This “Manifesto of Women Against War” was prepared and distributed in late 1877 by a cross-national group of women who called themselves “The Society for the Defense of the Rights of Woman.”
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, this group spun itself out from another women’s progressive group called “La Solidarité,” which adopted these principles at its general assembly of September 1877.
Their manifesto, created in a climate of high tension between several European nations, was reproduced by the following newspapers: L'Avenir des femmes, La Finance nouvelle, Paris; Il Secolo, Milan; La Dona, Rome; The Woman's Review,The Arbitrator, London; Woman's Journal, Boston; The Voice of Peace, Philadelphia; Les Etats Unis d'Europe.
Clio reminds readers that this manifesto is more than a statement of moral outrage; it also points to the economic consequences of war – the “detestable waste of human lives and of riches, the devastation of entire countries.”
MANIFESTO OF WOMEN AGAINST WAR
We, the women of all countries, we, who form the half of the contingent of Nations, we, whom the laws of men have excluded from those councils in which of old, the voice of our mothers made the cause of peace to triumph, we to whom barbarous war spares neither death nor the most cruel outrages, we, whom it deprives of all which can attach a being to life father, husband, son, fireside we whose consciences have not learned to distinguish between solitary instances of homicide, justly condemned and punished, and the homicide en masse which is rewarded by a vain glory when it is executed upon innocent beings, we, who have not forgotten the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” we whom society judges capable of fulfilling the heaviest duties without the compensation of corresponding rights, we, whose mission on earth is conciliation, peace and devotion, we whom a longer silence would render accomplices of this detestable waste of human lives and of riches, the devastation of entire countries, -- we protest with all our energy against war, that odious abuse, that offense; against the voluntary abandonment of the effectual and peaceful method of “international arbitration.”
We protest in the name of humanity whose most holy laws war violates, in the name of the Fatherland which war deprives of its sons, in the name of the family which war mutilates and destroys, in the name of progress which war banishes, in the name of morality which war perverts.
We women, we mothers, we guardians of the family we demand of all men of heart a brotherly humane concurrence in this holy crusade.
We address a supreme Appeal to legislators - to the educators of youth – to put forth laws to second our efforts, to teach to our sons to feel a horror of war, a horror of carnage, a horror of fratricide!
Signed:
Mesdames: V. GRIESS TRAUT
Christine LAZZATTI ROSSI
Mathilde HUNZIKER
Louise DE VIRTE
Marie GOEGG, President of the Central Committee.
Source: Mesdames V. Griess Traut, et al., “Manifesto of Women Against War,” as translated in The Woman’s Journal, vol. 9, no. 4 (26 Jan. 1878), p. 4; originally published in French as “Manifeste des femmes contre la guerre,” in the Minutes of the General Assembly of “La Solidarité,” Fall 1877, p. 24.
CLIO TALKS BACK: Clio Eavesdrops on the International Congress of Women, 1933
When Clio feels pessimistic about the present, she dips into the record of the past, looking for the deeds and words of women. And sometimes she comes up with very juicy morsels such as this 1933 speech, “The World As It Is.”
The speaker is a woman lawyer,a suffrage and disarmament activist from France, Marcelle Kraemer-Bach (1896-1990), who was visiting Chicago in the course of a trip around the world. And like so many others, then and since, she believed that women held the key to peace and mutual understanding. Many of us still think so today, including many members of the IMOW community.
Here is a long excerpt from the speech given by Mme Kraemer-Bach at the International Congress of Women, which was sponsored by the National Council of Women of the United States during Chicago’s Century of Progress Fair (40 years after the World’s Columbian Exposition, during which the International Council of Women held its first major congress).
Clio thinks you will be surprised by how pertinent Marcelle Kraemer-Bach’s observations remain today – in the early 21st century. The details may differ – but these observations must be set in context of a recent, horrifying war, followed by economic frenzy and collapse, the Great Depression, the coming to power of the Nazi Party in Germany, and the rumblings of war in the Far East.
“I have to speak of the World as It Is! Well, I think it is in a mess; 30,000,000 people are unemployed. Through reduction of production and lack of exchanges there has been a loss of $35,000,000 which is three times the quantity of gold left in the world. Nations have selfish opinions. Tariffs are so high and often so absurd that we find countries which have overproduction and others mearby that know starvation.
“I was in Roumania last year, and saw corn being burned there; we all know that in Brazil, the coffee is thrown into the sea. That seems absurd as well as tragic. Some people are so poor and so unhappy, and others have many privileges. There seems to be no justice, and above all, we often see the shade of war. What can we do?
“Women haven’t done much until now – we must be frank and speak openly about it – women haven’t done much. They have not yet had their political rights for very long but they have had education a long time. But now, this Congress may be the beginning, if we really wish it to be, of a real change.
“Now women have political rights in nearly all countries. Women have education and opportunities in all countries. Why in the world don’t they do something?
“They are sometimes afraid to think for themselves. They dare not think. I believe that it is only through the education of younger generations that the world can be better, and it is only through mutual understanding; women of all countries should understand each other. They have, after all, common interests, and however different their ways of expression and feelings are, they are similar in so many things.
“Above all, women of democratic countries should find it very easy to cooperate. Our countries, the United States and France, are so similar in their democratic spirit, that it should be very easy, I think, to increase their mutual friendship. But I think that women of all countries should cooperate in a very loyal way. France loves peace and loves freedom, as the United States does, but all women of all the world must cooperate. M. [Aristide] Briand [leader of the campaign to outlaw war in the 1920s] has said that he believes that through women, peace could be brought to the world. Women must do this work of bringing about mutual understanding between nations, because the world is waiting for them to do it!
“Until now, women have only tried to give better health and better happiness to their children – and that is a great deal. But, what about it, if those children, in later days, know a terrible war, or if those children know unemployment, or if they know some other catastrophe which can happen – what about it?
“What will be the use of those children being happy and healthy, if all that can be destroyed in a minute if people get mad again and foolish again, as they might do?
“Women must avoid selfishness and they must also avoid laziness – laziness in thinking and laziness in action, in order to save their children from war and from other catastrophes. They must build up a new and peaceful world in order to save Our Common Cause – Civilization.”
Clio asks you to let IMOW know what you have done lately to promote peace and international understanding.
Source: Our Common Cause—Civilization: Report of the International Congress of Women (New York: National Council of Women of the U.S., 1933), pp. 162-163.
The speaker is a woman lawyer,a suffrage and disarmament activist from France, Marcelle Kraemer-Bach (1896-1990), who was visiting Chicago in the course of a trip around the world. And like so many others, then and since, she believed that women held the key to peace and mutual understanding. Many of us still think so today, including many members of the IMOW community.
Here is a long excerpt from the speech given by Mme Kraemer-Bach at the International Congress of Women, which was sponsored by the National Council of Women of the United States during Chicago’s Century of Progress Fair (40 years after the World’s Columbian Exposition, during which the International Council of Women held its first major congress).
Clio thinks you will be surprised by how pertinent Marcelle Kraemer-Bach’s observations remain today – in the early 21st century. The details may differ – but these observations must be set in context of a recent, horrifying war, followed by economic frenzy and collapse, the Great Depression, the coming to power of the Nazi Party in Germany, and the rumblings of war in the Far East.
“I have to speak of the World as It Is! Well, I think it is in a mess; 30,000,000 people are unemployed. Through reduction of production and lack of exchanges there has been a loss of $35,000,000 which is three times the quantity of gold left in the world. Nations have selfish opinions. Tariffs are so high and often so absurd that we find countries which have overproduction and others mearby that know starvation.
“I was in Roumania last year, and saw corn being burned there; we all know that in Brazil, the coffee is thrown into the sea. That seems absurd as well as tragic. Some people are so poor and so unhappy, and others have many privileges. There seems to be no justice, and above all, we often see the shade of war. What can we do?
“Women haven’t done much until now – we must be frank and speak openly about it – women haven’t done much. They have not yet had their political rights for very long but they have had education a long time. But now, this Congress may be the beginning, if we really wish it to be, of a real change.
“Now women have political rights in nearly all countries. Women have education and opportunities in all countries. Why in the world don’t they do something?
“They are sometimes afraid to think for themselves. They dare not think. I believe that it is only through the education of younger generations that the world can be better, and it is only through mutual understanding; women of all countries should understand each other. They have, after all, common interests, and however different their ways of expression and feelings are, they are similar in so many things.
“Above all, women of democratic countries should find it very easy to cooperate. Our countries, the United States and France, are so similar in their democratic spirit, that it should be very easy, I think, to increase their mutual friendship. But I think that women of all countries should cooperate in a very loyal way. France loves peace and loves freedom, as the United States does, but all women of all the world must cooperate. M. [Aristide] Briand [leader of the campaign to outlaw war in the 1920s] has said that he believes that through women, peace could be brought to the world. Women must do this work of bringing about mutual understanding between nations, because the world is waiting for them to do it!
“Until now, women have only tried to give better health and better happiness to their children – and that is a great deal. But, what about it, if those children, in later days, know a terrible war, or if those children know unemployment, or if they know some other catastrophe which can happen – what about it?
“What will be the use of those children being happy and healthy, if all that can be destroyed in a minute if people get mad again and foolish again, as they might do?
“Women must avoid selfishness and they must also avoid laziness – laziness in thinking and laziness in action, in order to save their children from war and from other catastrophes. They must build up a new and peaceful world in order to save Our Common Cause – Civilization.”
Clio asks you to let IMOW know what you have done lately to promote peace and international understanding.
Source: Our Common Cause—Civilization: Report of the International Congress of Women (New York: National Council of Women of the U.S., 1933), pp. 162-163.
CLIO TALKS BACK: On the historical meaning of gold
Gold has haunted the imagination of people in many cultures. One of the most famous fairy tales from central Europe has to do with a girl who was captured by a gnome named Rumpelstiltskin and forced to spin straw into gold. In medieval times, alchemists tried every chemical combination they could think of to turn ordinary materials into gold – they never succeeded. Thousands, even millions of men (and some women) contracted “gold fever” in the mid-nineteenth century, and rushed west – to California, to Australia, to the Yukon, and south to the tip of Africa. Men made huge fortunes in mining gold – and silver – and lost them just as quickly. Gold was greatly prized! It became the object of greed, fraud, even killing, to mine it, refine it, possess it, hoard it.
Gold ornaments from antiquity have survived in archeological digs (unlike woven fabrics made by women), and now feature prominently in museum collections, as for example, in the National Museum of Bulgaria (in Sofia), and recently the objects from what archeologists call “The Bactrian Hoard,” in an extraordinary touring exhibition from the National Museum in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Gold has had, and still has great power to excite. Women in many cultures carry and exhibit their wealth in the form of gold jewelry. Until recent times, national governments based their currency on the “gold standard,” which meant that the worth of a country’s circulating paper money was based on solid gold bars hidden away in banks and vaults. This is no longer the case. Today the price of an ounce of gold is higher than it has ever been.
One of the most remarkable analyses of the meaning of gold came from the pen of the novelist Christina Stead (1902-1983), an Australian by birth and upbringing who lived in Paris from 1929 to 1935, where she worked for an international investment bank. Stead, a great fan of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine series, and its exposure of the follies of the human condition, proved to be a faithful disciple as well as a remarkable innovator. She probes the souls and minds of men and women with great subtlety but also with unremitting irony.
Stead set her powerful novel, House of All Nations (1938) in Paris in the years 1931-1932, the earlier years of the great world depression, while the French government still clung to the “gold standard” to ward off financial catastrophe and Hitler was on the march to power in Germany. This novel unremittingly exposed the shady, self-serving practices and cynical attitudes of the greedy and unscrupulous men in charge of the fictional Banc Mercure, and of the equally corrupt women who backed them up. Both she and her partner, then husband William Blech (later Blake) were skeptical about capitalism but, even as committed Marxists “in orientation and sentiment,” they were similarly skeptical about the pretensions of the Left.
Here is what Christina Stead wrote about the multi-dimensional significance of gold:
“The word ‘gold’ spoken by those who have seen it, had it, lived with it, has undertones of sensual revel and superstitious awe and overtones of command and superhuman strength that excite the greatest hostility and indignation in those who have not got it, have never seen it, or have not lived with its beautiful invisible presence – invisible, because it is always socked away. This joyful sensuality comes not only from its brightness, softness, purity, rarity, great specific gravity, nor from the designs, head, crowns, olive branches, men with staves, lions, unicorns, escutcheons, arms, and legends printed on it, nor from its finely milled edge in coins, nor wholly from the worshipful value of a very small bar of it, nor from the soft jingling it makes in a leather bag, nor from the way, like a little sun it can bring light on to the face of everyone who regards, and reverence, as Ra to his admirers: it comes from all these things, but also from a lifelong association of the word ‘gold’ with the idea ultimate wealth, perrenial ease, absolute security. It is an absolute and in its presence the anxious heart breathes sweetly and the blood laughs and the toiling brain sheds its dew of agony. Sweet gold! It has in it everything that man desires in a wife, that cannot, precisely, be purchased with gold. Beautiful gold! It is cosmetic: it makes a girl handsome and marriageable in a moment. Virgin gold! There may be suspicions and shades of jealousy clinging to those whose all is paper and participations, but there is a sun-colored cloak ‘Sir-Galahad’ model for those who own gold. Fetish gold! But that’s an old one: we know what that means: it means ‘I’ve none’.”
Clio is curious to learn what you readers think about when you think about gold. Would you agree with Christina Stead? Would you consider women’s relationship to gold as a specific form of wealth similar to or different than that of men. Your comments are welcome.
Source: Christina Stead, House of All Nations (1938; reprinted 1972). See also Rosemary Lancaster, Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008) and Joan Gould, Spinning Straw into Gold: What the Fairy Tales Reveal about the Transformations in Women’s Lives (New York: Random House, 2006).
Gold ornaments from antiquity have survived in archeological digs (unlike woven fabrics made by women), and now feature prominently in museum collections, as for example, in the National Museum of Bulgaria (in Sofia), and recently the objects from what archeologists call “The Bactrian Hoard,” in an extraordinary touring exhibition from the National Museum in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Gold has had, and still has great power to excite. Women in many cultures carry and exhibit their wealth in the form of gold jewelry. Until recent times, national governments based their currency on the “gold standard,” which meant that the worth of a country’s circulating paper money was based on solid gold bars hidden away in banks and vaults. This is no longer the case. Today the price of an ounce of gold is higher than it has ever been.
One of the most remarkable analyses of the meaning of gold came from the pen of the novelist Christina Stead (1902-1983), an Australian by birth and upbringing who lived in Paris from 1929 to 1935, where she worked for an international investment bank. Stead, a great fan of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine series, and its exposure of the follies of the human condition, proved to be a faithful disciple as well as a remarkable innovator. She probes the souls and minds of men and women with great subtlety but also with unremitting irony.
Stead set her powerful novel, House of All Nations (1938) in Paris in the years 1931-1932, the earlier years of the great world depression, while the French government still clung to the “gold standard” to ward off financial catastrophe and Hitler was on the march to power in Germany. This novel unremittingly exposed the shady, self-serving practices and cynical attitudes of the greedy and unscrupulous men in charge of the fictional Banc Mercure, and of the equally corrupt women who backed them up. Both she and her partner, then husband William Blech (later Blake) were skeptical about capitalism but, even as committed Marxists “in orientation and sentiment,” they were similarly skeptical about the pretensions of the Left.
Here is what Christina Stead wrote about the multi-dimensional significance of gold:
“The word ‘gold’ spoken by those who have seen it, had it, lived with it, has undertones of sensual revel and superstitious awe and overtones of command and superhuman strength that excite the greatest hostility and indignation in those who have not got it, have never seen it, or have not lived with its beautiful invisible presence – invisible, because it is always socked away. This joyful sensuality comes not only from its brightness, softness, purity, rarity, great specific gravity, nor from the designs, head, crowns, olive branches, men with staves, lions, unicorns, escutcheons, arms, and legends printed on it, nor from its finely milled edge in coins, nor wholly from the worshipful value of a very small bar of it, nor from the soft jingling it makes in a leather bag, nor from the way, like a little sun it can bring light on to the face of everyone who regards, and reverence, as Ra to his admirers: it comes from all these things, but also from a lifelong association of the word ‘gold’ with the idea ultimate wealth, perrenial ease, absolute security. It is an absolute and in its presence the anxious heart breathes sweetly and the blood laughs and the toiling brain sheds its dew of agony. Sweet gold! It has in it everything that man desires in a wife, that cannot, precisely, be purchased with gold. Beautiful gold! It is cosmetic: it makes a girl handsome and marriageable in a moment. Virgin gold! There may be suspicions and shades of jealousy clinging to those whose all is paper and participations, but there is a sun-colored cloak ‘Sir-Galahad’ model for those who own gold. Fetish gold! But that’s an old one: we know what that means: it means ‘I’ve none’.”
Clio is curious to learn what you readers think about when you think about gold. Would you agree with Christina Stead? Would you consider women’s relationship to gold as a specific form of wealth similar to or different than that of men. Your comments are welcome.
Source: Christina Stead, House of All Nations (1938; reprinted 1972). See also Rosemary Lancaster, Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008) and Joan Gould, Spinning Straw into Gold: What the Fairy Tales Reveal about the Transformations in Women’s Lives (New York: Random House, 2006).
CLIO TALKS BACK: How long have we been fighting the war on poverty ?
Clio has been sorting through her many files. This one struck a chord. People nowadays (at least in the U.S.)tend to think that “wars on poverty” were invented quite recently, and that women’s disproportionate poverty is relatively new.
Read, then, to the words of Zoé Gatti de Gamond, a Belgian French-speaking “economic feminist”. Published in 1841-42 in Paris, her book on Charles Fourier and his system laid out arguments that are still relevant in the twenty-first century. Here is what she had to say, nearly 170 years ago:
“The most direct cause of women’s misfortune is poverty ; demanding their freedom means above all demanding reform in the economy of society which will eradicate poverty and give everyone education, a minimum standard of living, and the right to work. It is not only that class called “women of the people” for whom the major source of all their misfortunes is poverty, but rather women of all classes.
“From that comes the subjection of women, their narrow dependence on men, and their reduction to a negative influence. Men have thus materialized love, perverted the angelic nature of women, and created a being who submits to their caprices, their desires – a domesticated animal shaped to their pleasures and to their needs. Using their powers, they have split women into the appearance of two classes: for the privileged group, marriage, the care of the household, and maternal love; for the other, the sad role of seduced woman and of the misfortunate one reduced to the last degree of misery and degradation. Everywhere oppression and nowhere liberty.
“The question is not to decide whether it is fitting to give women political rights or to put them on an equal footing with men when it comes to admission to employment. Rather the question exists above all in the question of poverty; and to make women ready to fill political roles, it is poverty above all that must be effaced. Nor can the independence of women be reconciled with the isolation of households, which prevents even the working woman from being independent.
“The system of Fourier, imperceptibly and smoothly introducing associations within society, resolves all the difficulties in the position of women; without changing legislation or proclaiming new rights, it will regenerate them, silence the sources of corruption and reform with one blow education and morals with the single fact that results naturally from the associational principles of his system: a common education and the independence of women assured by the right to work [employment]; independence rendered possible by the association of households, attractive and harmonious work, and the multiplication of wealth.”
Clio asks you: do you think this is a “utopian” dream or a program for action? What elements can inform our action today?
Source: Zoé Gatti de Gamond, Fourier et son système (Paris: Capelle, 1841-42). pp. 247-66 ff. As translated in Bonnie G. Smith’s text Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989), pp. 174-75.
Read, then, to the words of Zoé Gatti de Gamond, a Belgian French-speaking “economic feminist”. Published in 1841-42 in Paris, her book on Charles Fourier and his system laid out arguments that are still relevant in the twenty-first century. Here is what she had to say, nearly 170 years ago:
“The most direct cause of women’s misfortune is poverty ; demanding their freedom means above all demanding reform in the economy of society which will eradicate poverty and give everyone education, a minimum standard of living, and the right to work. It is not only that class called “women of the people” for whom the major source of all their misfortunes is poverty, but rather women of all classes.
“From that comes the subjection of women, their narrow dependence on men, and their reduction to a negative influence. Men have thus materialized love, perverted the angelic nature of women, and created a being who submits to their caprices, their desires – a domesticated animal shaped to their pleasures and to their needs. Using their powers, they have split women into the appearance of two classes: for the privileged group, marriage, the care of the household, and maternal love; for the other, the sad role of seduced woman and of the misfortunate one reduced to the last degree of misery and degradation. Everywhere oppression and nowhere liberty.
“The question is not to decide whether it is fitting to give women political rights or to put them on an equal footing with men when it comes to admission to employment. Rather the question exists above all in the question of poverty; and to make women ready to fill political roles, it is poverty above all that must be effaced. Nor can the independence of women be reconciled with the isolation of households, which prevents even the working woman from being independent.
“The system of Fourier, imperceptibly and smoothly introducing associations within society, resolves all the difficulties in the position of women; without changing legislation or proclaiming new rights, it will regenerate them, silence the sources of corruption and reform with one blow education and morals with the single fact that results naturally from the associational principles of his system: a common education and the independence of women assured by the right to work [employment]; independence rendered possible by the association of households, attractive and harmonious work, and the multiplication of wealth.”
Clio asks you: do you think this is a “utopian” dream or a program for action? What elements can inform our action today?
Source: Zoé Gatti de Gamond, Fourier et son système (Paris: Capelle, 1841-42). pp. 247-66 ff. As translated in Bonnie G. Smith’s text Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989), pp. 174-75.
CLIO TALKS BACK: What is Women’s History?
Here is how Clio defines "women's history":
“Women’s history encompasses the history of humankind, including men, but approaches it from a woman-centered perspective. It highlights women’s activities and ideas and asserts that their problems, issues, and accomplishments are just as central to the telling of the human story as are those of their brothers, husbands, and sons. It places the sociopolitical relations between the sexes, or gender, at the center of historical inquiry and questions female subordination. It examines the closely intertwined constructions of femininity and masculinity over time in one or more cultures, looking for evidence of continuities and changes. It also exposes and confronts the biases of earlier male-centered historiography, asking why certain subjects and choices of themes for study were favored over others and posing new questions for investigation. Women’s historians have expanded the scope of research on women and gender both temporally, from prehistory to the present, and geographically, from dealing only with the West to encompassing the globe.”
For more, see Karen Offen, “History of Women,” in vol. 2, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, ed. Bonnie G. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“Women’s history encompasses the history of humankind, including men, but approaches it from a woman-centered perspective. It highlights women’s activities and ideas and asserts that their problems, issues, and accomplishments are just as central to the telling of the human story as are those of their brothers, husbands, and sons. It places the sociopolitical relations between the sexes, or gender, at the center of historical inquiry and questions female subordination. It examines the closely intertwined constructions of femininity and masculinity over time in one or more cultures, looking for evidence of continuities and changes. It also exposes and confronts the biases of earlier male-centered historiography, asking why certain subjects and choices of themes for study were favored over others and posing new questions for investigation. Women’s historians have expanded the scope of research on women and gender both temporally, from prehistory to the present, and geographically, from dealing only with the West to encompassing the globe.”
For more, see Karen Offen, “History of Women,” in vol. 2, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, ed. Bonnie G. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
CLIO TALKS BACK: More about the history of “women’s work”
Women’s history month offers us an opportunity to think about the history of “women’s work.” Clio has long been concerned about this topic, particularly with reference to the issue of money and value. Clio asks: who decides what “value” is, who gets paid for doing what, and why? And how much? Or how little?
We know from examining women’s history that “women’s work” encompasses many tasks (some agreeable and others onerous) for which women have never been paid. So how can some people today still treat paid employment as the sole form of “women’s work”? What planet are they living on?
Clio’s colleague Ellen Fleischmann, who studies the history of women in the Middle East, has signalled another aspect of “women’s work” – another form of unpaid work that women do and have done on behalf of the societies they live in or aspire to create. Let’s hear what she has to say about this question, with respect to the development of nation-states – long a topic in “men’s” political history.. This is “political” work for which women have rarely gotten the credit they deserve, much less any form of pay. This seems to be a universal phenomenon.
“Women’s work” – whether supporting the nationalist struggle or engaging in social welfare activities oriented toward “uplifting the nation” – has too often been considered auxiliary, conservative, and nonpolitical. Rethinking both feminism and nationalism requires eschewing gendered notions of politics and resistance. In the nationalist context, gendered notions of what was considered meaningful in the way of “active” or “passive” resistance have contributed to obscuring the nature of women’s participation. The kind of work women engaged in was crucial to the nationalist struggles; for one thing, the fact that women were involved at all contributed to legitimizing nationalism as a communal, collective, unifying ideology. For another, no movement can endure without the sustenance of daily, mundane “support” activities. The provision of necessities such as food, medicine, and funds; and, on another level, the dissemination and use of information for intelligence and propaganda purposes, are not secondary. History’s gendered focus on the “main” struggle – armed battles and rebellions, confrontations between nationalist leaders and colonial powers, diplomatic and political maneuverings – obscures the urgent necessity of the work that takes place in what is perceived as the margins. It is perhaps only because the “marginal” work is performed by women that it is considered the footnote to the nationalist narrative rather than constituting the “real” work in and of itself. A history that expands the central narrative to incorporate the margins and that recasts these limited concepts would allow us to more fully recognize the complete contours of the nationalist narrative in all its richness and complexity.”
Clio says: this is what women’s history is all about – rethinking and expanding the central narrative to the point where the activities can be taken into account, and the criteria for value of "women's work" rethought.
Clio asks you: what aspect of history’s central narratives have you questioned lately?
Source: Ellen Fleischmann, “The Other ‘Awakening’: The Emergence of Women’s Movements in the Modern Middle East, 1900-1940,” in A Social History of Women & Gender in the Modern Middle East, ed. Margaret L. Meriwether & Judith E. Tucker (Westview, 1999), pp. 89-139; quotation pp.114-115.
We know from examining women’s history that “women’s work” encompasses many tasks (some agreeable and others onerous) for which women have never been paid. So how can some people today still treat paid employment as the sole form of “women’s work”? What planet are they living on?
Clio’s colleague Ellen Fleischmann, who studies the history of women in the Middle East, has signalled another aspect of “women’s work” – another form of unpaid work that women do and have done on behalf of the societies they live in or aspire to create. Let’s hear what she has to say about this question, with respect to the development of nation-states – long a topic in “men’s” political history.. This is “political” work for which women have rarely gotten the credit they deserve, much less any form of pay. This seems to be a universal phenomenon.
“Women’s work” – whether supporting the nationalist struggle or engaging in social welfare activities oriented toward “uplifting the nation” – has too often been considered auxiliary, conservative, and nonpolitical. Rethinking both feminism and nationalism requires eschewing gendered notions of politics and resistance. In the nationalist context, gendered notions of what was considered meaningful in the way of “active” or “passive” resistance have contributed to obscuring the nature of women’s participation. The kind of work women engaged in was crucial to the nationalist struggles; for one thing, the fact that women were involved at all contributed to legitimizing nationalism as a communal, collective, unifying ideology. For another, no movement can endure without the sustenance of daily, mundane “support” activities. The provision of necessities such as food, medicine, and funds; and, on another level, the dissemination and use of information for intelligence and propaganda purposes, are not secondary. History’s gendered focus on the “main” struggle – armed battles and rebellions, confrontations between nationalist leaders and colonial powers, diplomatic and political maneuverings – obscures the urgent necessity of the work that takes place in what is perceived as the margins. It is perhaps only because the “marginal” work is performed by women that it is considered the footnote to the nationalist narrative rather than constituting the “real” work in and of itself. A history that expands the central narrative to incorporate the margins and that recasts these limited concepts would allow us to more fully recognize the complete contours of the nationalist narrative in all its richness and complexity.”
Clio says: this is what women’s history is all about – rethinking and expanding the central narrative to the point where the activities can be taken into account, and the criteria for value of "women's work" rethought.
Clio asks you: what aspect of history’s central narratives have you questioned lately?
Source: Ellen Fleischmann, “The Other ‘Awakening’: The Emergence of Women’s Movements in the Modern Middle East, 1900-1940,” in A Social History of Women & Gender in the Modern Middle East, ed. Margaret L. Meriwether & Judith E. Tucker (Westview, 1999), pp. 89-139; quotation pp.114-115.
CLIO TALKS BACK: What is "women's work"?
Clio has been reading a new book called Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples can Have it all by Sharing it all, and Why it’s Great for Your Marriage, your Career, your Kids. .. and You. The authors are two young Californian mothers who are trying to combine professional careers with family life – a dilemma that is troubling a lot of young women today.
Clio is concerned about one thing, however. In this book, the authors, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, treat “women’s work” as what they get paid to do. Employment for money is the important thing. That is “work.” The lessons of the book revolve around splitting household labor with paid labor, but the authors never question the thinking that equates “women’s work” with their employment.
Yet one of the great feminist insights of the last 30 years is precisely that women’s work is “never done,” and that “work” or “labor” encompasses far more than what one gets paid to do. Indeed, it embraces most of what women do – and don’t get paid for.
This aspect of thinking about “women’s work” is not new. It dates well into the early nineteenth century, when male political economists began to think about “economics” exclusively in terms of paid jobs for breadwinning men that would enable them to “support” wives and children. Even then, feminists fought back against this type of thinking. Even then, some wrote poignantly about this problem and even demanded pay for housework.
Listen to what one woman in France had to say on this subject. Jeanne Deroin was a married woman, an employed woman and a mother. In 1848-49 she campaigned for women’s rights, including the vote for women, and posed her candidacy (unsuccessfully) for the French legislature. She was, in fact, the first woman in Europe and perhaps in the world to run for political office. Here are her reflections about “women’s work” in reference to the poor women of Paris in the early 1850s.
Women’s Work
“It is in the household that woman’s work is the most tiresome and the least appreciated.
“We are not speaking of a household where there is a live-in nurse and a maid for each child, and domestic servants to do all the work; we are speaking of the majority, of the proletarian household, where the mother alone cares for several children, where there is not always means to pay the laundress, where the wife must get up before dawn, often exhausted by having had to nurse her newest child through part of the night. She lights her stove and prepares her wash water, in order to wash her children’s clothing and the diapers. Moreover, she hasn’t enough of anything to be able to wait a week; the lodging is small, the basins inconvenient; the sink is either one floor up or two floors down, and the stairway is dark. Her husband gets up to go to work; his pants are torn and must be mended but a child cries or the clay casserole tips over; the woman runs; the husband gets impatient; the repair gets done. He leaves and the washing begins. The two biggest children get up and ask for their breakfast; the littlest ones cry to be gotten up; the sudsing finished, she hangs out the wash as best she can, wipes up the spilt water, makes the soup, dresses the littlest children and gives everybody breakfast; she puts some bread in the baskets of the bigger children and sends them off to school; she has not yet had time to sit down for an instant in order to nurse the little one who is crying loudly.
“The landlord’s wife enters: she is an early riser, a woman of order, a good housewife who does her own canning and makes her own jam, repairs her laces, cleans her own ribbons and embroiders her collars. Everything is neat and tidy in her quarters before nine o’clock. She rouses her maid and her domestic at five a.m. and supervises them, pushes them, prods them, so that the tasks get done promptly and well. Thus, upon entering, she is indignant at the laziness and disorderliness of her renter. The beds are not yet made, the room is not swept; the chipped bowls used for breakfast are still sitting unwashed on the floor; the poorly bleached diapers hang on the line, the torn caps and socks full of holes dry on the back of a chair. She concludes from all this that her renter doesn’t get up early enough and doesn’t work hard enough. She asks for the rent more severely than she might have otherwise and leaves, threatening to throw them all out if it isn’t paid by the fourteenth.
“Upset and already exhausted with fatigue, the poor wife nurses her infant, changes it and puts it back in the cradle, and leaves it in the charge of an obliging neighbor’s children so that she can run to the central market to buy potatoes a bit cheaper. She returns in haste, loaded down, breathless and perspiring. She nurses the infant to stop its crying, puts her irons on to heat, peels her vegetables, irons the caps, mends the vests and pants, fixes the shirts, darns the socks, repairs the slippers, and prepares dinner.
“The children come home from school: one has torn his blouse, the other has a bump on his head. She scolds the first one and bandages the second. During this time the potatoes have burned; her husband returns, and the soup is not yet poured over the bread. He is tired and in a bad mood, and displays his astonishment that a woman who has nothing to do but take care of her house is incapable of getting up dinner. He sulks or flies into a rage and, when dinner is over, he goes to bed. The wife undresses and puts the children to bed, washes the dishes, and is able to mend the most urgent items. But she has to interrupt her work every few minutes to calm the baby, whose cries are waking up its father, who gets upset at not being able to sleep and recover from the fatigue of the day. Often the poor baby has been changed with a diaper that is still wet; he gets colic, and the mother spends part of the night calming him. She scarcely gets a few hours of sleep and wakes up only to recommence the same life. And they say, in speaking of her, that only her husband works; she doesn’t do anything. She has only her household and her children to take care of.”
When Clio first read this account some 130 years later, she cried. Who among us has not confronted a similar experience?
Source: Jeanne Deroin, “Le Travail des femmes,” Almanach des Femmes (1852), as translated by Karen Offen and published in Victorian Women (Stanford University Press, 1981), pp. 304-305.
Clio is concerned about one thing, however. In this book, the authors, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, treat “women’s work” as what they get paid to do. Employment for money is the important thing. That is “work.” The lessons of the book revolve around splitting household labor with paid labor, but the authors never question the thinking that equates “women’s work” with their employment.
Yet one of the great feminist insights of the last 30 years is precisely that women’s work is “never done,” and that “work” or “labor” encompasses far more than what one gets paid to do. Indeed, it embraces most of what women do – and don’t get paid for.
This aspect of thinking about “women’s work” is not new. It dates well into the early nineteenth century, when male political economists began to think about “economics” exclusively in terms of paid jobs for breadwinning men that would enable them to “support” wives and children. Even then, feminists fought back against this type of thinking. Even then, some wrote poignantly about this problem and even demanded pay for housework.
Listen to what one woman in France had to say on this subject. Jeanne Deroin was a married woman, an employed woman and a mother. In 1848-49 she campaigned for women’s rights, including the vote for women, and posed her candidacy (unsuccessfully) for the French legislature. She was, in fact, the first woman in Europe and perhaps in the world to run for political office. Here are her reflections about “women’s work” in reference to the poor women of Paris in the early 1850s.
Women’s Work
“It is in the household that woman’s work is the most tiresome and the least appreciated.
“We are not speaking of a household where there is a live-in nurse and a maid for each child, and domestic servants to do all the work; we are speaking of the majority, of the proletarian household, where the mother alone cares for several children, where there is not always means to pay the laundress, where the wife must get up before dawn, often exhausted by having had to nurse her newest child through part of the night. She lights her stove and prepares her wash water, in order to wash her children’s clothing and the diapers. Moreover, she hasn’t enough of anything to be able to wait a week; the lodging is small, the basins inconvenient; the sink is either one floor up or two floors down, and the stairway is dark. Her husband gets up to go to work; his pants are torn and must be mended but a child cries or the clay casserole tips over; the woman runs; the husband gets impatient; the repair gets done. He leaves and the washing begins. The two biggest children get up and ask for their breakfast; the littlest ones cry to be gotten up; the sudsing finished, she hangs out the wash as best she can, wipes up the spilt water, makes the soup, dresses the littlest children and gives everybody breakfast; she puts some bread in the baskets of the bigger children and sends them off to school; she has not yet had time to sit down for an instant in order to nurse the little one who is crying loudly.
“The landlord’s wife enters: she is an early riser, a woman of order, a good housewife who does her own canning and makes her own jam, repairs her laces, cleans her own ribbons and embroiders her collars. Everything is neat and tidy in her quarters before nine o’clock. She rouses her maid and her domestic at five a.m. and supervises them, pushes them, prods them, so that the tasks get done promptly and well. Thus, upon entering, she is indignant at the laziness and disorderliness of her renter. The beds are not yet made, the room is not swept; the chipped bowls used for breakfast are still sitting unwashed on the floor; the poorly bleached diapers hang on the line, the torn caps and socks full of holes dry on the back of a chair. She concludes from all this that her renter doesn’t get up early enough and doesn’t work hard enough. She asks for the rent more severely than she might have otherwise and leaves, threatening to throw them all out if it isn’t paid by the fourteenth.
“Upset and already exhausted with fatigue, the poor wife nurses her infant, changes it and puts it back in the cradle, and leaves it in the charge of an obliging neighbor’s children so that she can run to the central market to buy potatoes a bit cheaper. She returns in haste, loaded down, breathless and perspiring. She nurses the infant to stop its crying, puts her irons on to heat, peels her vegetables, irons the caps, mends the vests and pants, fixes the shirts, darns the socks, repairs the slippers, and prepares dinner.
“The children come home from school: one has torn his blouse, the other has a bump on his head. She scolds the first one and bandages the second. During this time the potatoes have burned; her husband returns, and the soup is not yet poured over the bread. He is tired and in a bad mood, and displays his astonishment that a woman who has nothing to do but take care of her house is incapable of getting up dinner. He sulks or flies into a rage and, when dinner is over, he goes to bed. The wife undresses and puts the children to bed, washes the dishes, and is able to mend the most urgent items. But she has to interrupt her work every few minutes to calm the baby, whose cries are waking up its father, who gets upset at not being able to sleep and recover from the fatigue of the day. Often the poor baby has been changed with a diaper that is still wet; he gets colic, and the mother spends part of the night calming him. She scarcely gets a few hours of sleep and wakes up only to recommence the same life. And they say, in speaking of her, that only her husband works; she doesn’t do anything. She has only her household and her children to take care of.”
When Clio first read this account some 130 years later, she cried. Who among us has not confronted a similar experience?
Source: Jeanne Deroin, “Le Travail des femmes,” Almanach des Femmes (1852), as translated by Karen Offen and published in Victorian Women (Stanford University Press, 1981), pp. 304-305.
CLIO TALKS BACK: Why Do Women (and Men too) Need Women’s History?
Clio notes that in the USA, the month of March is Women’s History Month, as designated by the Congress of the United States (this, too, was a struggle). So it’s time to think about why we need women’s history – and particularly why we need to know about the history of women’s struggles for liberty, equality, and justice. Clio has gathered a collection of interesting quotations on this subject from historians around the world. Here is a sample from the 1990s.
"The year Zero: this is a striking title. Before 1970 nothing happened? Women had never demanded anything? Unthinkable. Then what is the sense of this affirmation? Must one get rid of the past? Why? Should one avoid wasting one's time acquiring knowledge of it? Could one affirm, a priori, that we had nothing to learn from the past?
Hedwig Peemans Poullet (Belgium), 1991
"Feminism should be added to the political history...as an autonomous political movement, next to the liberal, socialist (or social democratic) and religious parties."
Marianne Braun (The Netherlands), 1992
"History is not simply what happened in the past but, more pointedly, the kinds of knowledge about the past that we are made aware of."
Antoinette Burton (USA), 1992
"The historiography of feminism is hampered by . . . lack of a functioning feminist tradition transmitted from one generation to the next. . . . Few of those who have protested about women's oppression in any given generation have known about predecessors and even those who did rarely acknowledged them."
Barbara Caine (Australia), 1995
The loss of collective memories, of myriad stories about the past, has contributed greatly to the ongoing subordination of women. The unending, cumulative building of broadly defined histories of women, including histories of feminism, is a critical component of resistance and change."
Susan Stanford Friedman (USA), 1995
"Time and again, the conclusion imposes itself that the amount of feminist activity over the past six centuries has been consistently underestimated, even by historians sympathetic to the feminist cause. . . . The question is not, in our opinion at least, whether we ought to reconstruct a history of European feminism(s), but how we may do so."
Tjitske Akkerman & Siep Stuurman (The Netherlands), 1998
"The year Zero: this is a striking title. Before 1970 nothing happened? Women had never demanded anything? Unthinkable. Then what is the sense of this affirmation? Must one get rid of the past? Why? Should one avoid wasting one's time acquiring knowledge of it? Could one affirm, a priori, that we had nothing to learn from the past?
Hedwig Peemans Poullet (Belgium), 1991
"Feminism should be added to the political history...as an autonomous political movement, next to the liberal, socialist (or social democratic) and religious parties."
Marianne Braun (The Netherlands), 1992
"History is not simply what happened in the past but, more pointedly, the kinds of knowledge about the past that we are made aware of."
Antoinette Burton (USA), 1992
"The historiography of feminism is hampered by . . . lack of a functioning feminist tradition transmitted from one generation to the next. . . . Few of those who have protested about women's oppression in any given generation have known about predecessors and even those who did rarely acknowledged them."
Barbara Caine (Australia), 1995
The loss of collective memories, of myriad stories about the past, has contributed greatly to the ongoing subordination of women. The unending, cumulative building of broadly defined histories of women, including histories of feminism, is a critical component of resistance and change."
Susan Stanford Friedman (USA), 1995
"Time and again, the conclusion imposes itself that the amount of feminist activity over the past six centuries has been consistently underestimated, even by historians sympathetic to the feminist cause. . . . The question is not, in our opinion at least, whether we ought to reconstruct a history of European feminism(s), but how we may do so."
Tjitske Akkerman & Siep Stuurman (The Netherlands), 1998
CLIO TALKS BACK: What Did Darwin Say about Women’s Emancipation? And Why Don’t We Hear More about Clémence Royer?
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Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand, Paris Clemence Royer as a young woman |
But Origin had not directly broached another subject that was already on many people’s minds from the 1830s – the evolution of humankind and the emancipation of women. What did Darwin say about women’s emancipation?
Darwin clarified his views on human evolution in a new landmark work, The Descent of Man (1871). There he proposed the evolutionary importance of sexual selection, or choice of mate, for increasing the differentiation between men and women – not only physiologically but also mentally and emotionally. Darwin was no misogynist but found it difficult to accept the arguments for women’s emancipation of such liberal thinkers as John Stuart Mill, author of The Subjection of Women (1869) and proponent of woman suffrage in the British Parliament a few years earlier. In Darwin’s eyes, historically speaking, women, however much preyed upon by men, had become increasingly protected by them as societies grew more complex. This suggested to him that women had lost the necessity of having to sharpen their faculties in the unremitting struggle for survival, thereby assuring their relatively inferior development; he was convinced that the results of evolutionary sexual differentiation could never be undone, whatever 19th century women’s rights advocates might desire.
This set off a stream of scientific investigations by physicians and others to measure skulls found in anthropological digs and to hypothesize about the relative size of women’s and men’s brains; these were the early years of physical anthropology. Some years later other scientists, such as Dr. Léonce Manouvrier, took women’s side, pointing out that relative to women’s body size, their brains might actually be larger than men’s. Partisans in controversies over providing secondary and higher education for women invested heavily in these arguments, on both sides of the question.
Darwin’s Origins was translated into French by a remarkable self-taught woman scientist, Clémence Royer (1830-1902), who was still a baby when the young Darwin set off on his voyages of exploration that led to his evolutionary theses. She undertook this labor because she said Darwin’s earlier work confirmed her own theories. Royer was already known for proposing (in the 1850s, in Lausanne) a “woman’s philosophy,” She sought “a form, a feminine expression of science. . . . a new art that I have to create.” “As long as science remains exclusively in the hands of men,” she explained, “it will never go down into the depths of the family and society. . . . Why. . . should [women] be excluded from the hunt for truth?” In 1869 Royer published a book, Origine de l’homme et des sociétés (The origins of man and of societies), nearly 600 pages long.
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from Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui 1881 Clemence Royer - Caricature 1881 |
Sources:
Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750-1880, ed. Susan Groag Bell & Karen Offen (Stanford University Press, 1981), which reprints the critical passages from Darwin’s Descent of Man, along with published remarks from Paul Broca and Herbert Spencer. Two recent biographical studies are: Genevieve Fraisse, Clémence Royer: Philosophe et femme de sciences (Paris, 1985) and Joy Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science (Rutgers University Press, 1997). See also Sara Jane Miles, “Evolution and Natural Law in the Synthetic Science of Clémence Royer, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicato, 1988, which includes translations of a number of Royer texts; and Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France (University of Alabama Press, 1984).
CLIO TALKS BACK: How did Catherine II of Russia exhibit herself in her memoirs?
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| Catherine in 1760 - the Rotari portrait |
Born as Princess Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, she was betrothed to the young Grand Duke Peter of Russia and went as a young teen, with her mother to live in the Russian court, where she received a new name, changed religions (from Lutheran to Greek Orthodox), and attempted to find a path through the incessant court intrigues that characterized the Russian court under the Empress Elizabeth. As the fiancée of the Grand Duke (the empress’s nephew and designated heir) and subsequently as Grand Duchess, Catherine lived essentially under house arrest, with all comings and goings subject to the approval of the empress. Every time she developed a trusting relationship with someone in her household, that person would be quickly dispatched from the court. She survived many illnesses, as well as the prescribed cures such as “bleeding,” presumably by leeches.
One of her few pleasures was horseback riding, which she often did in a male riding habit, seated astride (Empress Elizabeth thought that this contributed to Catherine’s inability to provide an heir). After nine years of marriage and several miscarriages, Catherine finally produced the much-awaited imperial heir (Paul) – no thanks to the collaboration of her husband. She was scarcely allowed to see this baby or either of her subsequent two children. Of her husband, she wrote: “If he had wanted to be loved, it would not have been difficult for me. I was naturally inclined toward and accustomed to fulfilling my duties, but for this I would have needed a husband endowed with common sense, and this man did not have any.” (36) She also understood that she might, one day, rule Russia in her own right.
Early on Catherine perceived that she would make history. When she was fifteen she penned a “Portrait of a Philosopher at Age Fifteen,” which she subsequently destroyed. But she continued as an avid reader and writer – exceptional in the Russian court of that day, and wrote both as a reporter and an autobiographer, taking her writing very seriously (though she deprecated it before the public). She wrote three different autobiographical memoirs in French, the first of which was not published until 1859. All three appeared in print after 1905. Fortunately the manuscripts had not been lost in the meantime. Throughout her life, when she was not writing, Catherine spent considerable time reading and learning from major works in French and German.
Catherine had a demonstrably fine intellect and a great deal of common sense, which comes through in her writing. According to her translators, Catherine “wrote on politics, Russian history, education, economics, and linguistics; she wrote thousands of letters, more than two dozen plays and operas, the first Russian children’s literature, memoirs, and journalism. Fluent in Russian, French, and German, she published a good deal in Russia and abroad, in French and in translations, often ‘anonmyously.’ Through her writings, Catherine promoted an enlightened Russia and its monarch together, and defended them against their many foreign critics, on a European historical, political, social, cultural, and intellectual stage.” She also wrote many works that circulated in manuscript among selected friends. She corresponded with the leading French writers, in particular Voltaire and Diderot, but also Baron Grimm, editor of the Correspondance européenne. As much as her choices of what to wear, or how her portraits should represent her, Catherine’s writings constituted another sort of public performance or exhibition.
As Catherine became more self-assured, aware of her talents, and versed in the strange maneuvering of Russian autocracy, her indomitable character emerged, and she began to stand up for herself, even to the empress Elizabeth – who died in late December 1761. By June 1762 Catherine had maneuvered into a position from which she and her supporters mounted a coup d’état against her incompetent husband Peter III (who was hustled away and subsequently executed) and Catherine took control of the government. Crowned in the Kremlin’s cathedral in September 1762, she proved to be a master of statecraft. In fact, the reign of Catherine II was enormously successful. In western Europe, where women’s rule was still controversial, advocates of women’s capacity to wield political power pointed to Catherine as a prime example of an enlightened ruler, along with her counterpart Maria Theresia of Austria. Already during her lifetime many called her “Catherine the Great.”
But following her sudden death in November 1796 – while writing – Catherine’s estranged and irascible son Paul sought revenge – it was widely know that his mother had hoped to skip over him and choose her favorite grandson Alexander as her heir. Among many other dramatic actions, Paul I exhumed and celebrated the body of his irresponsible and much-maligned father. He also revised the rules of succession – from a policy in which the reigning Russian monarch could choose a successor to a strict system of primogeniture that would henceforth give preference to male heirs.
Sources: The Memoirs of Catherine the Great. A new translation by Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom (New York: Modern Library, 2005).
John T. Alexander. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Isabel de Madariaga. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
CLIO TALKS BACK: Liberian Women Taking Action for Peace
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| Poster for "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" |
These brave women in Liberia were fed up with the killing, rape, and decimation of the country and its people by warring forces and they came together, across religious lines – Christian and Muslim – to stop it, founding the Liberian Women’s Initiative (LWI). As the situation deteriorated still further, they persisted – and this is a key element – sitting in, dressed in white, with T-shirts proclaiming their mission – not only in the fish market in Monrovia but also at the peace negotiations in Accra, Ghana. They were ultimately instrumental in getting the warring sides to agree, forcing out the president-become-dictator Charles Taylor, and welcoming the United Nations pacification forces who collected and destroyed the weapons that had led to so many senseless deaths, maimings, and destruction of the country’s infrastructure. And, finally, they helped to promote the candidacy and election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as president of Liberia. They remain on the watch, as their nation attempts to revive.
The work of these women is testimony to what the united force of women can accomplish. Here is the text of their 1994 manifesto:
“We, the women of Liberia, are the mothers of the land. We feel the joys and sorrows of this land in a special way because we are women. Not only do we represent one half of the population, but we also feel a special sense of responsibility for our children, our husbands and our brothers who make up the other half of the population. We take care of the society. We soothe the pains. We are the healers and peacemakers. We call on all women of Liberia at home and abroad to unite and join our efforts in aiding the peace process in Liberia clear its final hurdle. The struggle for survival as a nation and as a people is presently at a delicate and crucial stage. For the past four years, we have been killed, raped, starved to death, misused and abused. We have witnessed the horror of having our children, our husbands, our fathers and other relatives killed and maimed before our very eyes. We have experienced starvation to the point of becoming walking skeletons. We have been stripped of our dignity as human beings! The women have borne all of this victimization with suffering and stoic silence. This silence is not to be construed as weakness or acquiescence.”
This effort is dramatic, forceful, and inspirational. But it is by no means the sole example from history of women coming together against war. We have seen Israeli women making common cause with Palestinian women to curb hostilities. Clio has already blogged about the women’s massive petition for peace presented at the international disarmament conference in 1932, sponsored by the League of Nations. But even this was not women’s first effort to work together across national lines in pursuit of peace. Clio has been impressed by the extraordinary contributions of Bertha von Suttner, with her internationally – famous novel Lay Down Your Arms, to combat militarism and war; as an inspirational leader of peace efforts in Europe before World War I (1914-1918), she became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1905). Clio can tell many stories about women coming together, across national boundaries, across oceans, and across religions to attempt – and sometimes to succeed – in accomplishing the unthinkable – bringing an end to war.
Sources: http://www.PrayTheDevilBackToHell.com . African Women and Peace Support Group, Liberian Women Peacemakers : Fighting for the Right to be Seen, Heard, and Counted (Trenton, NJ & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, Inc., 2004).
CLIO TALKS BACK: Gandhi, the English suffragettes, and non-violent direct action
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Google Images Gandhi |
In 1906, Mahatma Gandhi, visiting London, praised the dignified non-violent methods of the English suffragettes, putting their case forward as a moral example to convince his Indian countrymen to adopt the practice of “satyagraha,” or non-violent resistance to the British in South Africa (and later in India). Later on, when the suffragettes adopted tactics of violence against property and even personal martyrdom, he became less enthusiastic. Still, Gandhi continued to follow the woman suffrage campaign with great interest, and clearly benefited from what suffrage advocates had taught. Gandhi had already formulated a theory of non-violence, based on his reading of Tolstoi, but the practical example furnished by the women’s campaign for the vote in England enabled him to refine and elaborate his approach - and perhaps to shame men who were reluctant to take action with the brave example of these remarkable British women.
Clio would never doubt the importance of action, but she believes that the words spoken by individuals such as Gandhi are powerful in their own right. Here is Gandhi's 1906 editorial:
“Deeds better than Words” [October 26, 1906]
Two things are now being widely discussed in England. One relates to the decision of the soap manufacturers who, like their American opposite numbers, have combined and resolved to increase the price of soap. The dealers in soap and the public naturally did not relish the decision. But they did not approach the Government for help; neither did they appeal to the manufacturers; but they resorted to direct action. They notified the manufacturers that they would not buy their soap even if it meant a great loss to them. The result was that Lever Brothers, of Sunlight Soap fame, who used till now to have fifteen ounces of soap in their one-pound cake, will henceforth give the full sixteen. The lesson from this is that deeds are better than words. The action of the dealers proved more fruitful than mere words.
The second example illustrating this saying is more remarkable. It is the movement in England for women’s right to vote, which the Government is unwilling to concede. The women therefore go to the House of Commons and harass the Members. They have sent petitions, written letters, delivered speeches and tried many other means. Last Wednesday, they went to the House of Commons as soon as it opened and demanded the right to vote; they caused some damage also, for which they were prosecuted and sentenced to furnish a security of £ 5 each. On their refusing to do so, they were sentenced to imprisonment, and they are now in gaol. Most of the women have got three months. All of them come from respectable families and some are very well educated. One of these is the daughter of the late Mr. Cobden who was highly respected by the people. She is serving her term in gaol. Another is the wife of Mr. Lawrence. A third is an LL.B. On the very day these women went to gaol there was a huge meeting here in support of the resolve adopted by the brave ladies, and a sum of £ 650 was collected on the spot. Mr Lawrence announced that he would pay £ 10 a day as long as his wife was in gaol. Some persons regard these women as insane; the police use force against them; the magistrate looks upon them with a stern eye. Cobden’s brave daughter said, “I shall never obey any law in the making of which I have no hand; I will not accept the authority of the court executing those laws; if you send me to gaol, I will go there, but I shall on no account pay a fine. I will not furnish any security either.” It is no wonder that a people which produces such daughters and mothers should hold the sceptre. Today the whole country is laughing at them, and they have only a few people on their side. But undaunted, these women work on steadfast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and gain the franchise, for the simple reason that deeds are better than words. Even those who laughed at them would be left wondering. If even women display such courage, will the Transvaal Indians fail in their duty and be afraid of gaol? Or would they rather consider the gaol a palace and readily go there? When that time comes, India’s bonds will snap of themselves.
We have sent petitions; made speeches; and we shall continue to do so. But we shall gain our object only if we have the kind of strength we have spoken of. People do not have much faith in articles and speeches. Anyone can do that, they call for no courage. Deeds after all are better than words. All other things are unavailing, and no one is afraid of them. The only way therefore is to sacrifice oneself and take the plunge. We have much to do yet, no doubt of that.
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Postcard in Clio's personal collection Emmeline Pankhurst under arrest |
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