The Women’s Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921–1942 by Harriet Hyman Alonso (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 127 action. Virtually every page of his early chapters shows how this distinction makes sense of otherwise incompatible statements; the later pages demonstrate how, when and, presumably, why all but a handful of later commentators and jurists forgot it. Examining what seems to have been virtually everything published on the subject since 1894, newspaper accounts and editorials excepted, Clinton shows that only a handful of authorities avoided conflating the two realms of jurisdiction. (Significantly, however, this handful consisted of men whose reputations as scholars of the law tower above those of their contemporaries.) Nevertheless, the most telling evidence that Clinton adduces for his thesis emerges from his study of the Supreme Court cases in which the Court has cited Marbury. He shows that it first invoked the case on behalf of an expanded judicial review only in 1884, in a context in which it was selfevidently irrelevant, and next in 1894 in Pollockv. Famier'sLoan & TrnstCo., where Marbury was potentially relevant but (Clinton holds) improperly applied. After that the Court cited it for this purpose only occasionally until the 1950s, when it clearly embraced a rendering it had largely avoided for a century and a half. This is a major re-interpretation of American history, the more striking because Clinton has no apparent axe to grind but the question of what actually happened. Rush Welter Bennington College Vermont Harriet Hyman Alonso. The Women's Peace Unionand the Outlawryof War, 1921-1942. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. xiv + 224 pp. Illus. The Women's Peace Union of the Western Hemisphere (WPU), was founded in 1921 by "a small, post-suffrage female community" committed to abolishing war (xi). The strategy of the plucky, determined and idealistic women who led the WPU was to lobby for a constitutional amendment which would have declared war illegal. The WPU was one of several major women's peace organizations of the inter-War period, but its history, like those of its sister peace associations, has been ignored or slighted in standard peace history books. Alonso's thoroughly-researched and well-written account of the WPU's history helps us to begin to unravel and appreciate women's role between the wars in the U.S. peace movement. 128 Shorter Book Reviews Alonso's goals are threefold: 1) to consider "the next step" for some pacifist suffragists after the vote was achieved; 2) to examine the absolutist pacifist or non-resistant wing of the women's peace movement from its origins in Garrisonian abolitionism to the present; and 3) to study one women's non-resistant organization in some detail, at the "ideological, organizational,and personal levels"(xiv). This monograph is good narrative history. The author places the WPU in the context of its era, ably delineating major themes in inter-War political, diplomatic and social history. The main topic of her study is the WPU's role as participant in the movement to outlaw war in the post-World War I era. In 1926 the Working Committee of the WPU succeeded in convincingRepublican Senator Lynn Frazier of North Dakota to introduce their constitutional amendment in Congress. Over the next dozen years, Frazier cooperated with the WPU's educational and lobbying efforts for total disarmament; he introduced what many came to designate "the Frazier amendment" into Congress every year until 1939,and was helpful in securing three hearings on the amendment as well. The WPU was a small organization with a membership that never exceededtwo hundred women. Its Working Committee, "the heartbeat of the WPU," consisted of a dozen or so women and functioned like "a small collective with no hierarchy and no officers except a treasurer" (24). Its requirement that members sign a personal pledge of non-resistance was unpalatable to many peace-minded women who, while sympathetic to the WPU's utopian vision of "no more war," preferred to work in the more moderate pacifist-oriented but not non-resistant Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or to attend annual meetings of the umbrella, federated women's peace association, the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War. But the WPU's small membership belied its influence. Women...