Harry Targ
As women and men organized politically during the two Trump administrations, it is critical to reflect on the centrality of women in the struggle for a peaceful world. Campaigns for social and economic justice and women’s movements, and particularly women’s peace movements, are inextricably connected.
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 in the over 100 years of
their existence. They also demanded that women play a role in decision-making
about all matters of foreign policy, including decisions concerning war and
peace.
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.”
Women Strike for Peace became early opponents of the escalating Vietnam war.
Among its prominent spokespersons was soon-to-be Congresswoman Bella Abzug.
Code Pink is a grassroots women-led organization opposing war and militarism.
It was organized in 2002 and includes militant activists such as Medea Benjamin
and Colonel Ann Wright. Code Pink advocates peace, a human rights agenda, and
demands conversion from military spending to spending for health care, green
jobs, and the general welfare. They have been active in campaigns for justice
for the Palestinian people and in opposition to United States support for
violence perpetuated by Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, the US/Israeli wars on
Iran, and the continued economic blockade that is starving the Cuban people.
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 by the University of Illinois Press.
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. Addams wrote that there needed to be a theoretical and practical shift from individualism and property rights to community. The spirit of nationalism must be replaced by internationalism. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars.
We move ahead in these troubled times inspired by the great fighters for racial
justice including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X, and Angela Davis. We are also inspired by those who struggled for
workers’ rights: Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, John
L. Lewis, and Sidney Hillman.
And, as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock ticks toward midnight, we desperately need to reacquaint ourselves with our foremothers whose ideas and activism have been central to movements for peace and justice throughout the world.
