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 The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Rhetorical Practices of a New Internationalism There is something in the international politics of today, which are managed by men only, which causes war. —Louise Keilhau, WILPF founding member, from report of the  Congress When Dutch suffragist Aletta Jacobs learned of the cancellation of the annual International Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA) convention due to the difficulty of travel in wartime, she summoned various international women, including prominent American activists Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch,to the Hague to discuss possibilities for ending male-run wars that interrupted progress toward international, universal suffrage.1 The women who gathered at the Hague in  as the International Congress of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP)—renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in —expressed dismay about the antagonistic atmosphere of male-dominated international relations. Many representatives at the meeting, including Addams and several American women who accompanied her,were in the midst of heated struggles for suffrage in their own countries and were deeply troubled by the disruption of international structures of suffrage support that resulted from the outbreak of war. Open international communication, Jacobs asserted in her call announcing the meeting at the Hague,enabled suffragists around the globe to maximize their persuasive efforts. Wars created by statesmen thus not only disrupted economic and social life,they also halted the progress of women’s rights by shutting down channels of international communication. Beginning with their first meeting in , the founders of the WILPF sought to correct what they saw as fundamental flaws in traditional methods of international communication—flaws that led to militant nationalism, antagonistic diplomacy,and violence.The women of the WILPF wished to infuse rhetorical structures of international relations with literate practices of cooperation,practices that they believed were particularly well-suited to 2  The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom women. To this end,they initiated a campaign to alter radically the rhetorical practices of traditional, male-dominated international relations. In this chapter,I consider the rhetorical reforms the WILPF wished to enact within internationalpoliticsduringthes,focusingparticularlyontheroleAmerican women played in defining and promoting these reforms. These reforms include increasing the presence of women in diplomatic spheres; restructuring traditional diplomatic bodies; revising conventional diplomatic procedures of negotiation; and transforming the role of the press within and across national boundaries.In the next chapter,I examine in greater detail the rhetorical practices the organization used to create widespread support for these international reforms.Throughout my analysis in this chapter and the next, I also consider the difficulties the organization encountered as it endeavored to present itself as a unified, global force of reform-oriented women. Reconfiguring Gender Difference in International Relations Chief among the WILPF’s critiques of traditional diplomatic communication was the membership’s belief that the exclusion of women perverted international politics. To advance their critique of traditional diplomatic procedures and to develop an ethos from which to argue for reform that would include women in the rhetorical structures of international relations, organizers of the WILPF strategically employed gendered social expectations to undermine men’s exclusive claims to power in international politics. Drawing on the arguments of the previous century’s activist women, the vanguard of the WILPF suggested that women derived their ethos for international intervention from their role as mothers.2 The organization approached reform in international relations from what Mary Dietz calls a “maternal feminist”perspective—a perspective that “claim[s] that women’s experience as mothers in the private realm endows them with a special capacity and a ‘moral imperative’for countering both the male liberal individualist world view and its masculinist notions of citizenship” ().3 The strength of this perspective among women at the Hague is reflected in the description of the origins of the congress as published in the meeting report. In this report, British member Emily Hobhouse explains the origin of the WILPF through a metaphor of immaculate conception: From the moment of the declaration of War . . . the hearts of women leapt to their sister women,and the germ of the idea, nameless and unformed, that the women of the world must come to that world’s aid, was silently and spontaneously conceived and lay in embryo in the hearts of many. (iii)  The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom In a seemingly biological response, women became the mothers of peace, conceiving—in the absence of men—a plan to end war. The WILPF also critiqued...

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