To focus on the lives and activities of individuals can be a fruitful way to (re)discover events, connections and structures. This is how historian Mona L. Siegel at California State University approaches women’s diplomacy after the First World War in her highly readable study, Peace on our terms: the global battle for women’s rights after the First World War. Which were the consequences of the fact that more than half of the world’s population were excluded by law from international decision-making? Which were the most prominent peace activists? How global were their arrangements?

With a number of personal portraits, Mona L. Siegel highlights the breadth and diversity of initiatives in 1919. At the Zürich Congress in neutral Switzerland, organized by women activists, Jeanne Mélin from France and Lida Gustava Heymann from Germany went on stage and took each other’s hands to the cheers of the participants. Heymann was one of the very few who had openly distanced herself from the war and Germany’s treatment of civilians – with the result that she was ostracized, arrested and sentenced to prison. She proclaimed that there was an organized resistance among women in Germany who had never wanted the war, and that the war had been made possible only because women had been denied political rights. 

The Zürich Congress made no concessions to fit into the men’s order. The Irish suffragette from the Hague Congress in 1915, Charlotte Despard, was met with a thunderous applause when she said that it was about time that women conducted foreign policies on their own terms. African American Mary Church Terrell gave incendiary speeches against racial inequality, and a unanimous assembly passed the resolution. The masculine peace negotiations in Paris/Versailles were condemned as unilateral and lacking both a mandate and conditions for building peace. The treaty, the Congress protested, was aimed more at retribution than at lasting peace.

In addition to the Zürich Congress, and in parallel with the men’s negotiations in Paris/Versailles, the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference was held for the victorious side in the World War. The conference has not been researched before as the documents were stolen by the Nazis during World War II and only now have been made available for research. Mona L. Siegel finds that the activists courted the male peace negotiators personally, but that exceptions were made for those from Africa and Asia; prejudicially, they were not expected to be receptive to women’s rights. To the women’s amazement, Liberia’s delegate Charles D. B. King expressed both insight and enthusiasm. As a delegate to the Pan-African Congress in Paris that spring, he had taken to heart the speeches of female delegates that there were links and sympathies around the world between opponents of racism and opponents of gender oppression.

The biographies of Ida Gibbs Hunt and Mary Church Terrell – African Americans, linguistically proficient organizers and delegates in opposition to white domination – expose the narrow representation of women’s conferences, but also that solidarity existed despite the inability to live up to the ideals. The portraits of Soumay Tcheng from China and Huda Sha’arawi from Egypt, interesting per se, show the connections between the nationalism of the time and women’s rights, as well as the relationship to allied men’s actions in the struggle. During the Paris/Versailles negotiations, Soumay Tcheng was the only woman with official diplomatic status, and in the 1930s she was one of the authors of the Constitution of the Chinese Republic. She became a celebrity and toured the West as a multilingual speaker in fashionable attire and bob haircut. The modern style, according to Mona L. Siegel, was an important part of Soumay Tcheng’s diplomacy.

Through the actor portraits, the larger stories of how women’s rights and feminism spread in China and Egypt are seen – through their own newspapers, street demonstrations and conversations in literary salons about previous women’s uprisings. Male feminists published books, essays and plays, but then found it difficult to make room for women’s own initiatives. Conflicts broke out and female feminists instead began to collaborate with Western colleagues. Here they encountered new problems. The activists in the West advocated decolonization but paired with a white supremacist attitude: the model of society was self-evidently Western civilization. In addition, ideological tensions arose around difference feminism and nationalism as tools to be heard and take their place in decision-making spaces where women were excluded. Promoting the opposite, such as internationalism and dissolved gender roles, entailed a risk of stigmatization.

The many portraits provide Mona L. Siegel with material for analysing the significance of peace activism in 1919. The radical diplomacy of the Zürich Congress advocated open and mutual disarmament, renounced colonial violence and oppression, protested against the genocide of Armenians (before the term existed) and started a petition for disarmament that came to include six million signatures. Furthermore, ways away from physical territorial battles and the idea of forcing the loser to his knees were stated. The negotiating method of reconciliation is today accepted in post-war work for lasting peace – but without it always being made clear from where it originates.

Could the reason for the exclusion of peace activists then, and the oversight of them today, even be that so many of the proposals – the League of Nations (later the United Nations), nine out of fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson’s Declaration, as well as the idea of an international court (realized in The Hague in 1945) – were taken over by the official male actors of the day? Mona L. Siegel stresses that international policies continued to exclude women: neither women’s suffrage as a global priority nor the proposal for a women’s committee with consultative status was accepted. The ILO conference – also an idea from individuals in the category of women – did not allow female participation but opened the way for 23 non-voters. At the end of 1919, the International Congress of Working Women was held in Washington, D.C., but without representation from China, the Soviet Union, Africa, the Middle East, African American delegates, or similar from the African diaspora.

Irene Andersson’s (2001), Abby Peterson’s (1987), Ann Town’s (2010) and Nevra Biltekin’s (2016) respective studies in gender and diplomacy have indicated that after the introduction of the Qualifications Act in 1924, women continued to be denied access to the diplomatic profession. After the Second World War, the law was abolished in Sweden – but was circumscribed with a ban on female diplomats entering into marriage. Internationally, the proportion of women in the profession is currently fifteen to twenty percent.

According to Mona L. Siegel’s study, the women’s conferences in 1919 nevertheless succeeded to some extent in circumventing discrimination: Article 7 of the League of Nations opened the way for women and thus for diplomatic talents with many years of experience from women’s associations to pursue careers – especially in the social section against the sex trade. The Women ‘s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which was founded in 1915 in The Hague, also offered the opportunity to work internationally.

It should be noted that during World War II, the WILPF conducted its own diplomatic activities, considered the extreme circumstances, modified radical pacifism, assisted refugees and let the demand for peace postpone in order to counteract Nazi Germany.

The insight into the archives from 1919 that the study provides leads the mind to what the Treaty of Versailles would have looked like if the women peace activists had been recognized as delegates at Versailles. If the rulers had heeded the ideas put forward by the radical Zürich Congress for a more reciprocal and less punitive peace treaty? Would it have been possible to avoid the consequences of famine, unemployment and popular reluctance? And by extension: the development towards fascism, Nazism and a new world war?

The final part of the book would have benefited from a forward-looking discussion – as well as a clear reconciliation of the claims: Can the peace activism of the time really be described as ‘global’ when the empirical data, admittedly analysed intersectionally, have been limited to European and American archives? The epilogue recounts the suffrage demonstration on the streets of Rome in 1923, when Mussolini was forced to bow to the front line by female demonstrators from forty nations who proclaimed the aspiration to promote the idea of human solidarity as superior to national and racial solidarity. The event requires far more attention than what an epilogue allows: hopefully, further critical studies by Mona L. Siegel and others await on the contemporary and historical struggle for equality and peace.

References

Irene Andersson (2001), Kvinnor mot krig: aktioner och nätverk för fred 1914-1940. Avhandling. Lund: Historiska institutionen, Lunds universitet.

Nevra Biltekin (2016), Servants of diplomacy: the making of Swedish diplomats, 1905-1995. Avhandling. Stockholm. Historiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet.

Abby Peterson (1987), Women in political “movement”. Avhandling. Göteborg: Sociologiska institutionen, Göteborgs universitet.

Ann E. Towns (2010), Women and states: Norms and hierarchies in international society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed book:

Mona L. Siegel

Peace on our terms: The global battle for women’s rights after the first world war

Columbia University Press 2020

Article by L. Gålmark previously published in Swedish in

Tidskrift för genusvetenskap 43 (2-3) 2023.

© Arimneste Anima Museum # 33