Helen Laville, Cold War Women: the International Activities of American Women's Organizations

Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organizations. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002. 220 pp. $64.95.

Helen Laville's monograph emphasizes the relationship between some U.S. women's voluntary organizations and U.S. government policy during the early years of the Cold War. Focusing primarily on the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the League of Women Voters (LWV), the National Council of Women (NCW), and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs (NFBPWC), Laville paints a portrait of middle- and upper-class, educated white women who appear to have had two agendas during the late 1940s and 1950s. First, they desired to help bring U.S.-style democracy and progress to the postwar world. Second, once the Cold War accelerated and anti-Communism became a central focus of U.S. political life, they slanted their programs to support governmental anti-Soviet propaganda. In both cases, the women openly embraced and even cooperated with the government in its international outreach. [End Page 165]

Laville emphasizes how deeply the participants in the organizations wanted peace. For example, to reach out to other women, the LWV became involved in Dwight D. Eisenhower's People-to-People program, which facilitated transoceanic visits for the purpose of fostering pro-U.S. practices in European countries. Women of the AAUW and the NFBPWC helped shape programs to export the U.S. model of citizenship to the women of Europe. In that hand of peaceful understanding that reached out to war-torn Europe (especially Germany) lay the recipe for duplicating the values and practices espoused by the U.S. government. It is understandable that these women avoided contact with the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a coalition of leftist women in Europe and the United States who often embraced Communist beliefs and sympathized with the Soviet Union. Laville presents several of the organizations' international efforts as being unofficial activities of the U.S. government with some monetary support from governmental agencies.

Two organizations in Laville's account that are especially interesting are the World Organization of Mothers of All Nations (WOMAN) and the Committee of Correspondence. WOMAN, created by Ladies Home Journal columnist Dorothy Thompson, began as an effort to foster world peace in three ways: by eliminating the veto power of the permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council and thereby strengthening the world body; by controlling nuclear weapons, and by establishing a World Police Force to maintain world peace as defined by the UN. Using the superior force of motherhood as its main argument, WOMAN sought to get its message out to the international community. However, within a short time, it found itself at odds with the U.S. government, especially when the women planned a conference in Berlin. Before WOMAN disbanded, its leaders came to realize that the U.S. government saw the peace movement as a pawn of the Soviet Union. To be patriotic Americans meant being unwilling to engage people either in the United States or elsewhere in discussions of international politics and disarmament.

The Committee of Correspondence, which received its funding directly from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was set up to attack women's organizations that advocated peace—such organizations were deemed by the Committee to be little more than Communist tools. The purpose of the organization was to persuade women around the world to adopt U.S. practices, including the rejection of any support for the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, the Committee maintained correspondence with more than a thousand women in seventy-three different countries. The Committee's funding was exposed in the 1960s, but this did not disturb its leaders, who felt that private citizens had a duty to support the government in its anti- Communist campaign.

Laville's book includes some very interesting information, but it also has some weak areas. For example, throughout the work, Laville speaks of women's "voluntary" organizations as if the few she covers represented all of the women's voluntary organizations in existence at the time. As U.S. historians have shown in innumerable studies, women in the United States have, from its earliest days, convened in organizations for myriad purposes. During the early Cold War years, American women took part in thousands of causes, and many women's voluntary organizations espoused the ideals [End Page 166] of citizenship and peace. Laville talks about how women wanted to achieve world peace, but she barely mentions the organizations whose main work was in fact peace and social justice. The reader therefore leaves the book a bit puzzled, not understanding the scope of women's peace efforts made during this time through conservative as well as liberal voluntary organizations.

Harriet Hyman Alonso

City College of New York, CUNY