No Peace Without Freedom
Subtitle: Race and The Women's International League For Peace and Freedom 1915-1975
Edition: 1st Edition edition
Publisher: Southern Illinois University; Southern Illinois University Press
Published: July 8, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780809325641
Subjects: Black studies; Civil rights & citizenship; Women's studies; 20th century; History; Discrimination & Racism; Social Science; Ethnic Issues; United States; Sociology; USA; Peace; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General; Women's Studies - General; Social Science / Women's Studies; African American women political activists; African American pacifists; African American women politic; Women and peace
First sentence: 1915-1925 By February 1915, a leading American peace activist, Carrie Chapman Catt, had repeatedly asked her colleagues what more could be done to end the war raging in Europe.
Description: "Just as women changed the direction and agenda of the peace movement when they became progressively more involved in an all-male club, black women altered acause that had previously lacked racial diversity when they were first granted, in 1915, admission to what would later become the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. As Joyce Blackwell illustrates in this first study of collective black peace activism, the increased presence of black women in WILPF over the next sixty years brought to the movement historical experiences shaped by societal racism." "No Peace Without Freedom: Race and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1975 explores how black women, fueled by the desire to eradicate racial injustice, compelled the white leadership of WILPF to revisit its own conceptions of peace and freedom. Blackwell offers a renewed examination of peace movements in American history, one that points out the implications of black women's participation for the study of social activism, African American history, and women's history. This new perspective on interracial and black female global activism helps redefine the often covert systemic violence necessary to maintain systems of social and economic hierarchy, moving peace and war discourse away from its narrow focus on European and European American issues." "Blackwell looks closely at the reasons why white women organized their own peace groups at the start of World War I and assesses several bold steps taken by these groups in their first ten years. Addressing white peace activists' continuous search for the "perfect" African American woman, Blackwell considers when and why black women joined WILPF, why so few of them were interested in the organization, and what the small number who did join had in common with their white counterparts. She also shows how WILPF, frustrated at its inability to successfully appeal to black women, established a controversial interracial committee to deal with the dilemma of recruiting black women while attempting to retain all of its white members." "Tracing the black activists' peace reform activities on an international level from World War I to the end of the Vietnam War, No Peace Without Freedom examines the links black activists established within the African American community as well as the connections they made with peoples of the black diaspora and later with colonized people irrespective of race. The volume is complemented by eighteen illustrations."--BOOK JACKET.