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Book Review
| No Peace without Freedom: Race and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1975. By Joyce Blackwell. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. xxii, 241 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8093-2564-0.)Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963. By Scott H. Bennett. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. xx, 335 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8156-3003-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 08156-3028-X.)
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| As Charles F. Howlett recently observed in "Studying America's Struggle against War: An Historical Perspective" (History Teacher, May 2003), scholars attracted to the field of peace studies and the subfield of peace history have produced a substantial body of significant work since the 1960s, when a group of historians occupied with issues of peace and justice banded together in the Historians Conference on Peace Research and launched the journal Peace and Change. The conference, known today as the Peace History Society (PHS), promotes scholarly study of the causes of war, the conditions of peace, and the pursuit of nonviolent strategies to resolve human conflict. Joyce Blackwell, who chairs the history department at St. Augustine's College in North Carolina, and Scott H. Bennett, assistant professor of history at Georgian Court University in New Jersey, exemplify those among the current PHS membership who are examining the connections between peace advocacy and war resistance, on the one hand, and campaigns against racism, sexism, and economic injustice, on the other. |
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Each author has delved into the history of one of the foundational institutions of the modern American peace movement, dating from the era of World War I. In Radical Pacifism Bennett describes and interprets the evolution of "the oldest secular, mixed-gender, radical pacifist organization in the United States," the War Resisters League (WRL; Bennett, p. 19). His is the first full-scale history of the WRL. In No Peace without Freedom Blackwell revises previous narrative histories of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The findings of both authors are well rooted in archival sources and deepened by interviews with activists who played essential roles in the two organizations. |
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Because peace activists have a penchant for involving themselves in multiple organizations, and because peace and antiwar organizations often work in coalition, separating out what is unique and particularly attributable to one group is not easy. This is especially true in the case of the WRL, whose membership overlapped with most other major peace groups as well as with the Socialist party. Bennett skillfully identifies WRL contributions within the overall peace movement and is persuasive in crediting the league with a central role in shaping an approach to war resistance and conflict resolution that drew upon Gandhian tactics and eschewed the more dogmatic moralism of traditional pacifists. |
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Bennett also stresses the importance of the WRL in expanding the pacifist agenda to address "the structural 'violence' inherent in classism, racism, patriarchy, and ... even eating meat" (Bennett, p. 243). Another of his themes is the cross-fertilization between the WRL and the Socialist party of the United States, whereby Socialist members of the league kept social justice issues in the forefront of the peace organization while speaking up in the party for nonviolent alternatives to the use of force. |
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