Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results

by Jane Addams, Harriet Hyman Alonso

In the midst of World War I, from April 28 to May 1, 1915, more than a thousand women from Europe and North America gathered in The Hague to discuss proposals for a peaceful end to the war. As one of the founders of the Woman's Peace Party, Jane Addams was among the attendees at the International Congress of Women, along with fellow social reformers and peace activists Emily G. Balch and Alice Hamilton. This book contains their journalistic accounts of the  Congress's proceedings and results as well as their personal reflections on peace, war, politics, and the central role of women in the preservation of peace.
 
Following the conference in The Hague, Addams and Balch traveled around Europe as members of delegations visiting various governmental leaders to demand an end to the war. In this book they describe the activities of these delegations, painting a vivid portrait of the emerging women's peace movement.
 
With the continuing growth of the peace movement, the essays in Women at the Hague remain as timely as they were when first published in 1915. Addams, Balch, and Hamilton write compellingly about the organizing methods and collaborative spirit of the women's peace movement, conveying a strong awareness of the responsibility of women to protect the global community from the devastating effects of war.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, History

136 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1972

About the author

American social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams in 1889 founded Hull house, a care and education center for the poor of Chicago, and in 1931 shared the Nobel Prize for peace.

Her mother died when she was two years old in 1862, and her father and later a stepmother reared her. She graduated from Rockford female seminary in 1881, among the first students to take a course of study equivalent to that of men at other institutions. Her father, whom she admired tremendously, died in that same year, 1881.

Jane Addams attended medical college of woman in Pennsylvania but, probably due to her ill health and chronic back pain, left. She toured Europe from 1883 to 1885 and then lived in Baltimore until 1887 but figure out not what she wanted with her education and skills.

In 1888, on a visit to England with her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr, Jane Addams visited Toynbee Settlement Hall and London's East End. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr planned to start an American equivalent of that settlement house. After their return they chose Hull mansion, a building which had, though originally built at the edge of the city, become surrounded by an immigrant neighborhood and had been used as a warehouse.

Using an experimental model of reform -- trying solutions to see what would work -- and committed to full- and part-time residents to keep in touch with the neighborhood's real needs, Jane Addams built Hull-House into an institution known worldwide. Addams wrote articles, lectured widely and did most of the fund-raising personally and served on many social work, social welfare and settlement house boards and commissions.

Jane Addams also became involved in wider efforts for social reform, including housing and sanitation issues, factory inspection, rights of immigrants, women and children, pacifism and the 8-hour day. She served as a Vice President of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1911-1914.

In 1912, Jane Addams campaigned for the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Teddy Roosevelt. She worked with the Peace Party, helped found and served as president (1919-1935) of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In 1931 Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, but her health was too fragile to attend the European ceremonies to accept the prize. She was the second woman to be awarded that honor.

By Jone Johnson Lewis, About.com

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important historical document regarding the events of the International Congress of Women at the Hague in April 1915, with an informative introduction that provides biographical information on the major players as well as historical context and an outline of what to expect from the document itself.

It's gratifying to know that strong, intelligent women were standing up for what they believed in during a time when they couldn't even vote yet in most countries. In the midst of World War I, these women wanted peace. They believed in peace. They wanted to make their voices heard for peace. Emily G. Balch, reporting on her general impressions of the Congress said, "What stands out most strongly among all my impressions of those thrilling and strained days at The Hague is the sense of the wonder of the beautiful spirit of the brave, self-controlled women who dared ridicule and every sort of difficulty to express a passionate human sympathy, not inconsistent with patriotism, but transcending it."

A delegation from the Congress was sent to the capitals of each country in Europe as well as the United States to present the government with the Congress's resolutions. Alice Hamilton shared her experiences as part of this delegation including some very insightful passages. This may have been my favorite part of the book as Ms. Hamilton describes the variances within each country, both in the opinions they encountered and the hardships the citizens were experiencing (and I loved reading about Vienna!). "In Paris, I had the impression even more strongly than elsewhere that the most extravagantly bitter statements are made, not by the Europeans themselves, but by the American sojourners in Europe. There is something very distasteful in this. It seems to me that no one has a right to urge extreme sacrifices unless he is also sacrificing himself, that nobody should talk of war to the bitter end who is not himself fighting."

The inestimable Jane Addams describes the differences of opinions she has seen, particularly among the younger generation. "What is needed above all else is some human interpretation of this overevolved and much-talked-of situation in which so much of the world finds itself in dire confusion and bloodshed." She also looks to the process of resuming the peace after the war:

"In addition to the revolt against war on the part of the young men, there was discernible everywhere among the civilian population two bodies of enthusiasm: one, and by far the larger, believes that the war can be settled only upon a military basis after a series of smashing victories; the other, a civil party, very much deprecates the exaltation of militarism and contends that the longer the war is carried on, the longer the military continues censoring the press and exercising other powers not ordinarily accorded to it--thus breaking down safeguards of civil government, many of which have been won at the hardest--the more difficult it will be for normal civil life to reestablish itself...War itself destroys democracy wherever it thrives and tends to entrench militarism."

I found Ms. Addams's comparison of the opinions in different countries regarding the sinking of the Lusitania fascinating. "Traveling rapidly, as we did, from one country to another, perhaps nothing was more striking than the diametrically opposing opinions we found concerning identical occurrences or series of events.

"We arrived in London two days after the sinking of the Lusitania and read in many columns the indignation against this 'crowning outrage of German piracy upon helpless women and children.' So profound was this feeling that during the next few days when we were still in London, the English Parliament, following the attacks upon the German bakeshops and other places of business, decided to intern German subjects. Ten days later when we reached Berlin, their citizens were still rejoicing over the victory which had been achieved by a tiny submarine over the 'great auxiliary cruiser of the British Navy,'...Even reasonable and justice-loving people in both countries, who wished to be sure of their data before passing judgment, would be quite unable to deal impartially with the situation."

I frequently read articles on CNN, Fox News, BBC, and Al Jazeera all about the identical event to try to get a fuller perspective. And I can say with full confidence that 100 years later, little has changed on that front. Ms. Addams doesn't have much nice to say about the press and its culpability in fanning the flames of "the war spirit." "At moments I found myself filled with a conviction that the next revolution against tyranny would have to be a revolution against the unscrupulous power of the press." She came to the conclusion that "the people of the different countries could not secure the material upon which they might form a sound judgment of the situation, because the press with the opportunity of determining opinion by selecting data, had assumed the power once exercised by the church when it gave to the people only such knowledge as it deemed fit for them to have."

Ms. Balch also explores the idea of peace itself, as well as the costs of peace. "Every country desires peace at the earliest possible moment, if peace can be had on what it regards as satisfactory terms. Peace is possible whenever the moment comes when each side would accept what the other side would grant, but from the international or human point of view a satisfactory peace is possible only when these claims and concessions are such as to forward, not to hinder, human progress...Any community which, if it could, would fight to change its political status may be quiet under coercion, but it is not at peace."

Ms. Addams shares her thoughts on internationalism vs. patriotism; a common criticism of these pacifist women was that they had no patriotism. She insists that the International Congress of Women showed that "internationalism...surrounds and completes national life, even as national life itself surrounds and completes family life" and that "internationalism does not conflict with patriotism on one side any more than family devotion conflicts with it upon the other."

Finally, she declares that "the world progresses, in the slow and halting manner in which it does progress, only in proportion to the moral energy exerted by the men and women living in it; advance in international affairs, as elsewhere, must be secured by the human will and understanding united for conscious ends." In other words, we are all complicit. Ms. Addams's words are still a call to action almost a century later.

For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.