ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the impact of the First World War on the thinking of some British women who were already feminists or at least suffragists. Feminism is not the only route to pacifism; opinion is divided as to whether pacifism is a logically inevitable corollary of feminism. On August 4, 1914, the day that Britain entered the First World War, an evening meeting of women was held in the Kingsway Hall in London. The opportunities provided by the First World War for women to move into non-traditional jobs have obscured the fact that war, as ever, reinforced women's traditional role of supportive subservience. Not only that, but socialism in practice had moved conclusively towards centralized state socialism, turning its back on utopian guild socialism, with its emphasis on the greatest possible decentralization of power and decision-making. The most concrete achievement of the feminist pacifists, however, was the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.