Declaring War on War: Gender and the American Socialist Attack on Militarism, 1914-1918

Declaring War on War: Gender and the American Socialist Attack on Militarism, 1914-1918 Kathleen Kennedy Three weeks before the United States entered World War I, New York socialist women formaUy declared war on the war. In a letter pubUshed in two major socialist newspapers, they berated "the leading socialist men of Europe," whose support of the war they caUed "a more painful revelation than the war itself." "The only ray of Hght in that period of utter darkness," the letter continued: was the consistent, courageous attitude of individual socialist men and practicaUy aU the socialist women of Europe. We American women are proud of the fact that not a single representative Socialist woman in any of the belUgerent countries allowed herself to be carried away by the general wave of war hysteria; that not a single representative Socialist woman abandoned her ideals of international working-class soUdarity. . . . From our hearts we echo Clara Zetkin's words: "When men kiU one another, it becomes the supreme duty of women to battle for the maintenance of Ufe. When men are süent, it becomes the sacred mission of women to remain true to their ideals and to raise their voices in protest."1 Like members of the Woman's Peace Party (WPP), sociaUst women claimed a poUtical position based on sexual difference—as mothers women had an obUgation to preserve Ufe where men had chosen to take it. Attacking war, feminist peace advocates increasingly argued, required an equaUy ferocious assault on gender roles and the poUtical disenfranchisement of women. Yet paradoxicaUy, they conducted this assault in a language that reinforced rather than challenged sexual difference. That emphasis, historians have argued, enabled feminist peace advocates to justify a unique and separate role for women in international pontics.2 For sociaUst feminists, this language posed problems—socialists defined issues of peace and war as gender-neutral. Socialists' obUgation to oppose war stemmed from their membership in an international citizenship of workers which required that them to transcend national interests and oppose war. Yet, sociaUst feininists expücitly gendered the issue of American participation in the war; they claimed leadership based on conduct, on the fact that sociaUst women had remained true to the principles that their male coUeagues had failed.3 It was men who had acted © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. τ No. 2 (Summer) 28 Journal of Women's History Summer hystericaUy, who had aUowed the gendered expectations of bourgeois society to govern their poUtical actions and alUances—a charge that was most often leveled against sociaUst feminists.4 The tone of New York socialist women's letter reflected more than their disappointment with men's conduct; it was an effort to reconstruct the role that miUtary obUgation and its attendant assumptions about gender, played in defining entitlement to citizenship. Historians and poUtical theorists have produced a large and controversial body of Uterature that places gender at the center of relationships between war and citizenship. Drawing in part on the historical and rhetorical dichotomy between women's roles as mothers and men's as warriors, "social feminists" argue that women's experiences construct different values than men's. Within contemporary peace poUtics and historical analysis this position argues that the "social experience of motherhood " demands interactive and cooperative forms of engagement that women can use to influence international poUtics. Maternal poUtics serves as an antidote to a male-dominated, militarist culture that privileges the experience of war.5 Following the lead of contemporary "social feminist" theorists, historians examine how maternal poUtics constructed a unique and effective poUtical space for women in peace and international poUtics.6 Social feminism presents significant analytical and poUtical problems. Historian Nancy Cott argues that as a descriptive term, social feminism 'leaches out meaning from the word feminism" as it fails to distinguish between women's entrance into the pubUc and a specific commitment to a feminist poUtical program. The specific poUtical choices that women made upon their entrance into the pubUc, Cott contends, are key to understanding "how conditions of gender were bunt into state regulations and distributions ."7 Historians must, in Cotf s estimation, develop a vocabulary that recognizes and problematizes the specific poUtical...