Abstract
In the political sphere women had spent much of the 1920s and early 1930s making war on war. The cause of peace and the internationalist orientation gave form and substance to women’s politics, and also politicized a wide swath of the female population that might otherwise have been preoccupied with local and domestic concerns. One need only look at the Women’s Peace Pilgrimage of 1926 when 10,000 women from all over the country marched, culminating in a great demonstration against war and for disarmament in Hyde Park; the consistent work of the Women’s Peace Crusade; how Labour, Communist, and Liberal women came together to organize ‘peace weeks;’ and the millions of women’s signatures amassed for anti- militarist petitions. In particular, by the mid-1920s and into the early 1930s disarmament became a rallying point for women’s activism. As Ethel Mannin recalled, “pacifism was all the rage. It really did seem like that—a craze.”1 However, this powerful narrative of the unity of women with peace was critiqued and gradually rewritten under the pressure of international crises in the course of the ‘Devil’s Decade.’ “The whole European situation had been altered by the change-over in this one country [Germany] from a Liberal democracy to a dictatorship,”2
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Notes
Ethel Mannin, Young in the Twenties (London, 1971), p. 165.
Storm Jameson, “The Twilight of Reason,” in Philip Noel Baker (ed.), A Challenge to Death (London, 1934), p. 6.
Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (London, 2009), p. 370.
Mary Agnes Hamilton, Remembering My Good Friends (London, 1944), p. 288.
Michele Haapanki, “Writers in Arms and the Just War: The Spanish Civil War, Literary Activism and Leftist Masculinity,” Left History, 10(2), 2005, pp. 33–52.
See Julie V. Gottlieb, “‘The Women’s Movement Took the Wrong Turning:’ British Feminists, Pacifism and the Politics of Appeasement,” Women’s History Review, 23(3), June, 2014, pp. 441–462.
See Julie V. Gottlieb, “Varieties of Feminist Anti-Fascism,” in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-war Period (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 101–118.
See M. Ceadel, “Pacifism versus Pacificism,” in Nigel J. Young (ed.), The Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Peace (New York, 2010), pp. 323–325.
Matt Perry, “In Search of ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson Beyond Frontiers and Beyond the Nation State,” International Review of Social History 58(2), 2013, pp. 219–246.
Monica Whately, Honorary Secretary, Six Point Group, “The Status of Women,” Time and Tide, 28 October, 1937.
Sunday, 6 January 1935) in Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. IV: 1931–1935 (London, 1982), p. 273.
See Julie V. Gottlieb, “Feminism and Anti-fascism in Britain: Militancy Revived,” in N. Copsey and D. Renton (eds), British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 68–94.
Edward Conze, “Atrocity Propaganda,” Left Forum, No. 31, April, 1939, pp. 68–71.
Monica Whately, “Elsie Evert and Olga Prestes,” Time and Tide, 21 November, 1936.
Monica Whately, Honorary Secretary, Six Point Group, Manchester Guardian, 3 September, 1937.
Linda Walker, “Whately, Monica (1889–1960),” ODNB (2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63900.
Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience, (Newhaven and London, 2004) p. 271.
See Petra Rau, “The Fascist Body Beautiful and the Imperial Crisis in 1930s British Writing,” Journal of European Studies, 39(1), March, 2009, pp. 5–35.
See David Caute, Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (London, 1973);
Paul Fussell, Abroad: Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York, 1980);
Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (London, 1980).
Norman Angell, “Holidays Under the Volcano,” Foreign Affairs, Incorporated into Time and Tide, 7 August, 1937.
Bernard Schweizer, Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (Virginia, 2001), p. 2.
See Helen McCarthy, “Petticoat Diplomacy: The Admission of Women to the British Foreign Service, c. 1919–1946,” Twentieth Century British History, 20(3), 2009, pp. 285–321.
Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life, 1882–1960 (London, 2003), p. 242.
Katherine Atholl, Rachel Crowdy, Eleanor Rathbone, and Ellen Wilkinson, “Report of Our Visit to Spain” (April, 1937).
See Helen Jones, “National, Community and Personal Priorities: British Women’s Responses to Refugees from the Nazis, from the Mid-1930s to the Early 1940s,” Women’s History Review, 21(1), 2012, pp. 121–151.
Letter from Vera Brittain to Winifred Holtby, 19 May, 1934, in Vera Brittain and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor (eds), Selected Letters of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain (London, 1960).
Evelyn Sharpe, “The Panoply of Peace: Unimaginative Pacifism,” Manchester Guardian, 22 March, 1933.
Winifred Holtby, “A Woman Looks at the News,” News Chronicle, 26 May, 1934.
See Maroula Joannou, ‘Ladies, Please Don’t Smash These Windows:’ Women’s Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918–1938 (Oxford, 1995);
Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (New York, 1998).
Winifred Holtby, “Black Words for Women Only,” Clarion, 24 May, 1934.
Thelma Cazalet Keir, From the Wings (London, 1967), p. 134.
Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: ‘The Mortal Storm,’ a deeply tragic Anti-Nazi Film,” New York Times, 21 June, 1940.
Alexis Pogorelskin, “Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm: Film and Controversy,” The Space Between, 6(1), 2010, pp. 39–58.
See also Pam Hirsch, “Authorship and Propaganda: Phyllis Bottome and the Making of The Mortal Storm, (1940),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 32(1), March, 2012, pp. 57–72.
Winifred Holtby, Woman and a Changing Civilization (London, 1934), p. 4.
Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations (Manchester, 2011), p. 190.
Vera Brittain, “Peace and the Public Mind,” Noel Baker (eds), Challenge to Death (London, 1934), p. 46.
See Zara Steiner, “On Writing International History: Chaps, Maps and Much More,” International Affairs, 73 (3), July, 1997, pp. 531–546.
Jeremy Lewis, Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London, 2006), p. 135.
Shiela Grant Duff, The Parting of Ways: A Personal Account of the Thirties (London, 1982), p. 96.
Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw (London, 1968), p. 84.
Grant Duff, The Parting of Ways, p. 79.
Dan Stone, “The ‘Mein Kampf Ramp:’ Emily Overend Lorimer and Hitler Translations in Britain,” German History, 26 (4), 2008, pp. 504–519.
Quoted in Ethel Mannin, Women and the Revolution (London, 1938), p. 203.
Oliver Baldwin, “A Farewell to Liberty,” Daily Herald, 14 June, 1933.
Naomi Mitchison, Home and a Changing Civilization (London, 1934), pp. 104–105.
Rebecca West, “The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Idea,” in Philip Noel Baker (ed.), A Challenge to Death (London, 1934), p. 251.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London, 1938), p. 102.
Ray Strachey, “Changes in Employment,” in Ray Strachey (ed.), Our Freedom and its Results (London, 1936), p. 153.
On the cleavages in anti-fascist mobilization on the left see Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke, 2000);
N. Copsey and A. Olechnowicz (eds.), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-war Period (Basingstoke, 2010);
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), especially Chapter 12, “The Politics of Gender;”
Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics, 1935–1941 (Manchester, 1989)
Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow (Manchester, 2000).
See Martin Ceadel, Semi-detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945(Oxford, 2000);
David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge, 2008).
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© 2015 Julie V. Gottlieb
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Gottlieb, J.V. (2015). Women’s War on Fascism. In: ‘Guilty Women,’ Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-31660-8_3
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