‘A League of Peoples’: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s Feminist Critique of the League of Nations, 1919-1924

This article explores the vision for the League of Nations proposed by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1919, and to show how rich was its engagement with new forms of international order. Formed in 1915 by pacifist feminists from over a dozen countries, both neutral and belligerent, WILPF made numerous proposals for postwar international governance that shared much with stock ‘new diplomacy’ ideas, including Woodrow Wilson’s. But when it met in Zurich in May 1919, it launched a sustained critique of the new order, emphasizing how the ‘yoke of masculinity’ which had caused the war was now embedded in the structures of the new League. WILPF’s citizen-diplomacy emerged from three contexts: a growing awareness of a global community of women, held together by a common identity as subjugated and disenfranchised persons; the development of a body of thought that has been called ‘settlement sociology’, which, growing out of reform work in modern industrial cities, pointed toward a conception of cosmopolitan humanity above nationality; and a foundational analysis of coercion that connected international violence to the subjugation of women in its many forms. This led WILPF in 1924 to propose a radical version of the League structured around peoples rather than nation-states.