Ruby Ekkel review of Kate Laing, Sisters in Peace: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Australia, 1915–2015

(Canberra: ANU Press, 2023), 360 pp., PB $49.95, ISBN 9781760465995

It has become a historical commonplace to argue that the Treaty of Versailles laid the groundwork for World War II (WWII). The harsh demands made on the defeated Germans, though not unusual for postwar settlements in this period, made the fulfilment of the treaty’s terms almost impossible, and bred domestic anger and economic instability later exacerbated by the Great Depression. Though he represented a comparatively small population, Prime Minister of Australia Billy Hughes was an influential player at the Paris Peace Conference where the momentous treaty was negotiated. He was a vociferous proponent of the war guilt clause requiring Germany to accept responsibility for the war and compensate Allied nations for their costs. Hughes was less enthusiastic about a possible racial equality clause proposed for the new League of Nations Covenant, which would have clashed with his government’s racially exclusive policies. He successfully argued against its inclusion, inflaming Australia’s diplomatic relations with Japan.

Women were excluded from the centre of these epoch-shaping political negotiations, but many around the world were deeply concerned with postwar global politics and especially the establishment of long-term peace. They were motivated by the devastations of World War I (WWI) and the promise of new forms of international diplomacy to make their voices heard and to connect with like-minded women beyond the national borders that seemed to cause so much strife. The second Women’s International Congress, held in Zurich in 1919, was the first international meeting to respond to the Paris Peace Conference’s output. The participants of this ‘miniature League of Nations’ roundly criticised the Treaty of Versailles, arguing that it was overly punitive and destructive, and that the disharmony it cemented ‘can only lead to future wars’ (p. 73). They were also greatly disappointed by the proposals for the actual League of Nations, which seemed to have departed from President Wilson’s original ‘14 points’. Where the Paris Peace Conference was dominated by competing national interests, and excluded defeated countries from negotiations, the Zurich Congress hoped for a more genuinely internationalist future, and encouraged delegates from all represented nations to advocate for global rather than national concerns. In what became a pattern of enormous productivity met with little recognition by the political establishment, the congress’s 37 resolutions were sent to every delegate and government present at Versailles. They were greeted with silence and, eventually, another war. A far more lasting consequence of the congress, however, was the official founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), now the oldest international feminist organisation. Kate Laing’s new history of the Australian arm of WILPF charts this pathbreaking organisation from its beginnings in WWI to its centenary celebrations in 2015.

The Australian WILPF’s longevity and engagement with a long and depressing series of conflicts lend themselves to an expansive history that must balance local and global arenas. Laing manages the task successfully, moving deftly between regional, national and international scales, and wrangling a temporal scope that includes both Vida Goldstein and Peter Dutton, Armistice Day and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We might even call Sisters in Peace a history of the Australian WILPF that also contains brief histories of twentieth-century war and feminism—not an easy feat. Eight chronological chapters chart the crises, commitments and adaptations of the organisation’s first century, as its members continued to advocate peace against the prevailing tides of militarism. Each chapter draws attention to the tensions at the heart of a feminist organisation advocating for peace and freedom, making claims to maternalist responsibility despite changing feminist milieux, and wavering between its commitment to palatable decorum and the drive for more radical activism.

Right from the start, two women’s peace organisations that formed in Melbourne in 1915 clashed over methods and timing, even as they agreed on a message of peace and the political potential of internationalism. The Sisterhood of International Peace preferred a ‘slow-burn’, educational approach (p. 48) that would be most effectively pursued after the war’s conclusion, while the Women’s Peace Army was true to its ironic name, preferring more militant and immediate methods. Newly enfranchised white Australian women had to negotiate carefully in asserting themselves in the political sphere, especially when issues of masculinity seemed to be at stake. This was especially the case in fraught debates over the 1916 referendum on conscription, in which both pro- and anti- groups lent heavily on ideas of sexual difference. As they countered arguments that mothers should be glad to sacrifice their sons for the good of the nation, women from both organisations were subject to sexist ridicule and sometimes violence. In the end, it was the Sisterhood of Peace that endured after 1918, changing its name to the Australian section of WILPF, but the push and pull between ‘respectable’ and ‘radical’ approaches continued to shape and sometimes rock the organisation in the following decades.

WILPF has always been committedly internationalist, but membership has led many women to rethink national norms. In particular, it was soon evident that ‘an internationalist mindset demanded engagement with the politics of race’ (p. 83), and, in interwar Australia, that meant a confrontation with the otherwise domestically popular White Australia policy. ‘I am against the White Australia Policy’, said one member ‘because the arming of brothers against each other is the only way it can be preserved’ (p. 84). On the other hand, some like Vida Goldstein worried that change would generate an exploited non-white labour class while reducing white men’s conditions and pay, thus demeaning both groups. (Like those of many WILPF members, Goldstein’s views on the White Australia policy changed over time.) Laing deals with this chapter delicately, careful not to generalise as she details how some WILPF members came to question the White Australia policy consensus and reject inflammatory racism, without making the leap to a full disavowal of the exclusionary set of policies supported by many of their trade union allies. Meanwhile, the unequal treatment of Aboriginal people was ‘ignored as irrelevant’ (p. 85) until the 1950s, when the Australian section began to promote Indigenous causes through the lens of universal human rights.

During WWII, the ‘freedom’ in WILPF’s name seemed increasingly at odds with the organisation’s central fight for peace and nonviolence, as people around the world took up arms to fight fascist and totalitarian aggression. Members had initially taken ‘freedom’ to mean emancipation from gendered oppression, so that women could more effectively fight for peace, but it quickly came to represent freedom from political and military oppression, raising vexed questions about how meaningful peace could truly be without recourse to violent resistance against dictators. Facing the failure of the once-promising disarmament movement and the disintegration of interwar antimilitarist sentiment, the Australian WILPF remained resolute in its pacifism, to the point of causing a rift with international leadership. Following the lead of Melbourne secretary Eleanor Moore, a committed and purist pacifist whose memoir is an important source for this book, the Australian section publicly dissented with the international WILPF’s decision to support a boycott of Japan. Australian WILPF members felt they ought to have been consulted as leaders in the Australasian and Asian region, having fostered pan-Pacific connections there for several decades.

The post-WWII order brought new tensions, as angst over communism divided the international peace movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLB) undercut the traditional contours of feminism. Unlike some peace organisations that sympathised with the Soviet Union and communist-aligned, nationalist struggles, the Australian WILPF section remained staunchly anti-communist, though its members’ statements on the matter were not enough to avert ASIO surveillance. WILPF gradually adapted to changing expressions of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, adopting theories of patriarchy to articulate how men and women were conditioned into gender roles that might lead to war, though the maternalism of an earlier era never totally dissipated. Indeed, the idea of women’s special mandate to protect children’s futures gained a new salience in the atomic era.

Despite these ideological strains, the overarching impression in this commemorative but clear-eyed history is of a group of women who insist on an alternative vision to ‘common sense’ political and military verities that normalise war and violence as solutions to political problems. Since the Zurich Congress’ critiques of the Paris Peace Conference, WILPF has refused to accept an absence of nonviolent possibilities in the face of indifference, sexism, resistance and disillusionment. It is a refusal best articulated in 1964, when the minister for external affairs argued in the House of Representatives that there was ‘no current alternative’ to ‘using force as necessary to check the southward thrust of militant Asian Communism’ (p. 235). In a response that struck a chord with the public, the Australian WILPF arranged an advertisement in the Australian: ‘Is there a current alternative to force in Asia? Yes Mr Hasluck there is!’

As Laing finalised Sisters in Peace in 2022, world leaders were grappling with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an event that upended comfortable beliefs about the unlikelihood of conventional warfare between financially connected modern states, and about the neutralisation of nuclear weapons as a realistic threat. In response, Australia’s defence minister and current leader of the opposition declared: ‘The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war’ (p. 299). Given her primary focus on the day-to-day politics of conference forums, drawing room meetings and correspondence with distant committees, Laing tends to refer only indirectly to the emotional and physical ravages of war that inspired WILPF’s work. The human consequences of failures to maintain peace are glimpsed, not foregrounded. But the anecdote of a Ukrainian woman forced to search for emergency contraception in between bombing raids, presented in the book’s conclusion, is a poignant reminder of the gravity of WILPF’s fight for peace and demilitarisation, and especially of the sexual violence disproportionately experienced by women in war. In reference to the threat of rape, the woman said, ‘I cried in silence, because all wars are like this’ (p. 300).

Since the book’s publication, old and new arenas of conflict have erupted, and the Australian WILPF is currently focused on atrocities in Gaza and the importation of arms to Israel, alongside campaigns relating to Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan and Ukraine—a grim and growing list. It is meaningful to see the former Labor MP Margaret Reynolds, who wrote the Foreword for Sisters in Peace and who was reprimanded for countering Bob Hawke’s decision to participate in the Gulf War, writing in July 2024 in support of Senator Fatima Payman’s break with the Labor Party over its stance on Palestine.¹

Sisters in Peace is a valuable contribution to the rich body of historical analysis of the relationship between feminism and pacifism; though it grows out of a well-established field of research, one of its many strengths is an attentiveness to the particularities of the Australian experience, and sometimes the Melbourne or Perth experience. This timely and thought-provoking book will be valuable to scholars of Australian feminism and peace advocacy, and all those interested in gendered perspectives on the last 100 years of global war. But readers should brace themselves for the second-hand frustration of learning about good ideas ignored and alternative possibilities unexplored, in debates of inconceivably high stakes.

1. 1 Margaret Reynolds, ‘Will Senator Payman Influence Australian Government Decision Makers?’, Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Australia’, 1 July 2024, wilpf.org.au/will-senator-payman-influence-australian-government-decision-makers/.