Women’s Peace Society

Women’s Peace Society, interwar feminist and pacifist organization, active from 1919–33, that was focused on total disarmament and the immorality of violence. The Women’s Peace Society was founded in October 1919, with its headquarters in New York City. Its ideals were based on the moral principles of American writer and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. At the organization’s peak, it had between 1,500 and 2,500 members, many of whom had prior experience in the abolitionist and woman suffrage movements.

The Women’s Peace Society was founded by Garrison’s daughter, Fanny Garrison Villard, and several other members of the Women’s Peace Party’s New York chapter (later part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). The founding members had left the Women’s Peace Party in order to focus their efforts on nonresistance and nonviolence. Members of the Women’s Peace Society insisted that all life at all times is sacred, and members signed a pledge to that effect.

At a meeting in 1921 in Niagara Falls, members of the Women’s Peace Society worked with Canadian women to form the Women’s Peace Union of the Western Hemisphere. Afterward, many of the active members of the Women’s Peace Society, realizing that they were unhappy with Villard’s control of the organization and what they believed were her weaknesses on the issue of disarmament, split from the organization to focus on the Women’s Peace Union. The Women’s Peace Society continued to work alongside the new organization, particularly on a constitutional amendment that attempted to outlaw war. In 1923 the Women’s Peace Society along with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Women’s Peace Union established the War Resisters League. In 1931, members of the Women’s Peace Society spoke out against U.S. military air shows. They later also participated in congressional hearings on the antiwar amendment.

Villard served as the permanent chair of the Women’s Peace Society and personally funded the organization until the last years of her life; she died in 1928. Annie E. Gray, who had been vice president, led the organization after Villard’s health failed. In the following years, however, the Women’s Peace Society failed to recruit new members, particularly young women, into the organization. It printed its final piece of literature in 1933.

The Women’s Peace Society linked women’s equality to the need for complete disarmament. The organization primarily focused its energies on educational activities, though it was also active in political lobbying, disarmament parades, and antiwar demonstrations. Members of the organization drafted literature, spoke at public events, and held educational contests that promoted pacifism and total nonresistance. Similar to many of the women’s peace organizations of the time, the Women’s Peace Society advocated an expanded role of women in international relations and particularly peace work because members believed that women’s roles as nurturers made them inherently pacifist.