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Book Reviews
A major interest on the part of the history community is to explore the relationships between people of different nations and among peoples of the world. In women’s peace history this work has just begun, most notably with Leila J. Rupp’s Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton University Press, 1997). Much of Rupp’s narrative discusses the relationship among woman peace activists and feminists from the United States and Europe. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler, and Susan Strasser add greater depth to Rupp’s work with their edited volume, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933. The import of this collection of essays, newspaper articles, and letters written by U.S. and German women is that the two groups shared ideas and influenced each other’s thinking about social reform and peace. Through a careful and thorough reading of the documents, the reader gains an understanding of U.S. activists’ perceptions of German women’s reform activities and German women’s perceptions of their U.S. counterparts.
The editors of this volume have supplied an introduction, footnotes, appendices on organizations and women, and a bibliography, which make the book extremely valuable even without considering the documents themselves. In the introduction, for example, the reader meets various key women, such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Mary Church Terrell from the United States and Alice Salomon, Minna Cauer, and Gertrud Baer of Germany. We learn of women activists’ early connections during the Progressive Era when labor issues and settlement house work brought them together in dialogue. Whether through international conferences, newspapers, or visits between countries, these reformers opened their minds and hearts to each other. When World War I began in Europe in 1914, the dialogue took a necessary turn towards issues of war and peace. With great difficulty, women who opposed the war on both sides of the Atlantic managed to keep in touch. The postwar period, although rife with the U.S. Red Scare, provided many avenues for discussion, especially through the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). However, as fascism spread in Europe and many German activists were forced to flee their homeland, the dialogue came to an end.
Peace historians will find the last two sections of the book of particular interest, as they address the period from World War I to World War II. Although some documents, such as those from the 1915 Hague conference and the 1919 Zurich founding meeting of WILPF, will be familiar to many, there are other items that offer new insights and are most interesting to read. Of particular significance are parts of a memoir written by Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augsburg after their exile from Germany in 1933. While rehashing their experiences at the Hague conference, Heymann and Augsburg offer interesting thoughts on the untenable situation socialist women such as Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin found themselves in during the war when each spent time in prison. Augsburg and Heymann sympathized with these women’s efforts to speak against war while supporting the idea of a socialist revolution. In a document by Gertrud Bäumer, the reader hears the voice of the League of German Women’s Associations, whose members abhorred war but could not support a pacifist position as it seemed unpatriotic to them. Documents taken from the postwar era point to the sympathy which German women had come to expect from their U.S. peers, as they wrote to Jane Addams and others of the need for U.S. women to intervene in the food blockade against Germany and the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty.
From the U.S. perspective, postwar observations by Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams about the starvation of German and Austrian children were chilling. By reprinting articles and letters around this issue, the editors of the volume have perhaps unwittingly awakened their readership to the effects of war on civilians today. A photograph of two starving Viennese children taken in 1919 speaks volumes. The other most enlightening section concerning U.S. women concerns the “racializing” of the dialogue in the interwar years. Many women peace historians may know of the accusation made by Germany that French colonial troops from Africa who were stationed in the Rhineland at the end of the war took part in large-scale rape and terrorizing of the female population. When WILPF circulated a petition against these troops Mary Church Terrell refused to sign it, claiming that the propaganda was based on racist precepts. In fact, Carrie Chapman Catt interviewed several German women activists who claimed that the accusations were exaggerated.
The editors of this volume chose to reprint a German propaganda piece entitled “Out against the Black Horror! Urgent Appeal to Americans,” which clearly shows the racist implications of the charges. They have also published Mary Church Terrell’s protest to Jane Addams which spells out Terrell’s repugnance for the racist slant surrounding the issue, especially when the violence against women perpetrated in Haiti by U.S. military men was never addressed. Terrell’s letter is followed by resolutions passed at the WILPF 1921 Vienna Congress against the use of colonial troops in any country, although they did not address the issue of rape, which the authors claim Emily Greene Balch felt would complicate peace concerns. Of course this raises all sorts of questions about just how far women pacifists would go to push the peace issue over concerns for women’s well-being, and illustrates just how strongly they believed that peace would immediately eliminate all violence, internationally, nationally, and locally.
Although this book is not a clear back-and-forth dialogue through correspondence and conversation, it does represent a dialogue of ideas through various means of communication. Its length may prevent some professors from using it as required reading, but its value as a secondary source cannot be overestimated. I found just one small fault with it. The editors consistently referred to the “Women’s Peace Party.” It was the Woman’s Peace Party—a picky point, I admit, but one which seems of great importance to me.
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