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World War and Worldly Women: the Great War and the Formation of the Women’S International League for Peace and Freedom in Australia

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World War and Worldly Women: the Great War and the Formation of the Women’S International League for Peace and Freedom in Australia 117 KATE LAING World war and worldly women: the Great War and the formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Australia World War I had a transformative impact on Australia’s international standing. After the war, the ideal of internationalism moved to the centre of discussions about how to secure future peace and postwar reconstruction, especially following the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO).1 With its new independent status at the League of Nations, Australia came of age diplomatically.2 The war changed ideas about Australia’s place in the world and the shift from imperial dependency to independent representation on new international bodies helped to shape the image of Australia as an autonomous state. While participation in the British imperial force paradoxically intensified a sense of national identity, the war also provoked more people to think in international terms. This was the case for politically engaged women like Vida Goldstein and Eleanor Moore, who came to understand the Great War as an example of the dangers of empire and called for Australia to exhibit more international independence. Goldstein explicitly encouraged readers of her wartime Woman Voter newspaper to ‘fight for internationalism, against imperialism’ and, in doing so, she both exemplified and pre-empted Australia’s transformation after the war.3 Internationalism was a popular political movement at the turn of the century, and the growing threat of war made it an attractive instrument 118 The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015 for trying to enforce permanent peace, especially for those activists and intellectuals who abhorred the atrocities that they believed were committed in the name of nationalism.4 As historian Glenda Sluga has shown, engagement in the international sphere was attractive to men, women and, especially, anti- colonialists, ‘who had limited political representation in nation-states and empires’.5 Moore and Goldstein were activists who recognised the promise of internationalism after experiencing difficulty in influencing the domestic political sphere, despite the extension of federal political rights to women in 1902. Their internationalism was strengthened by the emergence of anti-war activism that was stimulated by the cataclysm of World War I. Moore and Goldstein established the anti-war organisations the Sisterhood of International Peace (SIP) and the Women’s Peace Army (Peace Army) in Melbourne in 1915. These groups later became the Melbourne branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which is still in existence today. Despite this influence and longevity, discussion of the SIP and the Peace Army in histories of Australia during the Great War has been limited. Writing in the 1930s Ernest Scott, the official home front historian, did not find the contributions of these groups worthy of note.6 Later historians such as Joan Beaumont, Malcolm Saunders and Ralph Summy, Hillary Summy, Judith Smart, Joy Damousi, and Marilyn Lake have examined the women’s groups in the Victorian peace movement in order to understand Australia’s conflicted response to the war.7 Yet, even in most recent general histories, such as Michael McKernan’s Victoria at War 1914–1918, published in 2014, reference to the SIP and the Peace Army’s activities has been omitted, reinforcing the mainstream intellectual tradition that found them inconsequential in the wider history of the home front.8 The most detailed work on the SIP and the Peace Army occurred some time ago in a study by Darryn Kruse and Charles Sowerwine, and another by Malcolm Saunders.9 Kruse and Sowerwine discussed the women’s peace groups in Melbourne in order to illustrate the first-wave feminists’ belief in the inherent peacefulness of women.10 Saunders, by contrast, focused on the SIP to present a more complex picture. In his article, ‘Are women more peaceful than men?’, he showed that Eleanor Moore and the SIP were sceptical of the assumed link between women and peace, but had other reasons to organise in a gender-specific way.11 Saunders also discussed the differences and debate between the SIP and the Peace Army.12 In this article, I build on this earlier work by examining the international dimensions of the SIP and Peace Army through their correspondence with the precursor to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom World war and worldly women 119 Committee of the Sisterhood of International Peace, 1915. Records of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, State Library of Victoria, MS9377/PHO1 in Geneva. This international archive contains a wealth of frank correspondence between the local groups and the centralised international organisation. I give attention to the common interests of the Peace Army and the SIP as well as their differences, focusing on their mutual commitment to internationalism and the ways by which both groups paved the way for the growth of international engagement on the part of Australian women during the twentieth century. The history of international women’s organisations has grown as a field of study in recent years. For example, historian Leila Rupp’s influential Worlds of Women compared the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the International Council of Women and the International Alliance of Women to show the importance of women’s transnational organising in the early twentieth century.13 In Australia, Judith Smart and Marian Quartly have discussed ‘mainstream’ women’s organisations, focusing on the National Councils of Women (NCW) and their affiliation to the International Council of Women (ICW).14 Other historians, such as Marilyn Lake, Ann Curthoys, Fiona Paisley and Joy Damousi have also contributed to the historiography of Australian women and international engagement.15 Glenda Sluga’s recent 120 The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015 book, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, has added to our understanding of internationalism as a political ideal and the interplay and tension between nationalism and internationalism.16 It is clear from these studies that the emergence of internationally oriented organisations and ideologues began to capture the imagination of Australian women and came to provide a forum for them to express their point of view. Building on this work, this article will examine more closely the development of the Australian branch of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and the women who lived internationalism through it. The ideological and organisational differences between the SIP and the Peace Army were well known, yet both groups believed in the political philosophy of internationalism, both became affiliated to the International Women’s Committee for Permanent Peace (IWCPP) in 1915, and both committed to send delegates to the international conference in Zürich in 1919. The SIP was the more long-lived and, in 1919, it voted to change its name to the Australian Section of the WILPF, which had been formed in 1919 out of the IWCPP.17 Nevertheless, both the Peace Army and the SIP played pivotal roles in the foundation of WILPF in Australia, for their collaboration and confrontation defined the Australian Section’s orientation during this globally tumultuous time. The interplay between the two groups also illustrates the range of strategies arising from the complexities of protesting against war when the national government granted itself increased powers to prosecute opponents under the War Precautions Act. The Women’s Peace Army Vida Goldstein’s involvement in the Australian women’s suffrage movement has been well documented.18 In 1903, one year after Australian women were granted full political rights nationally, she formed the Women’s Political Association (WPA) and became its president. It was specifically a ‘non- party’ organisation, which acted as a lobby group outside the major parties. The association supported Goldstein’s several bids for parliament between 1903 and 1917. In July 1915, the Women’s Political Association formed a dedicated peace group, the Women’s Peace Army, to protest against the war and its impact on women. With Goldstein as the president, it attracted other prominent women from the suffrage movement. Adela Pankhurst became the secretary, and Cecilia John – an accomplished contralto singer – the treasurer. Thus, in a way that was similar to the formation of women-only peace groups overseas, the Peace Army grew out of the women’s suffrage movement and emphasised the allegedly innate peaceful qualities of women. Not all members World war and worldly women 121 of the Women’s Political Association supported the new campaign for peace. In November 1914, three months after the outbreak of the war, two executive office bearers felt compelled to resign on the grounds ‘they were out of sympathy with the anti-war campaign of the WPA’, stating ‘any opposition to compulsory military training and to militarism at this juncture might tend to weaken England’s opportunities for obtaining volunteer military service in the present war’.19 Clearly some feminists were still swayed by patriotism and support for the war. Thus the WPA moved to establish the Women’s Peace Army as a separate organisation, using the same acronym (WPA) for name recognition. It also meant that those ‘who do not approve of our non-party political policy [could] unite with us in regards to peace’.20 This
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