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World War I brought an unprecedented degree of destruction and death. In the drawn-out stale-
mate of trench warfare, and the belligerence and intransigence of both sides, many feared the col-
lapse of the very foundations of Western civilization.
The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I explores
the international efforts for mediation of the conflict and in particular the prominent role of
David S. Patterson
With your extensive research into the World War I peace move- Cultural influences were also involved. This was an era when
ment, why did you decide to explore the role of women activists greater affluence allowed many more middle-class women to receive
in more depth? a college education and begin to escape the home. By 1914 most of
Actually, my focus on the women activists evolved only gradual- the women I studied were already involved in the suffrage move-
ly. I first thought that my current work would be a logical sequel to ment or social work, including their transnational connections.
my earlier one on the movement before 1914. But the outbreak of As the war expanded with no apparent end in sight, I also covered
the Great War fundamentally transformed the prewar peace move- the increasing involvement of male peace workers in the movement.
ment. New people, ideas, and programs came to the fore, and it
became a transatlantic phenomenon. Among the newcomers were Very appealing in the book is your detailed picture of the peace
women who entered the peace movement in large numbers, and movement: the interweaving of colorful and forceful personali-
their activism had to become a central part of my story. ties, such as Jane Addams, Rosika Schwimmer, and Henry Ford,
and their motives, with the events. Did this process take you to
How did women bring greater direction and momentum to the some new sources?
international peace movement after the outbreak of war in I decided early in my research to base my study on the personal
1914? To what degree did gender make a difference? papers of the leading activists, and I eventually consulted more than
It is safe to say that without women the international peace move- 50 collections. The most valuable repository for my purposes was
ment would have been a tame affair, and it was energetic women the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, which houses the papers
who assumed leadership of its every phase. They formed new of Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, and other manuscripts.
women’s peace groups, articulated principles for a “new diplomacy,” The Schwimmer-Lloyd papers at the New York Public Library were
and developed a strategy for involving neutral nations in possible another key source.
mediation of the war. In these ways, gender made a real difference, My research in personal papers expanded across the United States
and I asked myself, why was this so? Fortunately, over the last gen- and to the United Kingdom and Holland. The papers of Aletta H.
eration there has been an explosion in women’s history, so we now Jacobs in Amsterdam, for instance, were important.
better understand the relationship between feminism and various I also examined many contemporary newspapers, several of which
social movements, including peace, in that era. can now be searched electronically, as well as participants’ memoirs.
The feminist peace activists often talked, for example, of a
“maternal instinct”—that women who bore children were naturally What official government records were helpful?
more peace-loving and less aggressive than men. Whether women The peace advocates had multiple interviews with heads of gov-
are really “wired” differently than men is still debated today, but ernment and foreign ministers of all European governments and
most women pacifists during the World War believed it, and the the United States at which they promoted mediation of the war
“maternal instinct” appealed to women attracted to the cause. and their program for postwar international reform. A subtheme of