A fragmenting world of trade wars. Food insecurity despite an abundance of food. Food wars waged between eastern European states. Abroken Brexit Britain undermining European unity and causing high food prices. The resurgence of right-wing nationalism. Human rights under attack. Children starving from wartime blockades. The world disorder, food insecurity, and trade wars of 2024 would have looked all too familiar to the international women’s peace movement of a century ago.
Feminists back then tended to see themselves as the mothers of the world, believing that women’s active participation in politics would curb or counter men’s militant predilection for nationalism and war. ‘First wave’ feminist internationalists numbered among the leaders of the early-20th-century fight for world peace, what Harriet Alonso has described as 'the suffragist wing' of the international peace movement from the First World War onwards.
Free trade was a key – but oft-overlooked – ingredient to their feminist vision for a peaceful world. Chicago social reformer Jane Addams, the figurehead of the international women’s peace movement, emphasised this free-trade dimension throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
Jane Addams made landfall in Europe in early July 1919 to bear witness to the destructive aftermath of the First World War. Addams’s main concern was the famine afflicting millions of Europe’s children.
Addams’s 1919 trek marked the beginning of what would become a multi-year European humanitarian mission of a new left-leaning feminist organization: the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which remains active today. Addams was WILPF’s inaugural president.
Addams experienced her first of many encounters with Europe’s malnourished children during a stopover in Lille in northern France. There, inside a schoolhouse, Addams looked on as a physician examined them by the hundreds. ‘Stripped to the waist’, the children looked more like ‘a line of moving skeletons; their little shoulder blades stuck straight out, the vertebrae were all perfectly distinct as were their ribs, and their bony arms hung limply at their sides’.
Adding to the shocking scene, an unnatural quiet hung over the makeshift emergency room. This was because the French physician on duty had lost his voice, a side effect of wartime shellshock. He therefore had to whisper ‘his instructions to the children as he applied his stethoscope and the children, thinking it was some sort of game, all whispered back to him’.
Addams encountered similarly appalling scenes in Switzerland and Germany. The 1919 WILPF mission’s findings reinforced her belief that securing the peace had just begun.
