American and British Women Peace Activists

The American and British women peace activists of the nineteenth century were practical reformers, intent on social change. But as the British philosopher Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) saw it, the reform work of American women was based on an excess of religious zeal rather than a true “moral philosophy.” In her mid-century assessment of them Martineau noted that American “ladies” were all engaged in charitable work, “doing good or harm according to the enlightenment of the mind which is carried to the work” (Hogeland 1973, 83–84). There were “pretensions” to mental and moral philosophy among these women, but Martineau dismissed those efforts as inadequate.¹

Many American and British women peace activists would have disagreed with Martineau’s assessment. Abolitionist Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) praised the peace women of the Massachusetts Olive Branch Circle for their work and “responsibility as intellectual, moral, and spiritual beings” in that “great work of regenerating the world” (Lerner 1975, 130–131).² The religious beliefs of many American and British women did form the basis for efforts to end the institution of war, but those beliefs were combined with notions of a universal duty to reform society, politics, and government. Although most women peace activists did not consider themselves philosophers, they did use theory and argument to articulate their aims for peace and the betterment of society.

Women made these arguments in a context of extreme limitation. White women were considered citizens of both nations; however, they lacked equal legal and social rights. The actual experiences of women of color were rarely considered as part of mainstream social narrative. Few people supported the idea that female peace activists should engage in public debates about changing governmental or foreign policies. Such participation by middle-class women outside the home was acceptable only if it mirrored domestic roles and focused on assisting women and children who were war victims. Given these limitations, female peace activists needed acceptable ways to insert their voices into the debates over war and peace. Like other reforming women of the period, American and British peace activists often claimed that their moral force was based on an innate, but idealized, universal womanhood and maternalism: a conviction that lasted throughout the century. However, some women activists stepped beyond these traditional boundaries, theorizing about the meaning of war and peace, commenting on foreign policies, and criticizing their governments and military institutions.

In both countries women joined organized peace societies beginning with their founding in 1815. The peace philosophy of these organized groups was based in Christian religious values and symbolism. The founders believed that human beings could settle conflict without resorting to violence. Peace was the natural order of human society, with war an evil and unnatural aberration. In the United States the early peace leaders were white men, often Congregational ministers, and merchants of the middling classes, based on the East Coast.³ In Great Britain, Quakers made up a significant portion of the various societies throughout the century.⁴ Other leaders were Unitarians and almost all were from non-conforming sects. British peace activists were also of the middling classes, with strong ties to the rising merchant and industrial classes seeking a voice in their government’s foreign policies and access to international markets. As with other reforming efforts in the first half of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideas of political equality, universal participation in reform, the possibility that people could make the world a better place, with the duty to do so, existed in these peace movements. There were a variety of opinions within peace societies concerning how British and American imperial efforts in the nineteenth century affected wars or violent conflicts.⁵ British and American peace societies published their own journals for their members, believing that the spread of their ideas would increase support among the general population. Essays, news notes, and poetry written by women were published on both sides of the Atlantic. The writings of British women such as Unitarian Catherine Cappe, evangelical reformer Hannah More (1745–1833), Elizabeth Hamilton (1756 or 1758–1866), and poets such as Felica Hemens (1793–1835) were included in these early journals. American Lydia Sigourney’s (1791–1865) peace poetry was some of the first to be published in American and British peace journals.

Despite these early contributions by female authors, women’s path to involvement in these societies was complicated. In the first decades of the American Republic, white Anglo women faced the tension between being expected to be ideal patriotic citizens yet having no political rights. By the early years of the century, these tensions were partially resolved by establishing an idealized role for educated white women and middle-class and free African American women as moral reformers. In this role, they could influence men and educate their sons to be good republican citizens.⁶ By the 1820s, many women demanded additional education for themselves so they could fulfill their roles as educators and as the moral center of the family. Women were also considered a force for peace and “moral stability,” but could act only through influencing men, rather than in public leadership roles (Kerber 1982; Boylan 2002). This idealized vision (if not the reality) portraying women as a positive moral influence also extended beyond middle class white women to middle class African American and immigrant women by the last quarter of the century. These tensions between the idealized cultural expectations and the desire for an expanded role in the reformation of society lasted throughout the century.

In Great Britain, most women who engaged in the organized peace movement, like their male counterparts, also belonged to dissenting religious sects. These women activists belonged to families with middling economic resources based in the new, rising industrial classes, especially in banking, factories and manufacturing, the new railroads, and the mechanized food industries. Some of these women had to work for a living or contribute to the family and household income, usually in female-based occupations such as teaching, as shop assistants, or as professional writers. Both American and British women peace activists believed in their duty, as women, to make the world a better place for all people. Many combined their work against war with other causes such as the abolition of slavery and the fight for African American rights as well as the better treatment of Irish immigrants and Native Americans. They also sometimes pursued prison reform, education reform, and sexual reforms and worked to support Christian missionaries. Later in the century some American and British women peace activists also supported women’s rights movements. In her 1867 speech supporting the inclusion of women’s rights in upcoming federal legislation, African American activist Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) connected the need for gender equity to bringing about a peaceful world: “When woman gets her rights … how beautiful that will be. Then it will be peace on earth and good will to men. But it cannot be that until it be right” (Truth 1867) (For more on Truth’s philosophical thought, see Robinson and Gray, this volume).

Leaders of early male-led peace societies published essays to convince other men that peace was superior to war, and courted politicians, ministers, and leaders. Female members were silent during public meetings and usually spoke or wrote only to other women and children. Male leaders encouraged women to join peace societies, but they were determined to control the ways in which women participated.⁷ The cultural beliefs of many American and British male peace leaders shaped the parameters for action of the women reformers. Believing that women had enormous influence on social and cultural institutions, some male leaders called upon women to work for peace, while also blaming the female sex for the continuation of war and social injustices. In the first half of the century, war was often depicted as a female monster. The Herald of Peace, the magazine of the British Society for a Permanent and Universal Peace (often called the Peace Society), published a typical poem “The Fiend of War—An Ode”: “trampling o’er the heaps of slain, Hovering round her fiery car, … Murder, with demoniac glance, Poising fierce her bloody lance” (Anonymous 1820).

Many of these leaders also chided women for continuing to support the military members of their own families and for attending public military parades. In 1818, Noah Worcester, a leader of the Massachusetts Peace Society, scolded women who “glory in having their sons educated for the business of human slaughter” (Worcester 1818). William Ladd, the first president of the American Peace Society (APS), blamed women for war itself: “When your sex shall frown on the custom of war, then … it will be abolished” (Ladd 1824, 14–15). A British speaker at the Bristol Auxiliary Peace Society told women “every intelligent, pious, and benevolent female [sh]ould engage … in the work [for peace],” and that failure would mean that women were guilty of the “devastation and ruin” of war (Anonymous 1831, 24). A man at a Devonshire peace meeting blamed women and their desire for cheap American furs as the cause of hostilities between the two countries in the 1840s, calling this “an exhibition of human depravity and infernal passions” (Anonymous 1846, 6). John Ruskin, the influential British philosopher and social critic, sounded the same themes later in the century, stridently blaming women for the continuation of war. He told the “unthinking, selfish ladies” of Great Britain that “at whatever moment you chose to put a period to war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any day to go out to dinner” (Ruskin, n.d.).⁸

But these same men also called women the best source for world peace, even while insisting that women’s efforts should occur only in their own families or among other women. In an 1836 pamphlet, APS leader William Ladd wrote that “political revolutions are brought about by men; it is not decent … for women to embark in them” (Ladd [1836] 1971, 42). Male leaders were happy to utilize “womanly” concepts such as motherhood in support of peace efforts as long as actual mothers and other women did not speak out in public or challenge male leadership. In 1838 when Abby Kelley, abolitionist leader and secretary of the New England Non-resistance Society, publicly chided APS president George Beckwith, he stormed out of the organization’s first meeting, later suggesting women be removed from the Society’s leadership (Ladd 1838).⁹ Not until the 1870s did the APS allow women into the organization’s leadership, asking Julia Ward Howe to become a vice-president of the organization.¹⁰ It took even longer for the national Peace Society in Great Britain to invite a woman to join their governing committee. In 1889 they invited Priscilla Peckover of the Wisbech Peace Association, the leading woman peace activist of her day, to join their board. Peckover refused the invitation (Brown 2003, 88; Ceadel 1996, 261). Throughout the century male peace leaders were happy to receive the significant sums of money raised by members of American and British women’s auxiliary peace societies (Chmielewski 1995, 466–490).¹¹ American women were encouraged to raise enough money for their local ministers to become peace society members. British women held numerous fairs and bazaars, selling their own baked goods, and fancy sewn goods, famously raising thousands of pounds for peace efforts. These funds almost always were sent to the male-led national peace societies.

American and British women also formed their own peace societies from the early 1820s onward. In Great Britain, they formed the Tavistock Ladies Peace Association and the Gisborough Ladies Peace Auxiliary.¹² In 1846 American peace activist Elihu Burritt traveled to Great Britain, where he spent the next two decades working with women throughout the British Isles to form over one hundred women’s peace groups known as Olive Leaf Circles.¹³ Lower middle-class women activists, such as Caroline Fry, Jane Colgate, Elizabeth Colgate, Bessie Inglis, Elizabeth B. Prideaux, and hundreds of others created a loose network of groups that were independent of the male-led national societies. A sense of familial community was encouraged, with women calling each other Olive Leaf Circle Sisters.¹⁴ The women funded projects such as writing, publishing, and distributing peace pamphlets, and placing placards with anti-war messages in public places accessible to all. Some of the writings covered the activities of various Olive Leaf Circles and attempts to maintain the network between groups; other articles related to peace issues. For example, during the Crimean War Olive Leaf sisters praised the work of Florence Nightingale. Some Olive Leaf groups donated funds to women lecturers, such as popular anti-slavery author Harriet Beecher Stowe, when she toured Great Britain in the 1850s.

In America at least nine independent women’s organizations were formed in between the 1820s to 1840s, such as the Ladies Bowdoin Street Peace Society, the Philadelphia Ladies’ Peace Society, and the Lynn [Massachusetts] Female Peace Society (Chmielewski 1995, 477–478).¹⁵ As organizers, these women drafted reports of their activities for peace, which were published in peace magazines. Many activists, such American poet Lydia Sigourney, organized women’s petitions with statements of their beliefs and hopes for peace.¹⁶ Three thousand women in Philadelphia, headed by experienced activists such as Quaker minister and activist Lucretia Mott, signed a similar anti-war petition sent to women in Exeter, England in 1846.¹⁷ In a letter accompanying the petition Mott noted how women could make their voices heard in the home and in public.

By the middle of the century many American peace activists and abolitionists debated on how to react to their government’s support of slavery. Some developed theories of non-violence called non-resistance. They pledged non-cooperation with the US government, which participated in war, capital punishment, and slavery.¹⁸ The New England Non-Resistance Society was formed in 1838 by radical abolitionists, including many women. Its constitution stated that women and people of color would have equal roles in the group. Maria Weston Chapman, one of the early members mostly remembered for her anti-slavery work, was also an editor of The Non-Resistant, the group’s newspaper aimed at promoting the non-resistance movement.

These activists pledged themselves to react peacefully to violence. In 1838 female anti-slavery activists in Philadelphia faced down a violent mob by leaving their meeting two by two, one white, and one Black woman forming each pair. Lucretia Mott and fellow Quaker peace activist Rebecca Fussell (with her child in her arms), each nonviolently confronted anti-abolitionist mobs. Many American abolitionists abandoned non-resistance by the 1850s as debates over how to end slavery swept through the movement. Some, like Mott, continued to support the ending of slavery but maintained their beliefs in non-violence.¹⁹

After the US Civil War (1861–1865), many women’s reform organizations concentrated on voting rights and racial justice as well as the battles for women’s rights. Peace activism continued, but mostly through individual efforts and through large women’s rights groups.²⁰ The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union sponsored a department of Peace and Arbitration from the early 1880s onward, with its own newspapers for adults and children. The National Council of Women established a department of Peace and Arbitration in 1895.²¹

In the mid-1870s women members of the London-based Peace Society organized the Women’s Peace and Arbitration Auxiliary of the Peace Society (WPAAPS), with a largely evangelical Christian membership. Leaders like Elizabeth M. Southey continued along the path set out by the male leadership of the Peace Society, praising the special moral influence of women (Brown 2003).²² By the following decade the WPAAPS became independent of the Peace Society. Under leadership of noted peace activist Priscilla Peckover, the organization shifted away from its London base to organizing women in other parts of Great Britain. Peckover had organized the Wisbech Local Peace Association. Although Peckover never connected her peace work with questions about women’s rights, the members of the Local Peace Association were able to make their voices heard beyond the traditional writing of tracts and their distribution. In the LPA organizations women began speaking publicly at meetings for the first time. In 1889 several women gave “striking and powerful addresses” at meetings (Anonymous 1889, 240). Women spoke out on issues of taxation, military buildup and weapons, arbitration, and male conscription. Women, such as Frances Thompson, the president of a northern peace group, also spoke to men’s organizations as well (Anonymous 1891, 244). Just prior to the Boer War, Peckover and the local peace group had successfully resisted the establishment of a militia base in Wisbech (Brown 2003, 104).

After Peckover’s retirement in 1894, peace activist Ellen Robinson took over the local peace association movement. She had already organized a peace group in the Liverpool area, and it was always independent of the male-led London Peace Society. Throughout her peace work, Robinson re-established some of the gender arguments against war: the rise of prostitution in locales with military barracks, the fact that women were paid less than men because they could not fight in wars, and the claim that women suffered more from the effects of war. Like other American and British feminists at the end of the nineteenth century, Robinson argued that women’s voices had to be included in national and international political debates. (Brown 2003, 104). She continued Peckover’s work in connecting with other British groups but established networks with international women’s organizations as well.

By the end of the century women peace activists had far more experience in practical politics and used that experience to make changes. In the US Hannah J. Bailey, the officer of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in charge of peace work, organized women’s petitions to the US Congress and encouraged women to write directly to their elected representatives demanding the end of funding for the military (Bailey [190?]). She provided peace articles, essays, pamphlets, and other materials for women to send with their demands. Although neither women in the US nor Great Britain had the national franchise, as president of the Maine Woman Suffrage Association Bailey knew women had some suffrage and electoral rights in both countries.²³ As voters and elected members of school boards, peace-minded women could influence local choices for textbooks, teachers, and funds in their home communities.

Some women peace activists openly challenged traditional prescriptions for female behavior, refusing to accept the blame for war. In response to Ruskin’s belligerent essay blaming women for war, Bessie Inglis, a British peace activist, and “one of the first and most successful of lady lecturers,” (Obituaries for December) told Ruskin to come up with more modern ideas about women.²⁴ In 1899 the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox angrily satirized the whole notion that women could use influence to end wars in a world controlled by men:

“O men, … is there no substitute for war in this Great age and era?

If you answer ‘No,’

Then let us rear our children to be wolves

And teach them from the cradle how to kill.

Why should we women waste our time and words

In talking peace when men declare for war?

(Wilcox 1900)²⁵

Some women peace activists did step beyond the parameters set by their male colleagues. While this shift was more likely to occur among female peace activists in the later years of the century, some took the bold step much earlier. Sarah Josepha Hale, a founding member of the Ladies Bowdoin Peace Society in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1820s, later published a poem in a gift book embodying the role of women in creating a new peaceful world. In this poem, “The Three Sceptres: A Vision,” about American exceptionalism, a young woman representing the new Republic and the New World lays a scepter, in the form of a pen, upon an altar. The pen, a symbol of peace, overcomes the sword and with it the religious intolerance that is represented in the poem as part of the Old World (Hale 1836).²⁶ Hale envisioned a new way to end human conflict and religious intolerance, namely through written communication, rather than by guns and cannons. Written works were increasingly accessible to educated women, both as creators of ideas and as readers. Hale assumed that women would incorporate these ideas into their own lives and in educating their children, thus spreading ideas of peace. As the editor, for several decades, of the enormously influential magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale knew intimately the role of the pen in providing an acceptable public voice for women. She joined an increasing number of women peace activists who found writing essays, poems, hymns, novels, short stories a way to make their ideas public.

Mary Grew and Jane Swisshelm both wrote for mixed-sex audiences in newspapers during the US war with Mexico in the 1840s. Both women entered the public debates over US foreign policy. As editor of an anti-slavery newspaper The Pennsylvania Freeman, Grew wrote about how the support of Southern US Congressmen was needed to avoid hostilities with the British over the Oregon border. But Southern politicians would only support negotiations with Britain if Northern Congressmen voted in favor of statehood for Texas and the expansion of slavery into that new territory.²⁷ Jane Swisshelm, a journalist and later newspaper editor, wrote that the war with Mexico was waged by an empire of the strong that trampled over the rights of the Mexican people (Isenberg 1998, 133–134).²⁸

The most significant activity for individual women peace activists on both sides of the Atlantic came through writing and publishing. Women made their ideas available through essays, poems, short stories, hymns, and advice columns, usually in magazines and newspapers popular with other women or in the reform press. Magazine, newspaper, and book editors were able to create their own vision on a particular topic. In America women edited mainstream, reform, and women’s rights newspapers and magazines by the middle of the century. Women peace activists such as Sarah Josepha Hale, Mary Grew, Maria Weston Chapman, and Lydia Maria Child worked as editors. By the last quarter of the century British women activists such as Lydia Becker and Emily Faithful incorporated articles on peace and anti-war issues in the magazines they edited. American women also edited annual “gift” books which contained stories, poems, and essays aimed at women, especially as holiday gifts. It was in such publications that women could voice their beliefs against war. They also used these publications to consider peace efforts that were different from those proposed by male-led organizations.

The earliest women’s writings dealt with the loss of male family members in battles, and also depicted the civilian deaths of women and children. These writings included gruesome details of battlefields, with dead men surrounded by dead or weeping women and children. Published in 1829 in The Herald of Peace, an anonymous female poet wrote:

I only heard the matron’s sigh, the widow’s tears, the orphan’s moans,

The battle’s rage, the din of war, And mangled armies’ dying groans.

(A Young Lady, 1829)

When American activist Julia Ward Howe, the famous author of the “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” called for an international women’s peace movement, she also combined traditional ideas of women’s roles in the private realm, with a universality of womanhood and a duty to act as moral saviors. She wrote that even if women did not participate in the political institutions of their home nations, they could work with women in other countries: “We are not divided by nationality … women are non-combatants, women are outside of diplomatic conventions” (Howe 1871, 7). Instead, Howe called for “a general Congress of women without limitation of country … to promote the general alliance of nations, the amicable arbitrament of difficulties, the great and enduring interests of peace” (30). An English woman writing to The Christian World later in the same decade wrote that protesting war was part of the duty of women and assured her readers that such protests were neither unreasonable nor unwomanly (Anonymous 1878, 30).²⁹

Women also addressed other social effects of war. They wrote about the taxes required to pay for past wars which devastated the economic viability of women. The issue of war taxes on working families was echoed in the story “The Soldier’s Wife,” written by an anonymous British woman peace activist. (Burritt 1853).³⁰ British suffragist Lydia E. Becker also questioned why women should be compelled to pay war taxes: “A war involves heavy and grinding taxation, which presses with the greatest cruelty on those of small means, and notably on women.” Becker went on to note that women suffered economic deprivation, as well as loss of family members (Becker 1878, 22). In her magazine devoted primarily to woman suffrage, she often included articles about the need for women’s role in matters of war and peace efforts.

The anonymous American female author of the essay “Claims of Peace on Women” addressed sexual issues, condemning the institution of the military in war and peace, and warning that military men seduced and abandoned women: “war … must from its nature, reek with licentiousness … wherever troops are quartered there is women tempted to her ruin” (Anonymous 1845, 372). In Great Britain, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), and activist Josephine Butler (1828–1906) made public some of the same issues and supported the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act in attempts to stop the state sanctioned sexual abuse and physical internal examinations of women considered to be sex workers near military institutions.³¹ Peace movement leaders hoped that these vivid word images would spur more women reformers to work for peace, on behalf of all vulnerable women and children.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a belief in an idealized, almost mythological, form of motherhood dominated both American and British societies. In this cultural mythology mothers loved their children unconditionally, and protected them from all forms of violence, even if it meant sacrificing themselves. These notions of perfect maternalism formed a subset of women’s moral force. These idealized images were used to encourage women to join social reform movements, assuring them that these political and public activities were acceptable.

In America, women without citizenship rights themselves, were told they could participate in society by preparing their sons for citizenship. Unmarried women, or women without children, could be teachers and fulfill this maternal role. Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale rarely admitted to her own peace movement activism, but she did include some articles about the need for women’s influence for peace over war. She included an 1851 article by magazine writer Kate Berry on how mothers could influence their sons to pursue patriotic, peaceful careers as alternatives to the military (Berry 1851).

During the British Canadian-Oregon border hostilities in the 1840s women on both sides of the Atlantic exchanged petitions demonstrating hopes for peace between the US and Great Britain. Some of these petitions called upon an ideal of universal motherhood: “let us as mothers watch over … our tender offspring and point out … that the way to true honour is not through fields of battle, but through the enlightened, straight-forward, course of justice and equity” (Exeter Friendly Address).³²

African American poet, novelist, peace worker, and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper published many works which both utilized and challenged mainstream notions of motherhood. In her poems and other writings Harper wrote about the horrors of slavery for mothers and children alike. She connected her work for peace with a belief in the need for temperance and women’s rights. As a vice president of the Universal Peace Union, Harper raised the issues of violence against African Americans and the racism in American society gaining new footholds in the last quarter of the century. In her poem from the 1890s, “An Appeal to My Country Women,” Harper recommends that “her well-sheltered sisters,” who weep for victims of war and violence beyond America, must become more clear-eyed and recognize the violence of lynching. She also warned that white supremacy, racism, and the legacies of slavery were still operational a generation beyond the Civil War. Harper may also have intended to remind readers of the mixed-race children born of the rape of enslaved women by white men:

But hark! from our Southland are floating

Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain, …

Remember that men are still wasting

Life’s crimson around our own doors. …

Weep not for the Negro alone,

But weep for your sons who must gather

The crops which their fathers have sown.

(Harper 1988)³³

Harper addressed all Americans in her writing, although much of her work was first published in African American newspapers.

White American poet Elizabeth Chandler also challenged mainstream notions of motherhood when she wrote that women had a duty to work for peace, as well as teaching their children about the connections between war and slavery. In the poem “Looking at Soldiers,” a young boy is dazzled by a military parade celebrating the fourth of July Independence Day celebrations. His mother tells him she is saddened by the event because American slaves “wear a life-crushing yoke,” and the white soldiers he admires would use their bayonets to kill slave rebels “should they fling off the shackles that round them are prest [sic].” While Chandler was herself unmarried and childless, she was familiar with the common symbols of motherhood of her day that would appeal to her female readership. Her poems openly dealt with the losses of slave mothers, the loss of traditional life for Native Americans, and the horrors of war. In her poem “A True Ballad” she specifically challenged the institution of motherhood, the American patriotic mythology of a free Republic, that also supported the institution of slavery. The poem opens with the lines: “A glorious land is this of ours, A land of liberty!” It then continues with the story of an imprisoned slave mother whose three children are sold away from her, “one by one” (Chandler, n.d.).³⁴

The idea that mothers had a significant role in ending wars continued into the early years of the modern peace movement, during World War I. The declaration of principles from the 1915 organizing meeting of the Woman’s Peace Party noted that the “mother-half of humanity” had right to be “considered in the settlement of questions concerning not alone the life of individuals, but of nations” (Collins 2007, 289).³⁵ The special role of mothers in seeking peace and social justice continued long into the twentieth century through such organizations as Another Mother for Peace, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, Madre, Mothers Against Gun Violence, and many others.

American and British women peace activists were not philosophers, but they were convinced that ideas and arguments would allow them to be agents of change in the world. Like many other nineteenth century reformers, they believed that their society could be changed, and that as women they had a duty to participate in making that change a reality. Many women activists based their work for a peaceful world and participation in organized reform movements, on the special moral force or influence they believed was universal and innate among all women. Most women lacked any political power or even influence in public debates on war, peace, and foreign policy. Social mores on both sides of the Atlantic determined that women should not even participate in public debates, but belief in this female moral force lasted throughout the century and continued as a useful strategy for women to raise their voices and ideas for peace. Some women were able to challenge (or begin to challenge), accepted ideas about women and peace and work beyond the limited parameters of the roles of American and British womanhood. All these women hoped to influence others with their ideas by creating their pathways to peace and justice.