Women’s Peace Activism Woman’s Peace Party Membership and Donation Form Led by Jane Addams, circa 1915

World Peace Jane Addams

Book

Woman’s Peace Party. Membership and donation form, circa 1915, documents women-led peace organizing during the first year of the organization founded under the leadership of Jane Addams. Organized in January 1915, while the United States remained neutral in World War I, the Woman’s Peace Party opposed military preparedness and American intervention and joined opposition to war with demands for women’s participation in political decisions concerning international conflict. The form records how the organization recruited and financed supporters through a statement that made women’s political exclusion part of its antiwar argument, declaring, “We Demand that women be given a share in deciding between war and peace in all the courts of high debate; within the home, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the State.”

Woman’s Peace Party. Membership donation form. United States, circa 1915. One sheet, 9.5 x 6 inches. The printed appeal begins, “We, Women of the United States, assembled on behalf of World Peace, grateful for the security of our own country, but sorrowing for the misery of all involved in the present struggle among warring nations, do hereby band ourselves together to demand that war should be abolished.” It grounds opposition to war in women’s responsibility for human life: “As Women, we feel a peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war...we are especially the custodians of the life of the ages. We will no longer consent to tis reckless destruction.” The organization also addressed the domestic consequences of warfare, including increased numbers of “invalid men...widows and orphans,” while advocating international cooperation and a greater political voice for women in determining questions of war and peace.

The form dates from the Woman’s Peace Party’s founding period, when American women’s peace activism connected opposition to World War I with arguments for political participation before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Addams’s leadership soon extended beyond the American organization: in 1915 she traveled with other American delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, where she served as president of the congress and pursued international mediation proposals. Expected toning and handling dents, with small tears and folds along the left, top, and right edges. Very good condition. The membership form preserves the Woman’s Peace Party’s own language for linking recruitment, financial support, pacifism, and women’s claims to a voice in public decisions over war.

Item #16273

Price: $240.00