Ingrid Sharp. Peace & Change. Volume 38, Issue 2. April 2013.
In 1915, over one thousand women from warring and neutral nations met at The Hague to protest against the First World War. In 1919, some of them met again in Zurich to discuss ways of building a sustainable peace. Focusing on the concepts of human security and positive peace, this article compares these activists’ vision of a gendered peace with the principles underlying UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and considers whether the barriers and obstacles to women’s participation in formal peace negotiations have been overcome. It also considers whether the Hague women’s work for peace was informed by a discourse of human rights. The comparison works to improve our historical understanding as well as revealing how attitudes to war, peace, and gender have developed over the intervening period. The experience since passage of UNSCR 1325 has shown that UN Resolutions alone do not guarantee women’s effective inclusion in peacebuilding. The failure since 2000 to tackle gender‐based violence, sexual trafficking, and rape during and after conflict also shows the limitations of a human rights discourse that does not explicitly address the differences between men’s and women’s experiences.
In April 1915, nine months after the start of the First World War, over 1000 women from combatant and noncombatant nations, mainly active in the international campaign for women’s suffrage, met at The Hague to discuss ways of mediating between the warring nations, stopping the war, and finding ways of resolving future conflict without recourse to violent means. In May 1919, after the armistice had been signed and the terms of the peace were being negotiated in Paris, many of the same women met in Zurich to respond to these negotiations. President of the Congress was the U.S.‐American campaigner Jane Addams and the organization, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which is one of the most influential international women’s organizations campaigning for peace at work today, was founded at this meeting.
This article will compare the vision of a gendered peace put forward at The Hague and Zurich with the principles reflected in UN Security Council Resolution 1325, for which WILPF and other groups campaigned between 1995 and 2000. Through a detailed reading of the resolutions themselves and the writings of key peace activists during the First World War such as the U.S.‐Americans Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch and the Germans Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg, it looks at two periods in history when transnational women’s organizations campaigned for women’s inclusion in postconflict peace negotiations, and asks whether the barriers and obstacles of 1919 have been overcome in the present day. The comparison is illuminating, both in deepening our understanding of the scope of the earlier women’s vision and in highlighting how much the social, political, and intellectual context for women’s peace activism has changed in the intervening period.
I will also consider whether the women’s work for peace during the First World War was informed by a discourse of human rights. This is a highly relevant question, as the human rights discourse as we currently understand it is held by many historians to date back only as far as 1945, reflected in the United Nation’s Universal declaration of Human Rights in 1948 or, as is argued in Samuel Moyn’s 2010 monograph, The Last Utopia, Human Rights in History, to have emerged as late as the 1970s. Moyn holds the invocation of human rights before this date to be too bound up with notions of the nation state to bear any significant relation to our present‐day understanding of the concept.
This study will concentrate on two aspects of women’s contributions to peacebuilding and conflict resolution to make the comparison and draw clear conclusions: human security, because “human rights are central to the human security discourse,” and postconflict peace negotiations to compare the arguments and mechanisms for inclusion and exclusion of women from the peace negotiation table in 1919 with those employed after later conflicts. It has been argued that these later conflicts are not the same as the First or even the Second World Wars, which were largely fought between nation‐states, with clear national boundaries and identifiable enemies, unlike the civil wars and genocidal conflicts in Rwanda, Serbia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sri Lanka, which have blurred the boundaries between civilian and combatant, victim and perpetrator, neighbor, and enemy. However, because of the messy nature of the end of the First World War, with civil wars, border conflicts, internal unrest, and revolution, the redrawing of national boundaries and mass displacement extending the conflict well beyond 1918, the nature of the conflicts and their effects on women and girls can be seen as comparable in nature if not in degree. Then as now, war could not be kept separate from civilian life and suffering and death was as widespread among noncombatants as among soldiers, with much of the violence against women, displacement, and insecurity, as well as famine and diseases of deprivation, increasing once the fighting has ceased. There are of course other differences, a major one being that the membership of the WILPF in 1919 was concentrated in Western Europe and America, while peace activism today is a global concern with membership reflecting the large number of conflicts in the Global South. Indeed, despite The Hague women’s commitment to a global sisterhood based on equality and shared humanity, the terminology of the resolutions and debates sometimes reveals their underlying colonialist assumptions that America and Western Europe represented a pinnacle of civilization to which other nations aspired. For some, there are elements of these assumptions in operation today, with feminism and the human rights agenda seen as western cultural hegemony. For example, Heidi Hudson, writing in 2006, contends that “the security needs of Western women and women in the developing world are different to the extent that no global sisterhood can be assumed” and argues for a plurality of feminisms rooted in specific contexts. The intellectual context in which women are operating today has also changed radically since 1919, with most nations now signatories to UN resolutions and conventions that profess shared views on human rights, war, conflict resolution, peace, and social justice. Among academics and theoreticians, attitudes to gender identity have also changed, and there is a more differentiated view of masculinities in war.
UN Security Council Resolution 1325
In 1995, U.S. historian Kathryn Kish Sklar considered Jane Addams’s peace activism as “a model for women today.” Her argument was that Addams’s social justice feminism, rooted in practice and sustained by a network of personal friendships, allowed her to influence the development of a progressive and far‐reaching program for postconflict resolution and building a sustainable peace. 1995 was also the year of the fourth UN World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, which identified women and armed conflict as one of twelve critical areas of concern. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which confirmed a commitment to human rights for women and girls (Articles 8, 14, 23, 31), the recognition of women’s agency in peacebuilding (Article 28) as well as their vulnerability during armed conflict (Chapter E of the Platform for Action) and a commitment to eliminating “all forms of violence against women and girls” (Article 29, see also Chapter D of the Platform for Action) represent an important stage in working toward the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in October 2000.
According to the UN’s special advisor on gender issues, UNSCR 1325 “reaffirms the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and in postconflict reconstruction and stresses the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security.” It represents a formal recognition of the important role of women in peacebuilding, the importance of monitoring the impact of war on women and girls and including a gender perspective in peace negotiations, which must also include female delegates. It encourages training and research to promote greater awareness of the needs of women and girls, their vulnerability to violence, rape, and sexual exploitation in postconflict societies. It also reaffirms “the need to implement fully international humanitarian and human rights law that protects the rights of women and girls during and after conflicts.”
The Resolution represents a watershed moment in gender aspects of peace and conflict resolution. It can be a tool for empowering women, enabling them to push demands for recognition of their role in peace‐making and their inclusion at the peace negotiation table. It is important to note that the successful passing of the Resolution and the commitment to annually monitoring the effects of its implementation by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) arose from the lobbying of women’s activist groups such as WILPF and Women Waging Peace (now included in the Institute for Inclusive Security). Like the resolutions produced by the Hague and Zurich congresses, the 18 clauses and the preamble of Resolution 1325 represent a consensus of women peace activists’ vision.
The vision of peace that emerges between the Platform for Action formulated at Beijing and the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in October 2000 is one of a sustainable peace based on gender equity, social justice, and respect for human rights. The concerns are for women and girls whose lives have been disrupted by war, displacement, sexual violence including rape, forced pregnancy, and exploitation. It reflects key concepts central to most peace theory of “positive” as opposed to “negative” peace, terms used by Johann Galtung in a number of articles published from the 1960s onwards. According to Galtung, “negative peace” is merely an absence of war, while “positive peace” suggests a society that is consciously tackling what he terms “structural violence,” which includes poverty, hunger, discrimination, and social injustice. Creation of a culture of peace is central to Galtung’s concept, which would include education for peace, the replacement of military values with alternatives, tackling poverty and inequality through social justice, and the sharing of political and economic power. The importance of these concepts for postconflict resolution is that they force the negotiators to focus on wider issues than the cessation of combat. UNSCR 1325 reflects this, in that it considers issues of social justice, including gender equity, as vital to “the achievement of durable peace, security, and reconciliation.” Galtung’s ideas have particular relevance to the inclusion of gender perspectives in peacebuilding, as he emphasizes the need for peace at the level of the people or community, where women are active, rather than the state, where women are not likely to be represented.
Implementation of Resolution 1325 has been monitored since it was passed, and even ten years later in 2010, there was widespread concern that women were being excluded from peace negotiations, the human rights of women and girls were being disregarded in the name of “cultural sensitivity” and too little was being performed to protect women and girls from sexual violence and rape. One of the major concerns of feminist organizations working for recognition of gender perspectives in peacebuilding is that women’s agency should be recognized and that women should be seen as actors in the process of transition from war to peace. A sole emphasis on women as victims of conflict in need of protection, or failure to recognize more complex aspects of their involvement in war—the fact that many women are active combatants—overlooks their potential for active participation in negotiating peace and fails to recognize their activism in local communities.
As well as regretting “the striking absence of women from formal peace negotiations,” feminist criticism of the Resolution’s implementation expresses disappointment that international organizations do not use their power to press for compliance and even that they are “more than ready to cede on matters of gender equality in the name of ‘cultural sensitivity’” and allow human rights abuses against women and girls, such as denial of their right to education, autonomy and bodily integrity, in deference to local custom. Christine Chinkin and Hilary Charlesworth give several examples of international experts condoning discriminatory cultural practices against women and girls, including physical violence, that are in direct contravention of international law, claiming that “[t]he respect for ‘culture’ in the international community in peacebuilding projects is often based on a monolithic view of ‘culture,’ as though it had no internal diversity and no potential for a critical tradition or a commitment to human rights” or that culture and traditions are viewed as “private and not therefore within their mandate.”
Since passing the resolution in 2000, the Security Council has recognized that there are implementation deficits in a number of areas and has passed three further resolutions to address them: Resolutions 1820 (2008) and 1888 (2009) acknowledge that “sexual violence in conflict has become in some contexts a tactic of war designed to achieve military and political objectives,” and this requires a response from UN peacekeeping and security forces as well as explicit consideration in peace negotiations. Resolution 1889 (2009) recognizes concerns about the Council’s implementation mechanisms for Resolution 1325 (2000) and calls for monitoring of and reports on women’s participation in peacebuilding.
In terms of raised awareness of a gender perspective and the inclusion of women in negotiating teams and peacekeeping forces, implementation has been patchy, with some successes. Even so, a UNIFEM report noted in 2010 that “women’s participation in peace processes remains one of the least well‐implemented elements of the women, peace and security agenda outlined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and related resolutions” with women making up “less than eight percent of negotiating parties,” while fewer than three percent of signatories included in the sample monitored were women. The report concluded that “it is thus clear that at the peace table, where crucial decisions about postconflict recovery and governance are made, women are conspicuously underrepresented.” This underrepresentation during postconflict negotiations compares with higher representation in other areas of government and decision‐making and points toward a strong cultural resistance to including women in peace negotiations.
Women’s Exclusion from the Peace Table
Women were also excluded from peace negotiations in 1919 despite their explicit demands to be included (Hague Resolution 1915, Articles 18 and 19) and actions taken to influence governments (Hague Resolution 1915, Article 20). Women of the victorious nations (the Inter‐Allied Conference) did meet in Paris to lobby the peace negotiations, were able to secure a hearing before the commission on the League of Nations, and did influence some aspects of its constitution. Most notably, Article 7 of the Covenant of the League of Nations declared that all positions within the League should be open to women and women pinned their hopes on working with the League, despite its many problems. However, the peace negotiations that were conducted by the victorious powers in the absence of defeated nations were closed to women.
A major reason for excluding women was a widespread perception that those who did not make war should have nothing to do with making the peace. Defining war narrowly as active combat, it is clear that between the years 1914 and 1918, this activity was overwhelmingly conducted by men, and even where women were engaged in fighting, their primary identity was not as soldiers. However, the women of WILPF’s predecessor, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, argued strongly that this was in fact the main reason that women should be included—peace could not be effectively negotiated by the very regimes responsible for the war in the first place. Sanam Naraghi Anderlini notes that ending war and bringing about peace are two separate things: While consensus between armed groups to cease fighting is the key to the former, she points out that “war makers rarely have the requisite experience and expertise in peacemaking or coexistence. Yet, they are charged with the responsibility and power to bring peace.” She cites several reasons for women’s exclusion from the peace table, including the belief that “women’s issues” are separate and skepticism about women’s capacity to contribute effectively to the process. According to Anderlini, women are often excluded on grounds that do not apply to men, for example, because women who belong to an educated elite are not seen as representative, or because they are seen as too ready to compromise.
This latter charge was put forward as a very strong reason for excluding women pacifists from peace negotiations in 1919: “[I]ronically, men (and women) denied female negotiators a role in the peace talks precisely because it was assumed that they would advocate peace and not their nations’ best interests.” This is revealing of the attitude to the peace talks as a forum for retribution and the securing of advantages for the victors at the expense of the vanquished, and stands in marked contrast to the terms of U.S. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, put forward in January 1918. This attitude, which dismisses women’s concerns for the populations of defeated nations as sentimental and advocates a robust and manly negotiating style was reflected in media coverage in the United States in the run up to the talks. The harsh terms of the peace treaty and the unsentimental masculinity of their imposition were not at all conducive to establishing a lasting peace and stability—as John M. Keynes pointed out, the effect was “abhorrent and detestable” as well as dangerous to the stability of Europe “if we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing.” With uncanny prescience, Keynes predicted that the next war would break out in twenty years from the signing of the ill‐fated treaty.
Women’s exclusion from government and their lack of access to political parties is another reason for their exclusion from formal negotiations. In 1919, many women did not yet have the right to vote, let alone participate in government, and in nations where female suffrage had been achieved, women had had little time to establish themselves politically, and many lacked the level of education to contribute confidently in a formal setting. In many postconflict nations after 1990, women have been similarly disenfranchised. For example, in Afghanistan, where state governance is highly contested, much power is in the hands of tribal or religious leaders, who are exclusively male. Former Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International, Deniz Kandiyoti, argues that in the case of Afghanistan where informal, local level institutions play a major role in government “[a]lthough women are almost totally excluded from participating in decision‐making in these bodies and despite the fact that these informal institutions uphold forms of customary practice that violate both international human rights law and the letter of the shari’a, they play a central role in local governance.” This has led to an uneasy compromise in which compliance with international human rights standards has been largely set‐aside in the case of women. When in 1996, Senator George Mitchell proposed that the ten political parties with the most popular support should conduct peace talks in Northern Ireland, this proposal threatened to exclude the powerful women’s network for peace that worked across sectarian lines but did not have the status of a political party. In this case, the women were able to convert their network to a political party very quickly and to mobilize sufficient support to gain a place at the table, but the incident shows how women’s more informal links and networks can easily be excluded from influence. One other factor that can exclude women from the peace process is the activists’ own lack of faith in established political systems that have rejected and excluded women and their concerns, which can lead to a reluctance to engage with formal processes. In 1919, although the women had lost faith in a system of national government that had brought the world to the brink of catastrophe, they were highly motivated to work alongside the men, as “the combined influence of the women of all countries is one of the strongest forces for the prevention of war.”
Sklar notes the importance of the community, organizational and personal networks as a source of peace activism, and personal friendships as a facilitator of reform, support networks that are as important now, as they were in 1914-1919. During the First World War, women pacifists were doubly isolated in their own community—by attitudes to nation that saw pacifism and internationalism as unpatriotic, and by rejection by other women’s groups—so a sense of belonging and shared values were only available through international ties reinforced by the expressions of love, support, and affection in their communications with one another. Addams recognized the enormous psychological strength required to resist the sense of community generated by the war, in which the individual becomes subsumed in and enveloped by the national consciousness. Now as then, the international community can be instrumental in providing support for women working in areas where their vision for women and girls goes against tradition, religion, and cultural consensus within their own communities. These women risk attack, intimidation and death for entering politics or pursuing educational goals, and only the support and protection of the international community and deep personal friendships allow them to continue in their work.
Human Security
The lack of recognition of community‐based activism, and the exclusion of such initiatives from formal talks both reflects and perpetuates a narrow view of peace and security that contributes to the marginalization of women’s concerns and practice. As we have seen, the immediate priority at the end of conflict is to stop the fighting, with the result that most peace negotiations are between warring parties. Since the 1990s, however, the concept of human security, informed by a discourse of human rights and Galtung’s concept of a positive peace, has imbued postconflict negotiations with recognition that peace is far more than simply an absence of war. As stated in the preamble to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), human beings are entitled to live in freedom from fear (threat of violent disruption) and freedom from want (hunger and material need). Jane Addams, writing in 1922, referred to “two of men’s earliest instincts […]: the first might be called security from attack, the second security from starvation.”
The concept of human security was formulated in the 1994 United Nations Human Development Report and includes economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal, community, and political security in its understanding of what is needed for a sustainable peace. Whereas national security is concerned with military defense strategies, human security prioritizes the individual human being’s rights and needs, and unlike traditional security can deal with threats to a population that come from its own state. For Taylor Owen, the concept “gives political voice to the otherwise politically marginalized” and “forces us to address the broader context of vulnerability,” in response to a globalized world in which nation‐states alone cannot solve the problems of famine, climate change, and natural disasters. Brandon Hamber et al. note, however, that in practice a specific effort to include a gender perspective is needed for the concept to take account of women’s experience. Concerns expressed in UNSCR 1325 about the continued exclusion of women and girls from decision‐making and their increased vulnerability to personal as well as economic, health, and food insecurity are very much in line with Addams’s social justice feminism, which as Sklar points out is rooted in practice. Addams worked with the poor, the disenfranchised and those without a voice: immigrants coming to the United States to make a new life. She helped them learn the language, acquire citizenship, make a decent life and give their children a future and recognized the major role that women can play in maintaining community security. Her opposition to war is rooted in this vision: War destroyed everything for which she was painstakingly working. Inclusion of clauses relating to social justice and the rights of the poorest in the resolutions of 1915 and 1919 show that Addams’s vision was shared by the women at The Hague.
The Hague Women’s Vision of Peace
The question is, is it anachronistic to read a concern with human security, positive peace, and human rights into these resolutions? To answer that, we need to look in detail at the women’s vision of war and peace.
The concerns of the women in 1915 and 1919 are highly comparable to those reflected in Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions. They believed that a sustainable peace went beyond the cessation of violence and that inequity, including gender inequity, would lead to renewed conflict. Importantly, their vision rested on a discourse of shared humanity, often based on women’s identity as mothers, which allowed them to reach across national divides and to maintain a sense of the humanity of the enemy. Their vision of peace was far from the passive aversion to violence expected of women, referred to disparagingly as that “damp angel peace,” but was active and dynamic. For Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, “there could be nothing negative in the idea of peace. War is the negative. Peace is the highest effort of the human brain applied to the organization of the life and being of the peoples of the world on the basis of cooperation.”
Especially in the combatant nations, the organizations most likely to maintain international links and to work for peace during the war were also the most enthusiastic suffrage campaigners, who saw working for the prevention of future wars and female suffrage as inextricably linked. On the other hand, political rights meant little if war was to be allowed to destroy any progress toward a fairer, more just and representative society. Suffrage was thus a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the realization of this vision.
Many of the pacifist women used a gendered discourse that saw women as the creators and men as the destroyers of life, an association that encouraged a discourse of maternalism: Women as mothers were opposed to violent destruction of the men to whom they have given life. Some feminists’ experience of the gendered wartime roles of men and women confirmed them in their belief in essential natural differences between the sexes and made them more likely to use separatist arguments. For radicals like Heymann and Augspurg, hostility to and contempt for men as a sex were reinforced by the war, which they saw as the consequence of centuries of unchecked male governance characterized by venality and self‐interest:
The world war has proved that the male state, founded and built up on force, has failed all along the line; we have never seen clearer proof of its unfitness. The male principle is divisive and, if allowed to continue unchecked, will bring about the total destruction of humanity.
Internationalism was also a key value that informed their vision of citizenship in a world structured to prevent future wars. The experience of the war itself showed the fragility of national integrity and the futility of pursuing progress in isolation: Preventing future war would only be possible at international level and through transnational activism. War itself was seen as atavistic, a remnant of an outmoded way of organizing human society, and one that went against powerful forces in human psychology. In the German report on the Hague Congress, an appeal to Germany’s women evokes a future in which war will no longer be seen as morally or culturally acceptable:
Using violence to resolve differences and disputes goes against our concept of culture. If this is not yet true of the present day, then it certainly will be so in future. We must work toward rooting out this approach in the present day.
To the primitive instinct to fight, Addams opposed what she believed was an even more deeply rooted human instinct: “to foster life and protect the helpless.” The Hague women’s witness was an understanding of war that did not stop at the battlefield and was not limited to the period of the war, and they set it against those who believed that war was a legitimate strategy of international relations and that it could bring advantages to the victor: “[T]he gains that either side makes are as nothing compared with their losses. […] this all‐outweighing fact is the intolerable burden of continued war.” For Addams, the war was a profound failure of the present system of government:
Twenty‐six governments of the world stood convicted of their own impotence to preserve life and property, they were directly responsible for the loss of ten million men in military service, as many more people through the disease and desolation following war, for the destructions of untold accumulations of civilized life.
It is this shared understanding of war as lasting damage and loss that informed the women’s internationalism and forced them to transcend the interests of the nation state.
There are of course problems with the women’s vision. The resolutions at The Hague and the writings of key activists such as Heymann appear to imbue women with an innate commitment to peace based on an essentialism that remained unchallenged by the presence in most combatant nations of a majority of women prepared to abandon gender solidarity and international sisterhood in fervent support of their nation’s war aims. In the aftermath of the conflict, too, the vision of a global sisterhood was marred by the refusal of Belgian women to participate in the congress and French women’s refusal to intervene on behalf of “enemy” women and children affected by the starvation blockade that continued until the signing of the peace treaty. There are similar problems today, with the commitment to the inclusion of women in peace negotiations often apparently based on a view of women as innately more invested in promoting peace, more likely to work to rebuild communities and contribute to the cultural demobilization needed to sustain peace. Writing in 2009, Sahla Aroussi argues that the discourse surrounding 1325 uses a renewed rhetoric of essentialism that perpetuates the oppositional gender stereotypes that shore up militarism and work against peace, a position reflected in Laura Kaplan’s contention that women’s claim to moral superiority does not challenge gender hierarchies but simply inverts them. Kaplan points out that women’s acceptance of the “caretaking” role can as easily be co‐opted in the service of militarism and war as in resistance to them. Laura Shepherd criticizes UNSCR 1325 itself for cementing the position of women as victims of violence “whose interests are essentially peaceful.” While this may be true where there are committed female peace activists at work, it would be foolish to ignore the role that women can and do play in supporting and perpetuating conflict. Whereas in 1919, women had been overwhelmingly excluded from the decision‐making process that led to war as well as from active combat, the present‐day situation is far more complex. Not only are there now many women in combat roles and positions of political power, but a belief in fixed gender characteristics has been superseded by an understanding of gender identity as unstable and contingent and a more nuanced understanding of women’s capacity for aggression and the vulnerability of men in war. As we have seen, too, the association of peace with femininity and violence with masculinity makes men more reluctant to associate with pacifist ideas and can be used to justify women’s exclusion from the peace table.
However, it is worth noting that Addams herself was less prone to make any claims upon gender lines, and although she used maternalist rhetoric in her writing and speeches, she did not believe that the potential for motherhood gave women a monopoly on working for internationalism, peace, and social justice. Marilyn Fischer argues very cogently that “Addams employed maternalist rhetoric as just one piece of a larger critique, demonstrating that peace among nation‐states is intimately tied to social justice within states.”
Human Rights
Does the women’s vision also rest on a discourse of human rights? Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia argues convincingly against a retro‐reading of history that interprets the past as if it were leading inevitably to the present. Human rights, understood as “an agenda for improving the world, and bringing about a new one in which the dignity of each individual will enjoy secure international protection” and which “promises to penetrate the impregnability of state borders, slowly replacing them with the authority of international law” are for Moyn a very recent phenomenon, emerging only in the mid 1970s. Before that there was no widespread “aspiration to transcend the nation state”, and past human rights campaigns were rooted in and used to support the emergence or preservation of the nation state. It is therefore especially misleading to assume that current concerns were present in past evocations of human rights: “True, human rights have long existed, but they were from the beginning part of the authority of the state, not motivated to transcend it.”
For Moyn, the women’s movement of the early twentieth century was indeed international, but its main aims were rooted in the growing social rights and greater participation in citizenship for women in their own nations.
[I]nsofar as a generally rights‐based movement like the women’s movement took an international form, its internationalism was about sharing techniques and building confidence for national agitation, not making the global forum itself a scene of invention or reform, participation in the quest for international peace aside.
This criticism certainly applies to some branches of the women’s movement, shown most clearly in their abandonment of internationalism during the war, but I do not believe that the “participation in the quest for international peace” can be so easily set‐aside in the argument. If we take Megan Threlkeld’s definition, the women’s peace movement, inextricably bound up with the campaign for women’s suffrage, was clearly transnational in nature:
“internationalism” assumes the primacy of nationality and the nation state as an organizing principle, while “transnationalism” conveys the primacy of an organization’s subjects, objects, or goals, and methods. International groups worked among nations, transnational groups worked across them.
Threlkeld notes that the distinctions were not absolute and that an organization could move between national, international and transnational concerns without contradiction, a view also put forward by Jean Quataert in her 2009 monograph, Advocating Dignity. For Quataert, historical research has largely overlooked an increasing challenge to national sovereignty emerging among transnational groups using the human rights language of a shared humanity to oppose injustice and oppression, and bound together across national borders “by the idea of the international solidarity of the group.”
Transnationalism and human rights are indeed strongly linked and feminist women’s ability to transcend their own nationality may rest partly on their experience of nation as something contingent: On marriage, a woman’s nationality was determined by her husband’s, whether she married a fellow national or a foreigner. There are several passages within the women’s writings that suggest that they did indeed have an “aspiration to transcend the nation state,” and a concern with inalienable rights rooted in human psychology that went well beyond the borders of nation‐states underlay all that WILPF did. Jane Addams hoped for “a new birth of internationalism […] designed to protect and enhance the fruitful processes of cooperation in the great experiment of living together in a world become conscious of itself.” For Addams as for Heymann, internationalism represented a superior, more advanced way of organizing and governing human affairs:
In reality, Europe is already, in normal times, one single society. Yet, perfectly artificial national boundaries are made to signify collective greeds and hatreds, and only a few miles off the fields are permanently ruined, and the countryside is poisoned with corpses, and all the decent thrifty little homes are smashed to dust, and the irreplaceable beauties of the cities are destroyed and living, thinking men are deliberately killing one another.
Despite recognizing elements of human rights discourse and transnationalism in the women’s groups, Quataert, too, disagrees with any claims that they were human rights movements per se or even that they were “examples that led logically to the inclusion of a human rights vocabulary in the U.N. Charter in 1945.” This is because these movements reinforced class and racial hierarchies in their demand for suffrage. It is true that the WILPF was dominated by Western Europeans and Americans, and that the use of terms such as “primitive” and “backward” is jarring, implying a hierarchy of nations reflected in the leadership of the organization, but the implication that the women of the supposedly less‐developed nations were denied shared rights or a shared humanity is certainly nowhere in the texts or resolutions. We have seen that key WILPF members shared a belief in human progress toward a more enlightened global order, and that their opposition to war is based on this. Just as they believed that war was an atavistic remnant of an earlier and less‐developed period in human history, so they believed that the nation state itself was becoming an anachronism.
Writing in 2008, Erika Kuhlman refers to Heymann and Addams’s discourse as one of human rights and is justified in doing so. The women’s vision of a sustainable peace is transformative, rooted in a fundamental belief in shared humanity and goes well beyond the boundaries of the nation state, albeit within the context of systems of government and social orders that are more or less progressive. The women’s vision for peace and a better postwar world may well have been shared by many who had been through the war and have found expression in U.S. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, but it was certainly not shared at the level of policy making and did not inform the peace negotiations at Versailles. Nor did the League of Nations, despite some promising international elements, set out to transcend national interests and overcome divisions between the former enemies, preferring instead to reinforce national self‐interest and advantage. Moyn is correct, then, to state that the political context at the time did not allow the women’s ideas to gain influence and that we should not read the existence of a human rights discourse within one transnational organization in 1919 as leading directly or inevitably to its global prominence in the present day. However, it is important to recognize the nature and scope of the women’s vision and acknowledge the continuities with WIPLF’s present‐day activism for gender, peace, and security.
Without specific consideration of women’s rights, it is clear that the human rights discourse of equality can mask support for an unchanged system in which all are supposed to be equal because the same criteria apply to all. If human rights are defined as universal but predicated on a male subject, the discourse can lead to the further marginalization of women. Writing in 1990, Charlotte Bunch argued that “the specific experiences of women must be added to traditional approaches to human rights to […] transform the concept and practice of human rights in our culture so that it take better account of women’s lives.” Fifteen years later, Heidi Hudson warned that “the term ‘human’ is presented as though it were gender‐neutral, but very often, it is an expression of the masculine” and that “including women as a category of identity within security discourse without also integrating gender as a unit of analysis creates silences, which in fact reinforce the dominance of masculinist universalisms.” Quataert, too, notes that some human rights violations are specific to women’s life experiences and can easily be missed “if men’s lives are assumed to be the normative measurement for the goal of human equality.” Experience shows that women and girls are excluded, discriminated against and oppressed in gender‐specific ways, and these are only recently becoming recognized as human rights abuses. Gender‐based violence and sexual exploitation in the aftermath of war and the use of rape as a weapon of war have been explicitly recognized as human rights issues, but domestic violence and culturally accepted violation of bodily integrity, for example, through female genital mutilation in much of Africa, have too often been seen as private or cultural matters beyond the scope of human rights law. Quataert notes that “recognizing people as gendered beings has meant a profound paradigm shift in human rights advocacy and law” and has eroded the distinction between public and private spheres “seen as a foundational norm in international legal traditions.”
Although it is clear that the women of WILPF in 1919 did use a discourse of human rights and that their aims and structures transcended the nation state, it is also clear that this alone was not sufficient to ensure that their vision was realized. Writing in 2002, the peace activists and theorists Shiela Meintjes, Anu Pillay, and Meredith Turshen concluded that:
[A]lthough both rights and needs are important aspects of creating an environment for postwar reconstruction, neither is adequate either alone or in combination, for the task of enabling women to realize substantive advancement. Neither approach recognizes the real need women feel for social transformation rather than the reconstruction of the past. […] Substantive equity means a fundamental shift toward the provision of specific rights related to women’s gender roles, for example reproductive health rights, rights to further education, and affirmative action.
It is both sobering and encouraging to realize that a transnational organization of women for peace had come to similar conclusions eighty‐five years before these ideas became part of official UN peace‐making policy.
Conclusion
The period immediately after any war represents a “window of opportunity” for a shift in social relations, but is also a period during which the continuing mindsets of war make cooperation and trust difficult and tend to work against social change. It was a feature of the First World War that few of the gains women had made during wartime were consolidated in the aftermath, and this remains a feature of postwar societies since: “The historical record confirms that societies neither defend the spaces women create during struggle nor acknowledge the ingenious ways in which women bear new and additional responsibilities.”
Then as now, there is a tension between feminist demands for a radical transformation of social and gender relations and a powerful drive to restore gender certainties as part of the postconflict restoration of order. The immediate aftermath of war can also be a period during which women are even more vulnerable to the effects of war than during the conflict itself. Inclusion of a conscious gender perspective, the recognition of women’s activities to end war and bring about peace, and a recognition of their right to be at the table are vital if peace is to be the basis of a stable community that can work against future war and to build future peace.
The comparison between 1919 and 2010 shows very clearly that UN Resolutions and International Law are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for women’s effective inclusion in peacebuilding and realizing social justice. There are few areas included in Resolution 1325 that were not already present in 1915 or 1919. The women of The Hague and Zurich formulated a remarkably forward‐looking vision based on practice, social justice, and gender equity. They shared a vision of war that went beyond combat and a vision of peace that went beyond the cessation of violence. The resolutions they passed anticipate the present‐day principles of human security and of positive peace and rest on a discourse of social justice and respect for human rights that recognizes the innate dignity of all individuals and their right to the conditions to create a life commensurate with that dignity. These rights are viewed as independent of contingent cultural practices within national borders and completely incompatible with a state of war. Yet despite this, the women were unable to exercise the slightest influence on the narrow and punitive approach reflected in the set of treaties signed after the First World War, demonstrating that peacebuilding requires a framework that formally recognizes the priority of human need over national self‐interest.
UNSCR 1325 provides such a framework. It recognizes the impact of war and transition to peace on women and girls, the agency of women as peacemakers and the importance of including women in the peace process. The resolution must be seen as a highly positive development that has led to greater involvement of women and heightened awareness of gender issues in recent conflicts as well as effecting real change to women’s position in postwar societies. Although flawed as an instrument for preventing war, the adoption of UNSCR 1325, a resolution “legally binding upon states that are signatories of the UN Charter” represents a very real achievement, showing that “the demands of women’s movements and the thoughts of feminist theorists are capable of influencing global governance.” Unlike in 1919, when WILPF was not able to appeal either to a social consensus or to governmental or international support for their aims and had no opportunity to see their vision of radical postwar transformation implemented, women’s groups today can appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the UN Charter (1945), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (1979), and of course to the provisions of UN Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888, and 1889.
However, the experience since 2000 has shown that the existence of such a framework by itself is not sufficient to counter resistance to women’s inclusion in peace negotiations. In 2010, many of the world’s women face in essence the same barriers to inclusion and the same willingness to ignore or deprioritize their needs, as they did in 1919. The failure since 2000 to tackle gender‐based violence, sexual trafficking, and rape during and after conflict also shows the limitations of a human rights discourse that does not explicitly address the differences between men’s and women’s experiences of abuse. The fact that ten years after the Resolution was passed, implementation is still uneven, international pressure on participants is not being brought to bear to ensure compliance and human rights are being denied to women and girls in the name of gender sensitivity and/or pragmatism suggests that there is still some way to go before this transformative vision is fully realized.