Our War Too: American Women Against the Axis (review)

Despite women's exclusion from the decision-making process that would take the United States to the brink of World War II, women were passionately engaged in public debate about how best to secure American interests as the world plunged into war. Moreover, women did not fill just the pacifist and/or isolationist ranks. Rather, as Paton-Walsh effectively demonstrates, prominent female writers and key women's organizations worked energetically for an end to strict neutrality, first as a means of keeping the United States out of the war, and subsequently on the grounds that an Axis victory would be worse than war itself.

Our War Too inserts women's voices into a familiar narrative about American responses to international conflicts from the mid-1930s to Pearl Harbor. Paton-Walsh focuses on five women's organizations and their leaders—the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the League of Women Voters, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Women's Trade Union League, and the American Association of University Women—on influential writers—Frieda Kirchwey, owner and editor of The Nation; Dorothy Thompson, syndicated columnist and radio commentator; and Anne O'Hare McCormick, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for The New York Times—and on foreign-policy oriented organizations such as the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and the Fight for Freedom Committee.

Paton-Walsh shows that these women were well-informed about world events. Women's organizations provided information and opportunities for discussion among their members and encouraged them to write policymakers. Their leaders lobbied and testified before Congress, and individual women wrote or spoke to large audiences on behalf of interventionist policies. The author provides close analyses of their developing views and of the differences among internationalist women. Although they did not necessarily endorse the position of all-out aid to the Allies, only one of the organizations studied in this book, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf), clung to a pro-neutrality position.

Isolationist women claimed authority based on motherhood to address foreign-policy questions; interventionists, however, used maternal arguments infrequently. Only in 1941 did interventionists frame their arguments in terms of gender, and even then they spoke not just as mothers seeking to protect their children (which they did to refute claims of the isolationist, right-wing mothers' movement to speak for all women) but also as women with a self-interest in averting the oppression that their sisters endured under National Socialism.

The author makes modest claims for the influence of internationalist women but argues that they assured policymakers that isolationist women did not speak for all women and that taking steps to aid the Allies "would not arouse the wrath of women" (55). She has provided extensive documentation for her claim that women "were neither led nor manipulated into war" (194).

This useful book is not without limitations. Primary-source research is limited to the records of women's organizations; examination of the records of mixed-gender interventionist groups and policymakers may have shed light on the extent of women's influence. With the exception of one reference to Mary McLeod Bethune, who spoke for African-Americans, not women, Paton-Walsh's subjects are all middle- or upper-class whites. The author does little to place her work in historiographical context; makes no effort to connect her subject with other scholarship on women, gender, and foreign policy; and employs no social-science theory about civil society, social movements, public opinion, or state decision making.