The Women’s Interwar Peace Movement

Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revue canadienned'etudesamericaines Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 189-193 The Women's lnterwar Peace Movement Carrie Foster 189 Rachel Waltner Goossen. Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Horne Front, 1941-1947. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 180 and bibliography and illustrations. Linda K. Schott. Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's lnternatronal League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. ix+ 211 and illustrations. Linked together by similar subjects-women pacifists in the United States during or prior to World War II-both of these books are useful for an understanding of the interwar peace movement. Schott's study of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) should be read in conjunction with Carrie Foster's 1995 work on that group, The Women and the Warriors, and the 1993 biography of long-time WILPF leader Mildred Scott Olmsted by Margaret Bacon entitled One Wornan's Passionfor Peaceand Freedom, both published by Syracuse University Press, as well as Harriet Hyman Alsono's two seminal works, The Women's Peace Union and the Outlau,ry of War, 1921-1942 (Knoxville, 1989) and Peaceas a Wornen's 190 Canadrn.n Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes americaines Issue (Syracuse, 1993). Goossen's study of women in Civilian Public Service (CPS) nicely complements earlier works on conscientious objectors (CO's) like Cynthia Eller's conscientious Objectors and the Second World War (Praeger, 1991) with its religious and moral emphasis. As Goossen points out in her introduction, women who opposed World War II, unlike men, were not legally considered conscientious objectors because the 1940 Selective Training and Service Act applied only to men. Focussing on such women, particularly those who participated in Civilian Public Service, Goossen's narrative documents the often frustrating yet rewarding wartime experiences of women whose pacifism was generally grounded on one of the three historic peace religions-Mennonites, Friends, and Brethren-all of which took upon themselves the job of administering the CPS camps for CO's. A Mennonite herself, Goossen was raised in an antiwar atmosphere and attended Bethel College, a Mennonite-affiliated school in Kansas, where she and other women students did what they could to support their male friends who were subject to a revised peacetime draft registration in the early 1980s. Her personal experience in religiously based pacifism has served her well in the research for her book which, while logically focussed on the peace churches, includes the Swarthmore College Peace Collection as well as an impressive array of personal interviews and secondary sources that deal with the peace movement generally, CO's, World War II, and women's history. While it breaks no new ground in our understanding of women pacifists, the book is eminently readable-well-organized, lucidly written, and rich with the kind of personal narrative that brings women like cafeteria worker Alice Hostetler alive as she countered prowar propaganda stamped on the pats of butter with the subversive action of serving them upside down. It was primarily as nurses and dieticians that these women-several thousand in number-served in the CPS camps, but many also worked as nurses' aides, particularly at state mental hospitals like that in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In some places, hostility among the local populations toward CO's, female as well as male, was the norm, causing these CPS volunteers to draw closer to each other and to the men they served; not only did lifetime friendships result, so, too, did marriages. Financial problems and child-care issues were also a critical part of the experience for some of the women, but for all the CarrieFoster I 191 anxiety, uncertainty, and hardship, there was much of a positive nature: as one woman recalled, "CPS helped me to realize that people are more important than things. Living simply frees a person" (125). With six chapters, an introduction and conclusion, plus an excellent bibliography, index, and endnotes, Goossen's work is made even more enjoyable by the inclusion throughout of well-chosen photographs of both people and places. She has also added...