(Reprinted from the Wisconsin Peace Action Mobilizer)
Harry Targ
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, it is critical to reflect on the centrality of women in the struggle for a peaceful and just world.
In 1915, 1,200 women from diverse backgrounds met in the Hague to create what
became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
They opposed World War I and would continue to oppose war.
WILPF, the oldest peace group in the
United States was led for many years by Jane Addams, who received the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1931.
In 1961 another
women’s peace group, Women Strike for Peace, organized a
day-long national strike of 50,000 women in 60 cities demanding nuclear
disarmament. They opposed nuclear testing, increased radiation in the
atmosphere and marched to the slogan, “End the Arms Race: Not the Human Race.”
Code Pink is a
grassroots women-led organization opposing war and militarism, organized in
2002, and includes militant activists who advocate for peace, a human rights
agenda, and demand conversion from military spending to spending for health
care and green jobs.
The writing and
activism of Jane Addams has been an important inspiration that runs throughout
the educational, advocacy, and militant peace activity of women for the last
100 years. Addams’ classic essay, “Newer Ideals of Peace” was originally
published in 1907 and reissued with an introduction by Berenice Carroll and
Clint Fink in 2007.
In this essay, Carroll and Fink
indicate that Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go
beyond just stopping war. According to Addams, achieving what peace researchers
later called “negative peace,” ending wars, must be coupled with “positive
peace.” Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged
in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds
including patriarchy, paternalism, the criminal justice system, and systems of
domination and subordination at the workplace. And the spirit of nationalism
must be replaced by internationalism.
CODEPINK Says Stop the
War in Ukraine: Russian Troops Out, No NATO Expansion
https://www.codepink.org/whitehouseukrianeexchange
