Why peace and freedom?(Women's International League for Peace and Freedom)

Editor's Note: Emily Green Balch (1867-1961) wrote this pamphlet explaining the origins of WILPF's name in 1935. Along with Jane Addams, Balch helped found WILPF and served as first international secretary from 1919 to 1922. A former settlement house worker and economics professor (she was fired after 25 years at Wellesley for teaching "pacifism not economics") she went on to write important reports on Haiti and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.

She begins her pamphlet by quoting a column from The Nation in which the author comments on the popularity of the Statue of Liberty, but goes on to say' " ... among us grown-ups, liberty either in bronze or in life has been so completely under a cloud in recent years that [this writer] may, perhaps, be pardoned for overlooking it."

An original, framed copy of this pamphlet was given to WILPF at Congress by Diane Brace, president, U.K. WILPF.

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom has had quaint experience of this unfashionableness of freedom in the land of the free. When this [WILPF] name was adopted at an International Congress in Switzerland in 1919, some of us may have fancied it would be attractive. "International," however, we soon came to realize had curious connotations in some minds. When we held a Summer School in Anti-Semitic Austria we found that to many people it meant something Jewish; in other cases, it seems to call up echoes of the "Third International;" to others, it apparently sounds vaguely dangerous.

"Freedom," however, we had thought would be universally acceptable, but most of all so in the United States, the self-styled "land of the free," Whose symbol is the Goddess of Liberty. But in the United States freedom also is suspicious and provokes challenge, "What do you mean by it?"

At the time this title was evolved those present at the meeting were under the pall of the peace parleys then going on in Paris. Women were gathered for this Congress from most of the countries that count in the progress of the world--France, Germany, England, the United States, Italy, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, Australia and others.

They had come together as pacifists. No lesser issue would have brought French, German and Belgian women together in friendship in those days when the Versailles treaty was being completed. But ...