to the needs of incoming Jewish settlers
and to the security needs of the state
417
.
Discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel was viewed as no more than a
correctable glitch in the practical implementation of liberal democratic principles. Their
education, citizenship and economic rights, and political representation were a matter of
discussion and subject to progress in the learning curve of the Israeli government toward
416
Madeleine Bouchereau, Conclusions and Recommendations, Mission to the Middle East. 1958, p. 1, box
118, folder 4, Reports on the Middle East 1958-59, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
417
Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 5th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004),
219-220.
175
the attainment of a fully liberal democratic state. Any measures to improve the living
conditions of Arab people living in Israel were seen as signs of magnanimity, and
subordinated to Israel’s security concerns. In 1958, Signe Höjer, a Swedish member of
the WILPF on an unofficial visit to Israel observed:
Of the total population of 1,900,000, 213,000 citizens are Arab refugees
[sic]. … Certainly their wellbeing is considered most important. Many of
them are allowed to go home to their countries once a year to visit
relatives, for example in Jordan. … Reliable people told me that Israel had
not fully understood the real importance of this matter until lately. In the
first years of building the new state, Arab workers had not – for several
reasons – been granted the opportunity of taking part in this work to the
same extent as the Jewish population. This was naturally not done
intentionally, since the Jewish people have themselves suffered so much
from discrimination. But the Arabs might have felt it this way
418
.
In a 1967 official trip to the Middle East, Johanne Reutz Gjermoe (a Norwegian
heading the WILPF Committee on the Middle East from 1965 to 1975) did not so much
compare the living conditions and political and economic rights of the Palestinians in
Israel with the Jewish citizens of Israel, but with their counterparts in Arab countries.
Thus, while Arab-Israelis suffered some discrimination in Israeli society, and popular
resentment toward them was widespread, they were better off in Israel than they would be
in an Arab country. However accurate, this comparison betrayed a view of the
Palestinians as ‘guests’ in Israel, rather than legitimate and entitled inhabitants of the
land. Any concessions were, therefore, generous, if sometimes inadequate, gifts of the
sovereign government. Similarly, never did the WILPF question Israel’s policies of
discrimination against Jewish immigrants to Israel from areas other than Europe.
418
Signe Höjer, Visit to Israel in February/March 1958, 1958, pp. 13-14, box 26, folder 8, Circular Letters
January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
176
Self-determination
The WILPF inscribed the Middle East in the framework and language of self-
determination immediately after the war, some time after the area became the subject of
Western powers’ decisions over boundaries and sovereignty. Inscribing the Middle East
question in the framework and language of self-determination meant that the approach to
peace in the Middle East depended on how self-determination was defined. At the time of
the final UNSCOP partition proposals, the Arabs’ positions relied on the UN Charter’s
codification of the right of self-determination of peoples: as the Arabs formed the
majority in Palestine, they had a right to self-determination as established by the UN
Charter. They claimed that Zionist religious claims and the illegal Balfour declaration
could not be the basis for the establishment of a Jewish state. The Zionist view, together
with Jewish religious claims regarding territorial rights to Palestine, also appealed to a
right to self-determination, but viewed it as the right of a minority to establish an
independent state in an area predominantly occupied by an Arab majority.
While adhering to self-determination as codified by the UN Charter, the WILPF
adhered to a Zionist interpretation of that right, with little to no regard to Arab positions.
Thus, the WILPF did not question the existence of the state of Israel, and most
importantly, did not fully acknowledge the quest for self-determination of the nationality
whose self-determination was crushed with Israel’s creation. Of course, the WILPF was
not alone in this oversight. Indeed,
Zionism long attracted … much support among organized labour and the
left; a diagnosis of the grounds of its original appeal does not so much
endorse the movement, as help explain how something that was
recognized by a range of those involved at the time as a brutal exercise in
dispossession could also be represented as a progressive, collectivist form
177
of pioneering that redressed rather than created a historical injustice
419
.
WILPF saw Israel’s creation precisely in this light, as a collectivist progressive
enterprise. It did so in the absence of Arab representation in its ranks, against the
background of vivid memories of the Holocaust, and the WILPF leadership’s views of
Arab people, as handed down from the pre-war period. The domestic and international
political environment in which the WILPF operated obviously constrained and limited
WILPF’s own interpretation of the situation. As a consequence, the voices of Palestinians
inside the UN-established Israel borders, and in the territories occupied by Israel in
subsequent wars, were rendered invisible, or downgraded as a humanitarian, rather than a
political issue.
At the IEC Meeting of 1948, the WILPF issued a resolution condemning the Arab
states’ refusal to accept the UNSCOP partition as an act of aggression
420
. However, it did
not condemn Israel’s taking over (also UN-determined) Palestinian territory in the second
part of the 1948 wars, and the later (October 1948) invasion of the Negev. It also failed to
mention the policies of forced expulsions and settlement that the Israeli state started to
implement, despite the fact that 1948 saw the fleeing of thousands of Arabs from Arab
villages inside and outside 1947 UN-established borders
421
. Forced expulsions and
settlement policies were ignored for many years within the WILPF.
The WILPF leaders were not so naïve as not to be aware and critical of the
geopolitical and strategic considerations of the Western powers in their support for the
419
Thomas, Colonialism's Culture, 17.
420
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1948, box 3, folder 16, Resolutions/Statements 1946-54, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
421
Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 200-201.
178
newly-created state
422
. Despite these considerations, the WILPF did not critically reflect
and reevaluate its support for the establishment of Israel, in view of the long-term
political implications of its creation.
Orientalism obscured the existence of Palestinians and denied their right to self-
determination. Self-determination became limited to self-determination for Jews in Israel,
at least until 1975. This point is best illustrated by Gertrude Baer’s decrial of the lack of
invitation of Israel to the 1
st
Afro-Asian Conference against colonialism held in Bandoeng
in 1955
423
. Since Israel was a newly decolonized country, the WILPF leaders could not
fathom why it had been excluded from Bandoeung.
Palestinians were most often referred to as “refugees” well into the 1960s
424
.
Moreover, Palestinians (when they were mentioned) already had a ‘national’ home and
that was Jordan. For example, in 1967 Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, commented in her trip
report:
The situation in Jordan is particularly absurd because the 700,000 refugees
there comprise two thirds of the entire population. What would happen to
Jordan if these 700,000 people left the country and returned to “occupied
Palestine”? Jordan could not survive such depopulation
425
.
422
See for example Gertrude Bussey, “World Survey,” in XIth International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August 15th-19th,
1949 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), 171-191, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
423
Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with
United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Magleaas,
Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the International Executive Committee in Hamburg, Germany,
July 1955, 1955, p. 22, box 14, folder 3, Reports 1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
424
The use of the term ‘refugee’ was not unique to the WILPF, of course. Many UN GA resolutions
throughout the 1950s and 1960s refer to Palestinians as such.
425
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, Report from WILPF Middle-East Fact-Finding Mission in the Arab States and
Israel, April 10-May 10, 1967, Summarized from a Report to the Nobel Committee, 1967, pp. 8-9, box 14,
folder 7, Reports 1965-69, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
179
Because Gjermoe viewed Jordan as a predominantly Palestinian state that could
not survive without its Palestinian population, she also thought that “Jordan [was] a
country which could have helped in solving the greatest part of the refugee problems
together with Israel”
426
. In adhering to an Israeli narrative, Gjermoe effectively made
surging Palestinian nationalist claims to an independent state invisible
427
. While
continuously calling for negotiations and the peaceful settlement of the disputes between
Israel and the Arab countries, the WILPF could not produce statements that addressed the
specific political issues of the “refugee question.”
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the WILPF often referred to Palestinian
organizations as “terrorists” or “guerrilla” even after the 1971 Congress resolution
supporting revolutionary movements. For instance, in 1972 Johanne Reutz Gjermoe
affirmed the need for a Palestinian political leadership willing to work with Israel for a
peaceful solution to the conflict, “not terror organizations that only hurt their cause in the
eyes of the world and makes [sic] it worse to reach a settlement of peace, such as the
situation has developed since the Munich drama”
428
.
Economic development
The WILPF viewed development as a precondition to peace and it related it to
technological and scientific endeavors and the rational organization of the economy.
426
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, “On Middle East Mission,” 1967, box 2, folder 4, IEC Meeting 1967, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA.
427
See also Israeli UN Ambassador’s response to Arafat’s address at the United Nations General Assembly
in 1974, reprinted in Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 339-340.
428
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, “Peace and Justice in the Middle-East,” 1972, box 14, folder 8, Reports 1970-
79, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. She was referring here to the hostage crisis at the Munich Olympic
games on September 5, 1972, which saw the death of all Israeli athletes and many of their captors (Smith,
Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 310).
180
Military expenditures diverted resources from economic development and accentuated
tensions between eastern and Western blocs. Speaking at the 1949 Congress, Gertrude
Bussey articulated the relationship between economic development and peace:
[A]dequate economic resources are a necessary basis for secure living. We
cannot expect peace if the peoples of the world have to struggle for their
share in a diminishing food supply. On the other hand the full use of the
world resources depends on peaceful cooperation since war and economic
competition destroy precious resources
429
.
Bussey and the WILPF thought that economic wellbeing did not preclude war, and that
peace was to be achieved through a long-term educational, ethical and religious struggle.
But fear (including fear of economic losses) was at the origin of conflicts, and rational
thought, aided by the presence of basic civil rights, was still a cure for it. Bussey viewed
the equitable distribution and ‘constructive’ use of resources as inscribed into an
inevitable and desirable model of development, which involved the large-scale
restructuring of local practices. She linked the equitable distribution of resources to
extensive agricultural and industrial development and she linked the idea of progress with
a break from traditional practices and the maintenance of a traditional society, based on
local practices and small-scale, sustenance industry and agriculture. Science and
rationality, and the work of international institutions, in particular the UN, were the best
hope for peace.
In the late 1940s the economic development of Israel was viewed in the context of
a supposed Jewish industriousness and technological know-how, demonstrated by Israel’s
exploitation and transformation of a deserted territory. Israel was seen as an experiment
429
Gertrude Bussey, “World Survey,” in XIth International Congress of the Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August 15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), 187, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
181
in the “constructive utilization of resources under the guidance of scientific knowledge
without exploitation of the people”
430
.
In 1958, Signe Höjer portrayed the Israeli state as a pioneering progressive
enterprise, which transformed a desert into productive land: “[i]ncredible efforts have
been and are being carried out to conquer the wilderness and to settle the immigrants”
431
.
And again in 1967, assumptions about the value of technology-driven development,
rational progress, and pioneering spirit guided Johanne Reutz Gjermoe’s impression of
Israeli society:
To travel from the Jordanian part of Jerusalem to the Israeli part is to enter
another world, less picturesque, more modern and decidedly more
European. It is a miracle what the Jews have wrought to Israel since 1948.
… One of the oldest pioneers from pre-world war I times told us how
Palestine looked in those days, and she felt that it was the Arabs who had
forced their way into Palestine, not the Jews – the latter had always been
there. In her earliest childhood most of the Arabs had come streaming in
from Egypt and other Arab lands to work on the roads and railroads, and
had never returned to their homelands. … In the beginning the Jewish
immigrants bought the arid land, rebuilt it, and used farmhands who by
this labor earned enough to buy their own land. This is how the Arab
farmers originated
432
.
In this context, the solution to Palestinian refugees’ economic woes was
resettlement in the countries to which they had fled, to be followed with a mixture of
economic assistance to those countries and professional training of the refugees.
Development programs were seen as a necessary precondition to the achievement of
peace in the Middle East. This practically translated into an endorsement of UNRWA’s
430
Ibid., 183-184.
431
Signe Höjer, Visit to Israel in February/March 1958, 1958, p. 2, box 26, folder 8, Circular Letters
January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
432
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, “On Middle East Mission,” 1967, pp. 10-11, box 2, folder 4, IEC Meeting
1967, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
182
(United Nations Relief and Works Agency) professional training schools, without
questioning the UNRWA’s failure to provide secondary education for refugees, a
prerequisite for university access, or the inadequacy of UNRWA technical schools to
adapt to local employment demands. The WILPF also did not address the UNRWA
practice of gender segregation in occupational training, whereby girls and boys were
trained for traditional sex-specific jobs, like teaching and hairdressing for women, or
mechanics and plumbing for men
433
.
The refugees’ return to the areas they had abandoned during the different wars
was, at best, impractical and irrational:
The official version was everywhere the same that the refugees should
return to their homes in Palestine. Our efforts to point out to them that the
refugees would not find their homes again, nor their fields, for all was
changed in Palestine, fell on dead [sic] ears. But when we spoke privately
with leading Arabs, people who had experience from the mandate period
or under the UN, or with non-Arabs, we got a different point of view. Most
of these people were convinced that if the refugees themselves were asked,
at most 20% would want to return. And with reference to compensation,
there were not many in the camps to-day who had owned very much in the
place from which they had come. Those who had received a good
education and good positions in the Arab countries would probably not
want to return to Palestine. But no one wanted to be the first to say this
straight out and be called a traitor
434
.
433
Lina Abu-Habib, “Education and the Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon – A Lost Generation?,” Refugee
Participation Network 21 (April, 1996), http://www.fmreview.org/HTMLcontent/rpn218.htm (accessed
03/03/2009). In 1962 the WILPF launched a program where members of the WILPF in different countries
could donate money to a fund destined to sponsor the training of an Arab refugee woman in a UNRWA
school in Jordan. This initiative was conducted in cooperation with UNRWA and continued for a couple of
years. The progress of the sponsorship recipient was followed closely and her picture and correspondence
were rather widely advertised in WILPF correspondence and publications. The WILPF saw this
sponsorship in the context of Arab-Israeli dialogue, and pertaining to the same spirit that saw the admission
of a new Lebanese section to the WILPF’s ranks (in the same year - see Adelaide Baker, “New Vistas in the
Middle East,” Pax et Libertas, January-March 1963, box 45, folder 2, Pax et Libertas 1960-1965, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA).
434
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, Report from WILPF Middle-East Fact-Finding Mission in the Arab States and
Israel, April 10-May 10, 1967, Summarized from a Report to the Nobel Committee, 1967, pp. 8-9, box 14,
folder 7, Reports 1965-69, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
183
Disarmament
As seen in chapter 3, the WILPF had always advocated total and universal
disarmament, of conventional, nuclear (after the Second World War), and
biological/chemical armaments. It consistently condemned arms trade and the
militarization of societies also. It ad vocated building a “culture of peace” and training for
non-violence. It studied and pushed the idea of building an international mechanism for
the peaceful settlement of disputes, without which it thought states would not commit to
disarm. It saw military expenditures as an obstacle to development, as well as to the
development of peaceful relations among states.
Until 1975 the WILPF issued general statements of condemnation of great
powers’ arms sales to the Middle East, observing the increased danger that a militarized
and heavily armed Middle East constituted to world peace (most of the time, however,
refraining from specifically addressing the increasing US military assistance to Israel, but
contesting, for example Soviet aid to Nasser’s Egypt). The WILPF refrained from
condemning several of the Israeli army’s aggressive maneuvers, or explained them as an
understandable, if not completely justifiable, reaction to the constant threat from and fear
of Arab (and later Palestinian groups’) aggression.
For instance, part of the WILPF’s executive’s interpretation of the Suez crisis in
1956 relied extensively on the Israeli section’s correspondence and reports, and did not
overtly condemn Israel’s role in the invasion of Egypt. In a circular letter written at the
beginning of 1957, Else Zeuthen (at the time International Chairman) extensively cited an
Israel section’s letter she had received, relying on it to explain and justify both the Israel
184
army’s invasion of the Sinai and the Israel section’s non-condemnation of its
government’s actions:
“Needless to say, we – whose work aims at the achievement of peaceful
solutions to conflicts – suffered a terrible shock when war suddenly broke
loose in our area. Not the slightest hint had been given to warn the public
that this act was imminent. The severe tension and the concern for our
security had almost become a matter of daily routine. …” The letter goes
on to describe the dangers and attacks to which Israel was constantly
exposed. The letter continues: “The fear of the threatened attack
eventually caused the action of our Army, which is considered by the
majority of our people to be an act of self-defence in the twelfth hour”
435
.
Emerging disagreements about the nature of and possible solutions to the
Arab/Israeli conflict prevented a general policy statement on the Suez crisis and only
resulted in unanimous support for the UNEF force, though disagreements existed on the
nature and duration of the stationing, which engendered doubts on whether peacekeeping
forces might actually hamper the reaching of a durable peace settlement
436
.
Israel’s peaceful attitudes and intentions were rather consistently opposed to Arab
states’ hostility. Thus, at the July 1964 IEC meeting the WILPF executive agreed on the
text of a letter to be sent to the UN Secretary general U Thant expressing WILPF’s
concern at “some nations… disseminating hostile propaganda and amassing weapons
435
Else Zeuthen, “E.Z. Circular Letter no. 5 1956/7, 1957, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October 1956-
December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also Rahel Straus and Hannah Rosenzweig, Israel
Section Letter to the WILPF International Executive Committee, 1957, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA, which expresses gratitude to WILPF’s headquarters and “many sections
which have shown their understanding and their warm sympathy.” The Israeli section's reluctance to
condemn its own government stands in stark contrast with both the British and the French sections'
immediate protestations against their governments' military actions in Egypt (see WILPF British Section's
Statement on Suez Crisis and WILPF French Section letter to French Premier Guy Mollet in Else Zeuthen,
E.Z. Circular Letter no. 3/1956, 1956, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters October 1956-December 1957,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA).
436
WILPF IEC, Decisions and Summary of Records, 1957, pp.1-24, 19, box 26, folder 7, Circular Letters
October 1956-December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. A 2005 study found that the presence of
peacekeeping operations in a conflict area inhibits both the likelihood of mediation or negotiation attempts
and their success rates once they are initiated (J. Michael Greig and Paul F. Diehl, “The Peacekeeping-
Peacemaking Dilemma,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 4 (2005), 621-646).
185
with the stated intention to destroy one small nation in their midst… created by United
Nations decision”
437
.
When the June 1967 War broke out between the Arab states and Israel, Johanne
Reutz Gjermoe accepted at face value the Israeli government’s denials of territorial
claims, and their declarations about peaceful coexistence, and saw Arab intransigence as
a sign of belligerence:
In the beginning of the war, Israel declared that they had no territorial
claims. It is therefore a common supposition now that this controlling of
foreign territories is kept up as a basis for negotiations with the Arab
states, about the recognition of Israel as a State by the Arab countries, and
the solution of the refugee problem, and a long-term solution of the
economic and social development in the whole area. … Soviet and the
Arab States are eager to condemn Israel as the aggressor and demanding
the Israeli troops to withdraw before any negotiations are going to take
place. … I think the war came as a surprise for some of the Arab
countries
438
.
Gjermoe made rather extensive use of Cold War rhetoric in her 1968 Middle East
report to Congress: Johnson’s public proclamations warning of the danger of an arms race
in the region were held up to Soviet arms shipments to Egypt, and Soviet-friendly Arab
states were portrayed as uncompromising and rigid and compared to Israel’s willingness
to negotiate and benevolence toward the refugees
439
. The juxtaposition of the two camps
437
WILPF IEC, Resolutions Adopted, 1964, p. 4, box 3, folder 17, Resolutions/Statements 1955-64, WILPF
SCPC Accession, UCBA. The statement was the WILPF’s direct response to the meeting of Arab heads of
States in Cairo in 1964, convened by Nasser which resulted, among other things, in the creation of the
Palestine Liberation Organization. It also came in the context of a resurgent preoccupation with anti-
semitism between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s (see for example Gertrude Baer, Report of the Work of
the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with United Nations in Geneva from the Meeting
of the International Executive Committee in Magleaas, Denmark, August 1954 Until the Meeting of the
International Executive Committee in Hamburg, Germany, July 1955, 1955, p. 14, box 14, folder 3, Reports
1955-56, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA).
438
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, “On Middle East Mission,” 1967, p. 2, box 2, folder 4, IEC Meeting 1967,
WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. Emphasis in the original.
439
Johanne Reutz Gjermoe, Report on the Middle-East, June 1967-June 1968, 1968, box 118, folder 14,
Reports on the Middle East 1968-75, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
186
was further accentuated by referring to Al Fatah as a terrorist organization attacking
Israeli civilians and “agricultural settlements” and to Israeli army’s actions as directed
against military targets or “terrorist bases”
440
.
WILPF’s almost exclusive reliance on the Israeli section’s reports throughout the
late 1940s and 1950s resulted in a view of the Israeli Army which contradicted its usual
emphasis on demilitarization and disarmament as necessary steps to peace. In 1956, for
instance, Hannah Rosenzweig (president of the Israeli section) depicted the Israeli Army
as a ‘special’ kind of army, one that provided the necessary training ground for new
immigrants, in view of their integration in Israeli democracy
441
. This portrayal of the
Israeli army as an apparatus necessary to the development and functioning of civic
society in a new country was uncontested within WILPF. This, together with the
depiction of Israel as constantly under threat, prevented the WILPF from outright
questioning the militarization of its society.
Methodology
It would be all too easy to claim that the ideological context in which the WILPF
operated crystallized WILPF’s policies and thoughts, thus determining the possibility or
impossibility of change. On the contrary, beginning at least in the 1950s, and most
notably after the Suez crisis in 1956, contestations within the WILPF about the meanings
of ‘peace’ in Israel/Palestine appeared. This led the WILPF to a sort of paralysis, where
for years it was unable to produce a comprehensive policy statement on the conflict in the
440
Ibid., 12-13.
441
Hannah Rosenzweig, “Israel in the Middle East,” in 13th International Congress of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom: Birmingham, England, 23rd-28th July, 1956 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1956), 114-115, microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC.
187
area. This failure was more than an indication of a lack of agreement among leaders and
members of the League; rather, the organization was painstakingly trying to figure out
how two different narratives about the struggle over territory could be reconciled, thus
producing policies that reflected an inclusive and better informed meaning of ‘peace’ for
Israel/Palestine.
The year 1975 represented a breakthrough moment for the WILPF. It was in this
year that the WILPF IEC produced a landmark policy statement demanding: 1) the
withdrawal of Israel to pre-1967 borders; 2) a comprehensive peace settlement including
the recognition of Israel by Arab states and the creation of a Palestinian state; 3)
negotiations between Israel, Arab states contiguous to Israel, and representatives chosen
by the Palestinians, under the aegis of the UN, the US, and the USSR; 4) the negotiation
terms had to include the “possible return and/or reparations for refugees, the special
problems of Jerusalem and steps toward the demilitarization of the area;” 5) an end to all
arms sales to the region; and 6) the channeling of all economic aid through the UNDP or
other UN agencies
442
.
This statement (together with the fact-finding trip that preceded it, and the debates
at the workshops that produced it) was the first in a series that: 1) recognized self-
determination as a right of both Palestinians and Jews, which could not be satisfied by
even a ‘benevolent occupation’; 2) recognized a specific political and national identity of
Palestinians, including the right to return to a ‘national home’ (or be compensated); 3)
viewed the presence of Palestinian refugees and of Palestinian military organizations in
Arab countries as entailing certain social and economic costs, which contributed to the
442
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1975, p. 10, box 2, folder 10, IEC Meeting Germany October 1975, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
188
kind of domestic instability that had impacted Lebanon, for example; 4) departed from
earlier understandings about economic aid, which had ignored the international political
dimensions of such aid and had viewed any “development plan” as a peace-fostering
prerequisite of conflict resolution; 5) recognized that conflict and militarization in Middle
East societies affected and were affected by the levels and quality of political
involvement for Arab/Palestinian and Israeli women (and men); and 6) acknowledged
that in the Middle East context (as in other contexts) militarization of both Israeli and
Arab and Palestinian societies precluded economic development by diverting resources
and maintaining a constant state of alertness and fear.
The program of action accompanying the 1975 resolution included support for
humanitarian work in cooperation with other international organizations in two towns,
one in Lebanon and one in Israel. Diverging from earlier programs, the WILPF stressed
that “these kinds of actions not be a substitute for political activity… but a tangible way
to show solidarity for victims of war and oppression”
443
. The two sides of the conflict
were no longer Israel and the Arab states but “the oppressors and the oppressed. This
distinction cut… across all national and religious boundaries”
444
.
The WILPF was able to arrive at this change thanks to an increasing reliance on a
feminist critical methodology, which guided the WILPF throughout a large part of the
thirty-year span I cover but which came to fruition in the mid-70s.
443
Ibid., 11.
444
Libby Frank, Report of Middle-East Committee Chair to International Executive Committee, 1976, p. 7,
box 2, folder 11, IEC Meeting Switzerland July 1976, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
189
Guiding criteria
Clearly the components or prerequisites of ‘peace’ as the WILPF defined them
(i.e., freedom and democracy, self-determination, economic development to satisfy
human needs, and disarmament) were their starting points and were derived from their
liberal internationalist tradition. As I have shown earlier modernity and its assumptions
about race, gender, and class relations shaped how these general principles translated
practically in the context of the Middle East. So Israel was hailed as the only democracy
in the Middle East (capable of bringing a freedom previously unknown to Arab women)
but its undemocratic practices were unquestioned; Palestinians’ claims to self-
determination went mostly unheard; Israel’s economic model was celebrated as bringing
development “without exploitation of the people”
445
; an international development model
that reproduced gender relations was uncontested; and military belligerence was ascribed
to Arab states and (later) Palestinian organizations, but not to Israel. However, the WILPF
did not start questioning its ideas and policies toward the Middle East, and with them its
guiding criteria, only in 1975. Rather, a self-reflective methodological process was
applied with some regularity, if not consistently, beginning at least as far back as the Suez
Crisis. This process included deliberative inquiry, skeptical scrutiny and imaginative
identification.
Deliberative Inquiry
Deliberative inquiry was an essential part of the WILPF’s methodology in regards
to the Middle East question and as a general practice. However, the League was never
445
Gertrude Bussey, “World Survey,” in XIth International Congress of the Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom, at Copenhagen, Christiansboro Castle, August 15th-19th, 1949 (Geneva,
Switzerland: WILPF, 1949), 183-184, microfilm reel 141.2, SCPC.
190
(and is not now) a mass organization, though some current members would object to
what they see as an elitist characteristic of the WILPF
446
. For a number of reasons, it has
had historical difficulties in recruiting members from the working classes, racial
minorities in the US and Europe, and in forming and maintaining sections outside this
limited geo-political area. Until 1962 (when a Lebanese section was admitted), the
League had no members or sections from Arab countries. Information about the Middle
East came almost exclusively from the Israeli section reports, the Middle East Rapporteur
or Middle East committee members, reports from official and unofficial trips to
Israel/Palestine, and reports from the UN representative.
There was, however, a lot of uneasiness about the lack of Arab and Palestinian
voices. In the 1964 IEC, for example, Madeleine Bouchereau questioned the Israeli
section about the lack of Arab women in the Israeli section and Gertrude Baer regretted
that no Arab country was represented at that year’s IEC, despite the fact that the League
had a new section in Lebanon
447
. Further, Gertrude Baer spoke against the issuing of a
Middle East resolution arrived at without the participation of the Lebanese section (which
had been admitted to the League two years earlier)
448
. Throughout the 1960s the WILPF
continued efforts aimed at establishing and maintaining contacts with Arab women. As
shown in chapter 4, the search for more inclusive deliberations within the WILPF went
beyond the Middle East and included efforts at establishing sections in the Third World,
in the global context of the rising Non-Aligned Movement, the struggle against the
446
Cf. for example Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author, July 13, 2003 with Joyce McLean, interview
by the author, April 19, 2004.
447
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1964, p. 10, box 5, folder 11, IEC Meeting Minutes 1960-64, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
448
Ibid., 24.
191
Apartheid regime in South Africa, and the growing US military involvement in Southeast
Asia.
Lacking adequate representation, the WILPF tried to gather information through
fact-finding trips to areas outside of the WILPF’s geopolitical reach. But trips could also
result in a confirmation of previously-held positions and ideas. This was the case, for
example, of Elisabeth Waern-Bugge’s 1931 mission, for reasons I have explained earlier.
Both a willingness by the WILPF’s delegates to seek contacts and dialogue with a variety
of people, and the consistent application of skeptical scrutiny to a delegate’s own beliefs
were necessary to produce reports, and thus influence policies, which were considerate of
all voices and inclusive of those most marginalized. The WILPF’s various trip reports
therefore reflected the extent to which these efforts were made and both inclusive
deliberation and skeptical scrutiny were pursued during the trip.
For example, there is a remarkable difference between Madeleine Boucherau’s
and Signe Höjer’s trip reports of 1958. Though, to a degree, both reports reflected
Orientalist views of Arab women, Bouchereau’s efforts at reaching out to Arabs and
Palestinians resulted in conclusions that took into consideration Arab and Palestinian
views of the conflict. Höjer’s report on the contrary almost exclusively reflected the
Israeli narrative, due to the fact that her only interlocutors were Israelis or Israeli-friendly
contacts (she also visited only Israel)
449
.
Madeleine Bouchereau’s 1958 trip also resulted in the admission of a Lebanese
section (which included Palestinian women) in 1962. The presence of the Lebanese
449
Cf. Emily Parker Simon Report with Excerpts from the Report of Madeleine Bouchereau's Mission to
the Middle East, Spring 1958, 1959, box 118, folder 4, Reports on the Middle East 1958-59, WILPF
Second Accession, UCBA and Signe Höjer, Visit to Israel in February/March 1958, 1958, box 26, folder 8,
Circular Letters January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
192
section changed the dynamics of discussions within the League: on the one hand,
discussions became progressively more heated and, at times, direct dialogue almost
impossible. On the other hand, the presence of the Lebanese section in international
meetings of the WILPF provided a direct link with and gave voice to Arab and
Palestinian opinions about Israel/Palestine. Though a turning point, this presence did not
translate in immediate changes in policy. According to Elise Boulding (who was WILPF’s
International Chairman for a term around this time) “it took a while to see the two
different histories [of Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis] and the two different kinds of
needs. And some people saw it sooner than others. [...] [T]he Lebanese section began
reeducating us about Palestine”
450
. Eventually for the first time in 1974, Lebanese, Israeli
and other members of the WILPF met in a workshop and together they came to an
agreement on short-term initiatives, that would serve the long-term purpose of producing
a comprehensive policy statement.
This workshop provides further evidence of WILPF’s reliance on inclusive
deliberative inquiry (and its ability to influence a change in ideas and policies). It was led
by Libby Frank during the 1974 Congress. Frank, a US Jewish member, had been active
in the Zionist movement in the 1940s and 1950s
451
and had initiated a dialogue within the
US section which had involved Palestinian women. While fighting sharp opposition to
450
Elise Boulding, interview by the author, May 21, 2005.
451
Frank recalls the personal development of her political thinking toward the Middle East as follows: “I
also wanted to move to Israel at that point [in the 40s and 50s]. I wanted to live in Israel and it was to help
the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland. And then I realized that the Jews in Israel weren’t going to be
safe if they weren’t safe everywhere and then I realized - this is not in one day this is over years - I realized
that the Jews weren’t going to be safe if everybody wasn’t safe. That was kind of the development of my
politics” (Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004).
193
her opening toward Palestinians, she also found some supporters. This strongly
encouraged her to take an active stance at the international level
452
.
Frank tried to position herself as a friendly mediator. First, Ruth Gage Colby, then
the WILPF's representative at the UN, introduced her to the Lebanese delegation. In
Frank’s recollection sharing a meal with the Lebanese women was a defining moment:
[Colby] knew the Arab women in WILPF and she introduced me to them
and told them I was a good person and that was a good opening. But this is
all, this is all necessary – here I am, Jewish, and you know I’m going to be
leading these workshops and there’s a lot of hesitation and a lot of
questions about that. So Ruth had me eat one meal with them and get to
know them. She was my go between so they knew to give me a chance
453
.
Over the following two or three days, WILPF women from many sections,
including the Lebanese and Israelis, gathered in a workshop in order “to identify some
short term action which the WILPF or others could take in the next six months to help
relieve tensions and violence in the Middle East”
454
. In addition to some “standard” rules
of debate (“you don’t interrupt, you don’t speak twice”), the group agreed to limit
arguments to references to the present situation, with no discussion of past history; to
refrain from accusations; to avoid criticizing any government but one’s own
455
.
Despite great tension
456
and the initial feeling on the part of some participants
(namely the Danish section) that a general debate would lead to “more hostility rather
452
Ibid. See also Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author, August 7, 2004.
453
Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004.
454
Dolores Taller, WILPF 19th Triennial Congress Middle East Workshop: A Brief Report, 1974, p. 1,
WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
455
Ibid. See also Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004.
456
Divisions within the WILPF were so sharp that Frank was once reproached for having been seen talking
in private to a “pro-Palestinian” member. However, Frank was also reassured by the explicit support of
some US Jewish members of the League (Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004).
194
than constructive attitudes”
457
, the workshop succeeded in getting the Lebanese and
Israeli delegates in the same room to talk to each other directly. Some participants to the
workshop attributed this partial success to Libby Frank’s organizing and leadership skills
and to the methodology of the workshop process
458
. In addition, Frank was able to
position herself as a “multi-sited critic”
459
, enabling her to gain the trust of many sides.
The workshop didn’t produce, nor it was meant to produce at the time, significant
comprehensive policy changes, but the Congress agreed to finance a new fact-finding
mission the subsequent year followed by a new Middle-East workshop. In the meantime,
sections were asked to undertake “an extensive study program” in preparation for 1975
460
.
Skeptical Scrutiny
As far back as 1948, a lone voice within the WILPF executive, Dorothy Warner of
Great Britain, actually thought that, while she didn’t agree on partition, the existence of
Israel was a fact that could not be reversed and that the WILPF’s work should have been
to convince the Arabs “not that the Jews have a ‘right’ to the State of Israel, but that it
would be politically wise to accept the creation of a Jewish state”
461
. Thus, although
457
Dolores Taller, WILPF 19th Triennial Congress Middle East Workshop: A Brief Report, 1974, p. 2,
WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
458
Dolores Taller, Notes from 19th WILPF Congress, 1974, p. 6, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores
Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
459
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 24.
460
Dolores Taller, Notes from 19th WILPF Congress, 1974, p. 5, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores
Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA. Later that same year, Yasser Arafat made his historical appearance
in front of the UN General Assembly, denouncing Zionism, inscribing the Palestinian struggle in the
decolonization and national liberation movements, while extending a symbolic olive branch to the Israeli
government.
461
Cited in WILPF, Search for Peace in the Middle East: A Brief Record of Efforts by WILPF to further
Peaceful Solutions of the Conflict in the Middle East,
http://www.wilpf.int.ch/publications/2000middleeast1930.htm (accessed 04/20/2006).
195
strategic considerations should have led the Arab states to accept the fait accompli of
Israel’s creation, Warner did not believe that a right to self-determination of the Jewish
people in Palestine should have produced a partition, which effectively denied the right to
self-determination of a large section of the population of the area.
In 1957 Gladys Walser, the WILPF’s representative at the UN started considering
the possibility that the portrayal of refugees as entirely politically manipulated and turned
into hostile enemies of Israel by Arab countries was at least partially inaccurate. In
addition, Walser proposed that Israel had “sustained a moral setback” when in 1948 it
took over properties of Arabs fleeing the war, and did not permit repatriation. Walser thus
was starting to question the previously held faith in Israel’s higher moral standing and
was willing and able to reconsider that people that had been living in the area had a
legitimate desire and claim to return (the question of refugees had started to become a
political issue for her)
462
.
The WILPF grew also increasingly skeptical of the UN Security Council’s ability
and willingness to serve “justice for the disputing parties” as opposed to the “interests of
the Permanent Members of the Security Council,” and toward the benevolence of US
brokerage of the Middle East question
463
. Once hailed for its “moral stance” in its support
of Israel’s creation, the US started to be viewed in a less sympathetic way, and the context
of the Cold War (with its repercussions for Middle East politics) as a smokescreen that
prevented a human-centered approach from taking priority in international relations.
462
Gladys D. Walser, The Fourth and Final Report of the Eleventh Session of the General Assembly, 1957,
pp. 11-13 and 22, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
463
Dolores Taller, Notes from 19th WILPF Congress, 1974, p. 3, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores
Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA. See also Edith Ballantyne, Letter to Dolores Taller, July 11, 1975,
p. 1, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed), UCBA.
196
That the WILPF was consciously applying skeptical scrutiny (though not
articulating it as such) to their own ideas and policies is further exemplified by Dorothy
Hutchinson’s concern about individual sections’ methods. At the end of her three-year
term as Chairman, Hutchinson stressed the prominence of WILPF’s principles over
national loyalties:
I am troubled that a few of our Sections seem to feel less free than in the
past to criticize their own or other governments when the policies of these
governments are at variance with those of WILPF
464
.
It was during this address that Hutchinson articulated her interpretation of Jane
Addams' “imaginative identification”
465
, which she believed ideally, though not always,
guided the WILPF's own methods.
The Role of Social Critics
Inside, outside and “multi-sited critics”
466
promoted deliberation, skeptical
scrutiny and facilitated policy changes. Critics formed an essential element of the
WILPF’s methodology. For example WILPF’s UN representative Gladys Walser arrived
at her considerations about the morality of Israel’s actions in 1957, after having listened
to Henry Labouisse, then director of UNRWA, and having read an article from a US
Jewish pacifist newsletter
467
. It has to be noted that Walser had previously described the
464
Dorothy Hutchinson, Chairman's Keynote Address, “The Right to be Human,” 1968, p. 9, box 25, 16th
International Congress Report 1966 and 17th International Congress Report 1968, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
465
See chapter 3, page 104.
466
According to Brooke Ackerly, “[t]he multi-sited critic has the unique perspective of an individual who
has been an insider or outsider vis-à-vis more than one group: she has acquired local knowledge about more
than one group. She is able to move between the places and ideas of those groups. And she is generally
self-conscious about her perspective” (Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 154).
467
Gladys D. Walser, The Fourth and Final Report of the Eleventh Session of the General Assembly, 1957,
197
Arab states as rigid and unwilling to negotiate a settlement with Israel, soon after the
Suez Crisis had erupted
468
. Thus, her change of mind was strongly influenced by these
contacts and her willingness to subject her previously held opinions to skeptical scrutiny.
Henry Labouisse and the authors of the US Jewish newletter fulfilled the roles of “outside
critics”
469
, who had some knowledge of the voices that were being silenced within the
WILPF, and who prompted a WILPF’s member’s inquiry about its exclusionary ideas and
practices.
Inside critics, outsiders, and “multi-sited critics” played a role in promoting
skeptical scrutiny, representing the “silent voices” in the WILPF, facilitating dialogue
between the Israeli and the Lebanese section, performing a sort of “shuttle diplomacy”
between members who would not speak directly to each other
470
, calling for
representation of Arab and Palestinian women in international meetings of the WILPF
and searching for a variety of interlocutors during fact-finding missions.
In 1960, Sushila Nayar for the first time forced the WILPF to face its own
assumptions about Arab women (and people in developing countries in general).
Reporting a conversation with a Lebanese woman, Nayar pointed out how “Arab women
pp. 11-13 and 22, box 14, folder 4, Reports 1957-58, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
468
Gladys Walser, Work with the United Nations at U.N. Headquarters in New York, In 13th International
Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: Birmingham, England, 23rd-28th
July, 1956 (Geneva, Switzerland: WILPF, 1956), p. 71, microfilm reel 141.3, SCPC.
469
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 152-155.
470
Libby Frank recalls having been told that “at earlier meeting, at earlier congresses people actually threw
their purses at each other, slammed out of the room” (Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004).
And Edith Ballantyne recalls that Lebanese and Israeli delegates for a time categorically refused to even be
in the same room, relying on a mediator to convey messages to each other (Edith Ballantyne, interview by
Felicity Hill, March 19, 2005).
198
feel unwelcome in international gatherings of women who seem unwilling to recognise
that the Arab women have a point of view and dismiss them as morally prejudiced”
471
.
She further gave voice to prevailing Arab sentiments toward Israel:
the Arabs believe that Israel is an outpost of the West. If she is to have
good will in the area she must be “of” them not an outpost of the West.
They believe that Israel has the weight of the USA behind her and that
arms she is getting from the U.S. are colossal and that with large numbers
of immigrants coming in, Israel will seek more land
472
.
Finally, she conveyed a message about people’s common hopes, when she
expressed concerns about Western financial aid, which she found needed to be bestowed
“in a manner that will not offend the recipients,” as independence, economic
development, and education were common aspirations of “modern man” in developing
and developed areas
473
. As a multi-sited critic Nayar thus encouraged the practice of
imaginative identification, by presenting the Arab narrative about the conflict, the
problems with Western aid and pointing out that they shared a common humanity.
Elise Boulding took on a conciliatory role in 1969, when she called the Lebanese
and Israeli sections to “support the moderate factions in each country”
474
, identified with
“able peacemakers…whose voices cannot be heard just now because the military
response has the upper hand”
475
. In this way Boulding was trying to foster inclusive
dialogue and the promotion of her own guiding principle of non-violence.
471
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1960, p. 13, box 5, folder 11, IEC Meeting Minutes 1960-64, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
472
Ibid.
473
Ibid.
474
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1969, p. 1, box 5, folder 12, IEC Meeting Minutes 1965-69, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
475
Elise Boulding, Letter to the Officers and Members of the Lebanese and Israeli Sections of the WILPF,
1969, p. 2, box 35, folder 8, Israel 1964-1982, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
199
Libby Frank and Edith Ballantyne also fulfilled the roles of social critics when,
after returning from their 1975 fact-finding trip, they proposed that the entire WILPF
initiate systematic internal discussions and studies on the Middle East, starting with a
Middle East workshop at the Hamburg IEC meeting in 1975. They felt that a seminar
with outside speakers would do little to break the deadlock within the organization, which
could be solved only through direct internal confrontation. Such confrontation could not,
however, be limited to a discussion between Middle East sections “with the rest sitting on
either side or in the middle, but it must be between all members with equal
responsibility”
476
. It was that meeting that produced the 1975 breakthrough policy
statement
477
.
Critics within and outside the WILPF and multi-sited critics promoted
institutional change by facilitating the WILPF’s self-examination of its ideas about
‘peace’ in the Middle East.
Imaginative Identification
The WILPF’s members’ historical memories of the Holocaust and the struggle
against Nazism and anti-semitism in Europe facilitated the WILPF's early identification
476
Libby Frank, WILPF Middle East Mission, April - May 1975: Report, 1975, p. 10, box 2, folder 10, IEC
Meeting Germany October 1975, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also Edith Ballantyne, Middle East
Mission - A Personal Report (April 19- may 2, 1975), 1975, p. 23, box 118, folder 14, Reports on the
Middle East 1968-75, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
477
I have to point out that the Israeli section did not participate in the 1975 meeting. The section had
undergone a change in leadership, which had resulted in a radicalization of their position and an abrupt
rupture with the WILPF. Frank and Ballantyne feel that the change in leadership had transformed the
section into a propagandistic arm of the Israeli government (Edith Ballantyne, interview by the author,
August 7, 2004; Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004). The section was later disbanded and
a new section formed and admitted in 1982 from members of the pacifist organization Gesher L’Shalom.
The new section continued to participate in the formulation of WILPF policies together with the Lebanese
and, starting in 1989, the Palestinian sections (Aliyah Strauss, interview by the author, August 1, 2004.).
200
with Israeli/Zionist aspirations. In 1958, Signe Höjer reported: “First of all I would
compare the situation in Israel with that in which Sweden found itself during WWII,
when the country was surrounded by Hitler's armies and expecting at any moment to be
invaded”
478
. Imaginative identification made it easier, in this case to portray Israel as a
peace loving country, contrasting it with Arabs’ hatefulness and belligerence, and
explaining away Israeli nationalism as a reaction to outside aggression: “[i]n Israel, the
hatred is not on her side, even if nationalist feelings such as were to be found in my own
country during the war, have an easy terrain to thrive in”
479
. The reading of Israel’s
position through Höjer’s own experiences in World War II could only lead to a failure to
contextualize the Israeli state position in 1958 as complexly inscribed in the existing
international context of East-West rivalry, with particular local repercussions and
consequences for the Arab populations affected by Israel’s creation. On a couple of
occasions, accusations were leveled against Nasser’s Egypt of harboring German Nazis
as counselors in the government and the army
480
. This example shows how imaginative
identification alone cannot induce emancipatory social change, but has to be practiced in
conjunction with deliberative inquiry and skeptical scrutiny.
There were numerous occasions on which imaginative identification was used
together with deliberative inquiry and skeptical scrutiny to make better informed
judgments about the Palestine/Israel conflict. For example, deliberative inquiry and
478
Signe Höjer, Visit to Israel in February/March 1958, 1958, p. 12, box 26, folder 8, Circular Letters
January 1958-November 1959 & 1969-70, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
479
Ibid., 12-13.
480
See Gertrude Woker’s intervention in WILPF IEC, Decisions and Summary of Records, 1957, p. 9, box
26, folder 7, Circular Letters October 1956-December 1957, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also
WILPF IEC, Minutes, 1960, p. 13, box 5, folder 11, IEC Meeting Minutes 1960-64, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
201
imaginative identification guided Libby Frank and Edith Ballantyne’s 1975 fact-finding
trip. The two women thought that
the League could make a unique contribution to understanding in the area
if the Mission studied the problems Arab and Israeli women face in the
current conflict situation and in gaining a better knowledge of their status
in society, their activities and their aspirations
481
.
Therefore, Ballantyne and Frank approached their trip with the understanding that
the situation in Israel/Palestine was better evaluated through an empathetic view of the
insiders’ perspectives. Only through this method, they (and particularly Edith Ballantyne)
believed the League could come to an agreement and take a definite policy stand on some
“significant international issues, even on those that are the most controversial.” She felt
that the WILPF needed to identify the causes of war and the obstacles to peace, in order
to achieve its constitutional aims. This necessarily implied that the WILPF “must be
prepared to take sides against those who threaten peace or are guilty of breaches of the
peace,” while working “to conciliate international differences”
482
. Although Libby Frank
had admittedly come to the trip carrying with her stereotypes about Arab women as
“backward”
483
, she soon revisited her assumptions based on her observations and
contacts. Israeli, Arab and Palestinian women, engaged in dialogue among themselves
and with other members of the WILPF thus fulfilled the roles of social critics in
481
Libby Frank, WILPF Middle East Mission, April - May 1975: Report, 1975, p. 1, box 2, folder 10, IEC
Meeting Germany October 1975, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA.
482
Edith Ballantyne, “League’s Aims: As Valid Today as When Founded,” Pax et Libertas, 1975, p. 20, box
162, folder 2, Pax et Libertas Annual 1975-79, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
483
Quoted in Marsha Romeranz, “Int'l Peace Group Seeks Dialogue between Women of the Mideast,” The
Jerusalem Post, May 13, 1975, WILPF International 1968-75, Dolores Taller Collection (unprocessed),
UCBA.
202
promoting inclusive and empathetic deliberative inquiry within the WILPF on the Israel/
Palestine conflict.
Libby Frank recalls, for her, that a breakthrough moment in her understanding of
Palestinian-Israeli relations happened during a discussion she had with Siba Fahoum, one
of the Lebanese section members, while on a plane trip to the 1975 IEC:
I had a book, which was anti-Semitic. It was ostensibly put out by the
PLO,… and I showed it to her, we were sitting together on the plane and I
would say: Siba, look at this. How could they put out something like this?
And she looked at it and she said: ‘we didn’t do that. The PLO didn’t do
that.’ And I said: ‘what do you mean?’ It showed a picture of a huge Arab,
a huge Arab ogre wanting to devour tiny little Israel. … What the booklet
indicated was that the Arabs wanted to destroy Israel and she said: ‘we
don’t, never, that’s not how we portray that situation.’ She said: ‘we
Palestinians and Arabs, we show Israel as a big ogre, and they are the
military strength and they are trying to defeat us.’ … It was very
interesting. It was very enlightening
484
.
By reading the booklet with skeptical eyes and practicing an empathetic
understanding of the concerns and interpretation of her interlocutor, Fahoum and Frank
together arrived at the conclusion that the booklet was part of the Israeli government’s
propaganda. Thus a willingness to subject her interpretation of a racist pamphlet to
skeptical scrutiny and to imaginatively identify with a different interpretation, Frank
revisited her assumptions about a supposedly peaceful Israel and a belligerent
(Arab/Palestinian) other
485
.
484
Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004.
485
Frank also thought that racial and historical myths were not the exclusive prerogative of Israeli and US
Jews: Arabs and Palestinians had misconceptions about the nature of Zionism, which she felt they equated
with “that demand for Jewish exclusiveness and sovereignty in Israel which result[ed] in discrimination
against Arabs and particularly Palestinians” (Libby Frank, “The Zionist/Racist Resolution at the UN,”
1975, p. 1, box 91, folder 13, Middle East Libby Frank Correspondence 1975-81, WILPF Second
Accession, UCBA). Libby Frank was especially concerned about how discussions over the nature of
Zionism distracted attention from the search for solutions to the conflict. She felt that the UN General
Assembly’s resolutions equating Zionism with racism and the South African apartheid regime (in 1973 and
1975) were used as politically expedient tools by “the most hawkish and intransigent of the Israelis and the
203
Conclusions
The statement and program of action arrived at in 1975 was amended several
times in the following years, though the WILPF has maintained its basic framework.
From 1975 on, sections and branches took Frank and Ballantyne’s suggestions to actively
study the question, participate as equally involved parties to discussions “about the
options available for a peace in the Middle East”
486
, and continuously and consistently
facilitated and mediated contacts between Middle East sections’ members and with other
peace organizations
487
. The practice of inclusive discussion, confrontation and
imaginative identification inherited from the WILPF founders (Jane Addams in
particular) and continued as a tradition within the WILPF over the years allowed the
League to start listening to the voices of excluded collectivities, providing a methodology
through which modernist assumptions could be questioned and transformed. This
conversion did not happen suddenly and unexpectedly in 1975; neither did the
progression operate in a linear fashion and in the absence of contestations and reversals.
International and national politico-economic conditions contributed to shifts and re-
evaluations of policies toward the Middle East, and the WILPF’s views about gender,
race, and class relations both influenced and were influenced by historical circumstances.
However, the WILPF’s methodological commitments (and the agents that formulated,
Americans” and by Arab regimes to rally people to their causes, hide their governments’ racist or racist-
supporting actions, and further accentuate the artificial “us vs. them” divide in the Middle East (ibid.).
Therefore, she pressed the League against supporting those resolutions.
486
Libby Frank, WILPF Middle East Mission, April - May 1975: Report, 1975, p. 10, box 2, folder 10, IEC
Meeting Germany October 1975, WILPF SCPC Accession, UCBA. See also Edith Ballantyne, Middle East
Mission - A Personal Report (April 19- may 2, 1975), 1975, p. 23, box 118, folder 14, Reports on the
Middle East 1968-75, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
487
Dolores Taller, interview by the author, April 21, 2004.
204
implemented, and reinforced these commitments
488
) provided the avenue through which
personal assumptions, institutional structures, and views about international politics,
could be transformed.
The changes brought about in 1975 were not without consequences for an
organization, which was heavily dependent on the support of a large US Jewish
constituency and of members (in the US and Europe) whose memories of the holocaust
were still vivid. In fact many of my interviewees claim that the WILPF lost many
members as a result of its change in policies. However, Libby Frank was willing to take
the risk: she recalls having pledged, as Chair of the Middle East Committee, to recruit
one new member for each member that left the WILPF and claims to have been able to do
so
489
. To be clear, the WILPF is still plagued and troubled by its inability to reach out to
constituencies other than the traditional Western middle-to-upper class older women who
have made up its ranks since its founding. It is still struggling to find institutional and
deliberative forms that are more inclusive and considerate of non-Western political tools
and paradigms.
But the history of the period between 1946 and 1975 shows that an increasing
reliance on four feminist critical methodological practices allowed the WILPF to
challenge the political and ideational milieu within which it was inscribed, thus
contributing to reframing the parameters of modernity, depart from Orientalist positions,
and reformulate its ideas about peace in the Middle East.
488
Some of the WILPF’s founders in earlier times, Libby Frank, Edith Ballantyne, the Lebanese/Palestinian
delegation, Dolores Taller, for example, but also the many members of the WILPF who studied and
participated in many forms in the WILPF’s decision-making.
489
Libby Frank, interview by the author, May 10, 2004.
205
Chapter 6: Conclusions
This dissertation contributes to constructivist IR by arguing that feminist critical
methodology offers a theory of agency that takes into account the co-constitution of
agents and structures. The previous chapters established that methodology (understood as
“guiding self-conscious reflections on epistemological assumptions, ontological
perspective, ethical responsibilities, and method choices”
490
) matters in the pursuit of
peace or, put in other words, that how one pursues peace is important to the kinds of
peace that might result. Between 1945 and 1975 the WILPF's understanding of peace, as
expressed in its policies on disarmament, decolonization and the conflict in
Israel/Palestine, underwent several changes. Such changes were made possible by a
feminist critical methodology, which guided the WILPF toward self-reflection about both
its ideas and practices and toward more inclusivity in decision-making. This methodology
helped the organization to identify and remedy potential and actual forms of oppression
and exclusion in society and in its practice. While far from perfect, feminist critical
methodology contributes to IR a theory of emancipatory social change.
In the third chapter I showed that the WILPF’s views on the causes of war,
militarization, the arms buildup and their elimination went through two distinct phases,
which reflected different understandings of peace. During the first phase, the WILPF
believed that disarmament would follow peace. This, in turn, would be established with
the help of a set of rational laws and consensual agreements among states that would
make the resort to war unnecessary. Science and technology, guided by rationality and
reason, had the ability to guide humanity toward progress and tame nuclear energy for
490
Ackerly, Stern and True, “Feminist Methodologies,” 6.
206
peaceful uses. Though it was important to have an avenue like the WILPF where women
could speak out on matters of international politics and in favor of disarmament, peace,
and the rational, peaceful utilization of nuclear energy, the WILPF thought that women
had no special knowledge, nor a special interest in peace
491
. These positions reflected
liberal modern understandings about the nature of law and science and the WILPF's
adherence to the normative and ideological framework that was shaping the creation of
the postwar international order. The WILPF gradually worked its way out of these
constraints, while not entirely abandoning the liberal principles that guided it. So, in the
second phase, the organization came to understand peace as an outcome of disarmament
(or disarmament as a prerequisite of peace), which would follow the establishment of a
human-needs-based and just economic order. Its economic critique of the international
system brought the WILPF to question the profit-driven nuclear and military industry as
inextricably linked to weapons production. Finally, the WILPF came to see disarmament
and a just economy to be of special interest to women; it began to view peacework as a
task for which women had developed useful skills; and it started to understand militarism
and the arms race as incompatible with the goals and principles of feminism as a political
movement for people's equality and well-being and, ultimately, for peace.
The fourth chapter showed that the WILPF's initial cautious optimism toward the
decolonization process, the Trusteeship system and the future of world community in the
wake of decolonization reflected a trust in the liberal modern roots of the international
491
Verta Taylor has developed the concept of abeyance to describe the organizational and cultural processes
that allowed the women's movements of the 1940s and 1950s in the West to survive through a hostile
political environment. and eventually make possible the flourishing of “second-wave” feminism (Verta
Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women's Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological
Review 54, no. 5 (Oct., 1989), 761-775). Though Taylor is specifically concerned with women's movements
organized around feminist goals, social movements' abeyance can help understand the reasons why the
WILPF found it irrelevant to undertake feminist analyses of peace and militarization in this period.
207
order, which embodied contradictions about the subjects entitled to liberal rights and
freedoms and racial and gendered representations of the non-European other. The
decolonization movement’s growing strength between the late 1950s and the late 1960s
found the WILPF divided between those who supported a gradual and nonviolent process
toward decolonization and those who advocated the immediate withdrawal of colonizing
powers from their remaining colonies and Trusteeship territories. Discussions in this
period brought racial and gendered assumptions to light more explicitly, yet at the same
time enabled members to openly question them. The mid-1960s international context
fostered the WILPF's further self-reflection on the meaning of peace as it related to
decolonization and freedom. In this third phase the WILPF reached consensus in support
of struggles for independence, while maintaining the superiority of nonviolence over
violence. The WILPF used stronger words to denounce colonialism and neo-colonialism,
it talked about a “system of exploitation, privilege and profit” as the ultimate source of
(structural) violence, it referred to “overdeveloped” nations, rather than underdeveloped
ones. This policy shift reflected an ideological shift, a critique of the liberal principles
that had guided the WILPF for many decades and ultimately represented a different
understanding of peace, one which expanded the boundaries of the historical and
ideological context that had shaped the organization.
Finally, chapter five followed the policies of the WILPF in a particular
geopolitical context, the conflict in Israel/Palestine. It demonstrated that their idea of
‘peace’ was influenced and shaped by the two intertwined ideological discourses of
modernity and Orientalism. As a consequence, the WILPF privileged Israeli narratives
and denied legitimacy to Palestinian claims. In the mid-seventies, the WILPF declared its
208
support for a two-state solution, a peace conference under UN auspices, and the creation
of a WMD-free zone in the area. With this resolution, and increasingly in subsequent
years, the WILPF went from being timidly pro-Israel to assertively questioning Israel’s
policies, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the democratic nature of the
Israeli state. The WILPF had thus reframed its idea of peace around the recognition of
Palestinian, as well as Israeli, aspirations.
These policy and ideational shifts were made possible by a feminist critical
methodology, which the WILPF largely implicitly, but consciously followed and which
allowed the organization to break out of the entrapment of the context that created and
shaped it. As activists, the WILPF's women practiced a theoretically-informed
methodology whenever, during the course of making policy decisions, they reflected on
the relationship between their views about the world (ontology), their understanding of
how they knew what they (thought they) knew about the world (epistemology), their
ethical stances about world problems and the issue of peace, and the ways they chose to
act on them (methods). As activists they made theoretical contributions to feminist IR by
proposing different ways to think about the relationship between women, feminism and
peace
492
.
Between 1945 and 1975 the WILPF's women remained divided over whether
women were more peaceful than men. Yet they continued to have faith in the necessity of
an organization of women devoted to the promotion of peace. To the feminist IR
preoccupation about too-easy associations between women and peace they responded
492
In drawing theoretical lessons from feminist activism I join IR feminists such as Catherine Eschle and
Bice Maiguashca, “Rethinking Globalised Resistance: Feminist Activism and Critical Theorising in
International Relations,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 2 (May, 2007), 284-
301; Eschle, Global Democracy; Ackerly, Universal Human Rights; and Ackerly, “Feminist
Methodological Reflection.”
209
with different questions: to what extent is peace a women's issue, that is do women have
a special interest in peace?; and what relationship, if any, exists between feminism and
militarism, and between feminism and peace? These questions implicitly informed the
WILPF as the women debated their policy positions. Different responses to these
questions undergirded their policies on disarmament, decolonization and the conflict in
Israel/Palestine. From thinking that women's interests and priorities were a matter of
fairness, but had little relationship to the pursuit of peace, the WILPF came to the
realization that peace was of special concern to women. While they all agreed on this,
they continued to differ over the reasons why this was so, and over whether it made sense
to even talk about common, generalizable women's interests. From refraining to discuss
the relationship between feminism and militarism, the WILPF started to undertake a
critique of militarism, racism and the international order that owed much to feminist
theory and activism, insofar as it described all forms of hierarchy, marginalization and
oppression as interrelated.
I asked what contributed to these ideational and policy shifts and I teased out the
methodological components of their practices. I showed that changes in the international
context alone were not enough to understand or explain how the WILPF's positions
changed in the course of thirty years. The international context of the 1960s (with the
surge of citizens' protests, second-wave feminism, and the non-aligned movement)
provided the opportunity for increased input from outside and multi-sited critics, who
promoted more inclusive deliberative processes and the critique of the WILPF's often
unstated assumptions and practices. But the WILPF in the 1960s joined other
organizations in formulating wider reaching understandings of peace; it did not follow
210
others. For example, rather than adopting an entirely horizontal and non-hierarchical
structure (which was characteristic of some of the organizations and movements with
which the WILPF cooperated) the WILPF maintained its essentially liberal organizational
framework and formal decision-making procedures. Optimally, within those spaces it
practiced “a horizontal, participatory, inclusive, responsible, educative and nurturing way
of doing things – a way that some would claim as feminist”
493
, though as seen in the
empirical chapters, this was not always so. The WILPF's policy changes did not represent
an adaptation to a changing political and economic environment. Rather, the WILPF’s is
a story among many of organizations and social movements that brought about some
changes in the international realm
494
.
The 1970s saw the rise of neoliberalism which, as an extremely individualist
ideology, subordinated the state to the market, promoted the deregulation and
privatization of the economy, the minimization of the state and the consequent
elimination of the institutions of welfare
495
, at the national and (through international
financial and trade organizations) at the global level. The WILPF was further radicalized
by proposing a strong critique of liberalism's very foundations, which had been its own.
Between 1975 and 1985 the West experienced a resurgence of anti-Communist paranoia
493
Cynthia Cockburn, “Feminist Antimilitarism and WILPF,”
http://www.wilpf.int.ch/events/2008IB/cockburn_speech.html (accessed 2/22/2009)
494
The literature on the role of social movements in effecting international change illustrates this. See for
example David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen's Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1993); David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge, UK; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008). Ian Welsh claims that “[o]ne measure of movement success [can be]
the extent to which the cultural artefacts of movements, as opposed to their knowledge claims, are adopted
within a particular social formation” (Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity, 29). In this sense, anti-nuclear and anti-
militarist movements of the Cold War enabled the formation of contemporary social movements and
influenced their structures, cultures and methods. Thus their reach extended beyond their actual or
perceived impact on the nuclear policies of nation-states.
495
Richardson, Contending Liberalisms, 42-45.
211
and accusations of Communism were leveled against the WILPF once again. This time
the WILPF did not go on the defensive, but continued and intensified its critique of the
international order.
The WILPF was a Western liberal middle class white women's organization,
which stretched the boundaries of the liberal context within which it was inscribed and
from which it both drew inspiration and tried to break free. The WILPF that came out of
this period was a different kind of organization, one that showed a more intentional and
more intensive effort at becoming a truly international organization, rather than a Western
organization guided by liberal internationalist principles. So while the WILPF operated
within a liberal modern zeitgeist, it also pushed liberalism and internationalism toward a
more inclusive, less hegemonic form. Yet it was unable to do so completely, perhaps
reflecting the problem of social movements and organizations in the West and of liberal
internationalism more generally.
I asked how the WILPF arrived at these changes and I identified the
methodological tools that made them possible. I started with the basic constructivist (and
feminist constructivist) claim that structures and agents are mutually constituted. While
constructivism's debates on the co-constitution of agent and structure focus on
ontological and epistemological questions, I shifted my attention to methodology. I
sought to point out that theoretical methods influence the way agents see the world and
act upon it. I thus suggested that the story of the WILPF offers a contribution to the
agent-structure debate in constructivism by showing how a group of women peace
activists advanced, through the practice of a feminist critical methodology, a critical
constructivist theory of agency. In the theoretical methods applied by the WILPF I
212
identified the possibility for a political agency that is conscious and critical of structural
limits and is therefore useful for activists and social movements interested in
emancipatory social change. In other words, by using feminist critical methodological
tools, organizations and social movements will be more likely to effect emancipatory
social change.
The history of the WILPF reframes the relationship between feminism and peace
studies in that it suggests that a feminist methodology, rather than a firm set of principles,
can lead to broader and more accurate conceptualizations of peace. In chapter 2 I
suggested that, rather than identifying a firm set of principles about what constitutes
emancipation, social change, or even peace, a critical constructivist theory of agency
needs a methodology that:
1)allows actors to identify and remedy actual or potential forms of oppression and
exclusion in society and in their own practice;
2)guides actors toward inclusivity and opens them to input and ideas from
(potentially) all members of society
3)compels critical self-reflection over actors' assumptions, language and
embeddedness in a particular historical and ideological context;
4)enables the recurrent evaluation of actors' practices and ideas.
I contend that feminist critical methodology satisfies these requirements and is
therefore a useful and necessary tool for critical social movements in their quest for social
transformation, insofar as change requires shifts away from exclusionary and/or
oppressive ideas and practices. Feminist critical methodology draws from and extends
Brooke Ackerly's TWFSC. Ackerly's starting point and inspiration for her theoretical
213
model are groups of Bangladeshi women activists and community leaders living in
particularly marginalized contexts struggling against harmful inequalities in their
societies and their lives. Ackerly finds that TWFSC is also practiced by other Third World
women's organizations and by the international women's human rights movement. While
describing the efforts of this movement, Ackerly highlights that some of the movement
shortcomings reflect its failure to apply all elements of TWFSC to their deliberative
processes: continuous skeptical scrutiny of its achievements would reveal how the
movement institutionalized exclusive and oppressive practices thus failing, for example,
to fully incorporate non-Western women or to heed their criticism of the movement's
excessive focus on anti-discrimination to the expenses of socio-economic justice. I argue
that these failures point to the need for another methodological tool, to make
marginalized groups' opinions intelligible and compelling to dominant groups and the
broader society.
I suggest that “imaginative identification,” a phrase that I borrow from Dorothy
Hutchinson's 1968 speech as outgoing Chairman of the WILPF
496
, complements TWFSC.
Together, TWFSC and imaginative identification make up a feminist critical methodology
which I argue has been used by the WILPF to challenge its ideological foundations, its
embeddedness in liberalism and notions about gender, race and class relations inscribed
in those foundations. Imaginative identification guarantees the enactment of a feminist
ethics of care, which is necessary to fully compel the skeptical scrutiny of entrenched
ideas, thus enabling an agency that challenges structural constraints.
496
Dorothy Hutchinson, Chairman's Keynote Address, “The Right to be Human,” 1968, pp. 7-8, box 25,
16th International Congress Report 1966 and 17th International Congress Report 1968, WILPF SCPC
Accession, UCBA.
214
Imaginative Identification: a Feminist Critical Methodology for Social Change
Chapter 2 suggested that TWFSC is insufficient to help dominant groups to even
hear (thus be able to make sense of) silenced and marginalized voices. The empirical
chapters have shown that the WILPF's guiding criteria (their idea of peace as expressed in
three policy areas) partially depended on exclusionary and oppressive ideologies and
practices. Inside, outside and multi-sited critics promoted deliberative inquiry and
collective learning within the organization. The limitations of the WILPF's non-inclusive
structure and membership were evident as the organization often had to rely on outside
critics to guide it through the exercise of skeptical scrutiny of its values, practices and
norms.
Brooke Ackerly correctly points out that people's ability to participate in
deliberations is severely hampered by power inequalities in society, which work to the
detriment of the less powerful
497
. TWFSC enables deliberation and political participation
in the presence of inequalities. However, limits to participation in deliberations can be of
a different nature. One of post-structuralism's insights is that meanings have a history, a
genealogy, and that the meaning we give to a certain word/action might be different from
the meaning someone else, with a different history, from a different geo-cultural or
ideological context, gives to the same word/action. In this sense, those who are at the
centers of (political, economic or social) power can be trapped in and blinded by the
historical, ideological and political context they inhabit. Ironically, it is their very position
of power which traps them and prevents them from seeing and hearing (let alone listening
to) the silent voices. Unhampered communication therefore requires a method for social
497
Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 234.
215
interactions that enables the creation of hybrid subjectivities, the recognition that the
“Other exists in part within the… Self”
498
. The empirical chapters have shown that
TWFSC falls short in this regard.
I propose that this hybrid-making process can be facilitated by extending
TWFSC’s tool box with a strategy from feminists’ ethical/methodological repertoire
499
.
Christine Sylvester’s articulation of “empathetic cooperation” as a method for IR can be
such strategy. Empathetic cooperation refers to
a process of positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the
concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is unaccustomed to heeding when
building social theory, taking on board rather than dismissing, finding in the
concerns of others borderlands of one’s own concerns and fears
500
.
Empathetic cooperation comes from feminist practice and is supported by a
political ethics of care but has none of the “anchors” that Gayatri Spivak identifies as
obstacles to conversations with the other
501
. It can be of use both in social theory and as a
social practice. It is based on the feminist principles of “learning to learn,”
498
Ling, “The Fish and the Turtle,” 286. Edward Said describes one such method as contrapuntal. The
contrapuntal method goes “beyond the usually polar oppositions that lock collective antagonists together in
conflicts” to understand empire, its variations, and the histories within it as interdependent and
unintelligible without each other (Edward W. Said, “A Method for Thinking about just Peace,” in What is a
just Peace?, eds. Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 176.
For a more extensive description of contrapuntal style see Said, Culture and Imperialism; and Geeta
Chowdhry, “Edward Said and Contrapuntal Reading: Implications for Critical Interventions in International
Relations,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 36, no. 1 (December 1, 2007), 101-116.
499
I believe that the suggestions that follow are entirely consistent with Ackerly’s theory and intentions. My
purpose here is to make imaginative identification explicitly part of a methodology for emancipatory social
change. Lily Ling explicitly mentions empathetic cooperation and other similar strategies for cross-world
communication. She claims that they are not enough and that tools that facilitate hybrid-making are needed.
500
Sylvester, “Empathetic Cooperation,” 317. That this strategy is in general part of the methodological
repertoire of feminism is clear by confronting for example Edwards, Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative
Research; Harding, Whose Science?; Harding, Is Science Multicultural?; Fonow and Cook, Beyond
Methodology; Wolf, Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork.
501
See Chapter 2, p. 46.
216
“hybridization,” “poesis,” and a political ethics of care which compels the silent voices to
come to the fore. It is, however, not exclusively feminist, nor is it exclusively for IR.
Karen Armstrong refers to a similar practice by historians of religion, who use
compassion (feeling with) to “make an imaginative, though disciplined, identification”
502
with the writer of a text and her ideas. Empathetic cooperation is importantly composed
of two elements. It involves taking
on board the struggles of others by listening to what they have to say in a
conversational style that does not push, direct, or break through to a 'linear
progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes'...
Together, empathy and cooperation enable 'different worlds and ourselves within
them'
503
.
I have called this empathetic cooperative practice within the WILPF “imaginative
identification” out of deference for the WILPF's own articulation, which precedes
Sylvester's by several decades. Sylvester has described her method as useful for
international relations theory, but she too has found it practiced by women activists (her
cases were the women of Greenham Common in the 1980s and an intergovernmental
organization “negotiating in tacit empathy” with women in Zimbabwe to secure European
Community funding for their microenterprises)
504
. Imaginative identification involves
502
Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, 1st ed. (New York; Toronto: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2004).
503
Sylvester, “Empathetic Cooperation,” 326. The first quote is from T. Minh-Ha Trinh, Woman, Native,
Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). The second
is from Maria Lugónes, “Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” In Making Face, Making
Soul = Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, 1st
ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990), 390-399. WILPF’s ideas about peace also
represent a tension between a “a feminism of totality” which is coopted “into the discourses of the
powerful”, while not being intentionally so, though lacking “a discourse based on a radical critique of the
present” and “an engaged feminism, one that refuses co-optation, or uniform definitions of what it is to be a
liberated self” (Jabri, “Feminist Ethics,” 265).
504
Sylvester, “Empathetic Cooperation,” 330-333.
217
reflecting long and hard before throwing away someone else’s ideas because at first we
do not understand them or how they relate to the question at hand. It involves striving to
understand connections, especially if we don’t see them because they are completely
alien to us. It involves making others' ideas ours first, before attempting to judge them. It
involves interrogating our own subjectivities to formulate questions that make sense for
others’ subjectivities. Finally, it involves the constant alertness to the possibility that our
empathetic efforts could involve acts of “appropriation” or imperialist moves
505
. The
empirical chapters have shown that where imaginative identification failed, guiding
criteria, deliberative inquiry and skeptical scrutiny were not enough to bring about
changes in the WILPF's policies and ideas. In concert, guiding criteria, deliberative
inquiry, skeptical scrutiny and imaginative identification provide a feminist critical
methodology that is conducive to emancipatory social change. As the previous chapters
have shown, to the degree to which this methodology was appropriated by the WILPF, it
was conducive to such a change.
Conclusions
One may reasonably argue that my theory of emancipatory social change and
feminist critical methodology themselves are products of the structure within which I, as
a social scientist, am embedded. This is a question of relative importance for the feminist
normative scholar, whose primary interest lies in the pragmatic issues relating to the
implications of theory for feminist practice and social change, and in the continual
assessment of one's theory vis-à-vis the lived experiences of women
506
. However, I did
505
Ibid., 327. In my interpretation, empathetic cooperation is largely implicit in TWFSC's skeptical
scrutiny. I make it an explicit part of a feminist critical methodology for emancipatory social change,
separate from skeptical scrutiny and fulfilling different tasks.
506
See Ackerly and True, “Studying the Struggles” for the synergies between the sociological, normative
218
not come up with an idea of what emancipatory social change should look like. I put
forward a method to help organizations reach better, more informed, more inclusive,
more critical and consciously provisional political decisions.
More importantly, however, a study of a single organization in a limited period of
time is questionably generalizable to larger organizations, different contexts, or the global
political arena. I propose this theory as a point of departure and as a suggestion for
critical IR theory, feminist IR and feminist peace studies to interact in more sustained and
perhaps more productive ways. Furthermore, while I hope for this theory to be of use to
organizations and social movements in dominant contexts, I am cognizant that
organizations in situations of marginalization might find it less useful, as it does little to
help them induce attentiveness, inclusivity, reflexivity and empathetic cooperation by the
powerful, whoever they may be.
The WILPF's policy and ideational changes were internally contested at the time
but the WILPF continues to be an avenue for many marginalized voices to be heard,
albeit in a very imperfect way. It is in a way a testament to the WILPF's persistent
feminist liveliness that a “cacophony” of voices is still heard at international Congresses,
in meetings and email exchanges
507
. For example, consider the differences manifested in
the following statements by two leaders of the WILPF. In 1984 Edith Ballantyne affirmed
and praxeological dimensions of feminist critical theory.
507
Several feminist IR theorists have described feminism as a “cacophony” of voices (Sylvester, “Riding
the Hyphens”; Helen Kinsella, “For a Careful Reading: The Conservativism of Gender Constructivism,”
International Studies Review 5, no. 2 (2003), 287-302; Marysia Zalewski, “Do we Understand Each Other
Yet? Troubling Feminist Encounters with(in) International Relations,” The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations 9, no. 2 (2007), 302-312). I borrow shamelessly from them to describe the wildly
different opinions that are welcomed within the WILPF on matters of peace and feminism.
219
that “the full participation of women in all spheres of social activity is essential to the
achievement of peace. The struggle for equality between women and men is a struggle for
peace”
508
. And again in 1986 Ballantyne stated: “there [can] be no development or
equality without peace, but there [can] be no peace either without equality and
development, without justice. The issues [are] inextricably linked”
509
. On the other hand,
more recently Krishna Ahooja Patel, WILPF International President between 2001 and
2004, made a distinction between stating that women are more peaceful and stating that
women are more peace-loving than men and added:
When we talk about linkages with peace, we need to talk about women, first, not
feminism. What difference does war make for women and men? WILPF is a
women’s organization working for peace, but not necessarily working on
women’s issues. Just because we are women it doesn’t necessarily mean that we
are feminists
510
.
To this day within the WILP there are very different opinions on the relationship
between women, feminism and peace; the organization somehow manages to welcome a
wide range of them while continuing to be a critical voice for peace, and to articulate the
interrelationship between all forms of violence, hierarchies and oppressive or
exclusionary practices and structures. By 1975, the WILPF was a different sort of
organization than the one that came out of the destruction of World War II. Though the
508
Edith Ballantyne, Address to the World Peace Council Meeting, Moscow, 24 March 1985, 1985, box 9,
folder 2, WILPF Statements 1967-90, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA.
509
Edith Ballantyne, Message to Inge Langen, Suggested Introduction to Information Book Re Nairobi
Film, 1985 [?]), box 9, folder 2, WILPF Statements 1967-90, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA. At the
third meeting of women’s peace activists in Warsaw in April 1986, E.B. talked of “women’s liberation as a
necessary part of peace struggle” and said that “conversely, women’s struggle for peace is part of the
struggle for her liberation” (Edith Ballantyne, Speech at the Third Meeting of Women Peace Activists,
Warsaw, 25-30 April 1986, “From the Hague 1915 to Nairobi 1985,” 1986, box 9, folder 2, WILPF
Statements 1967-90, WILPF Second Accession, UCBA).
510
Krishna Ahooja Patel, interview by the author, July 12, 2003.
220
WILPF did not change completely and it continued to be an essentially liberal modern
organization, the tools of feminist critical methodology, when used, allowed it to enlarge
the boundaries of the possible, question the very bases that sustained its existence as a
liberal organization and push toward emancipatory social change.
221
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Creator Confortini, Catia Cecilia (author)

Core Title Imaginative identification. Feminist critical methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1945-1975)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program International Relations

Publication Date 05/08/2009

Defense Date 03/09/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag constructivism,critical methodology,critical theory,emancipation,feminism,gender,International relations,OAI-PMH Harvest,Peace,social change,Women

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tickner, Judith Ann (committee chair), Brand, Laurie A. (committee member), Lutkehaus, Nancy (committee member)

Creator Email catiacc@gmail.com,conforti@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2213

Unique identifier UC1473780

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Legacy Identifier etd-Confortini-2738.pdf

Dmrecord 248768

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Confortini, Catia Cecilia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

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