Forging Positive Peace: The British Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1934-1946

The Women's International League (WIL) was the British section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a non-profit organisation founded in 1915. The League brought together members from different countries who believed women had a unique role in peacekeeping. They argued that gender inequality and social injustice were directly proportional to conflict and suffering, from which their dual aims of peace and freedom emerged. However, the advent of the Second World War appeared to pit peace against freedom, exasperating old, and creating new, fractures not only between the WIL and WILPF but within the British section itself. It appeared that choosing peace meant, in effect, not resisting Nazism, but advocating for freedom meant supporting the war. After heated deliberation, the WIL decided to remain officially pacifist. This was not because they had chosen peace over freedom but rather because they had a dynamic and complex understanding of pacifism. An understanding of pacifism that involved both negative peace, regarding the absence of war, and positive peace, concerning creating 'just' structural changes to society that would make anything but peace impossible.

This project draws on archival material, including many understudied official and personal records from WIL(PF) members, to reveal the WIL's peace policies and how they changed from 1934 to 1946. It develops current historiography that has largely overlooked the WIL during this period and challenges the idea that the movement 'screeched to a halt in 1939' and did not reform until the late 1940s. It does so in the first three sections, which identify the WIL's different periods of peace work: 1934-1937, 1938-1943 and 1944-1946. Here, the British section's ideological work and tangible strategies are analysed and contextualised within the League's international work. The final section takes a closer look at the WIL's gendered policies to challenge literature that discounts the League's work due to the association that is made between feminist pacifism and the essentialist idea that women are naturally peaceful.

Overall, it is argued that the WIL continued to engage in substantial and essential peace work from 1934 to 1946, despite the numerous ongoing conflicts.