Women’s Pacifism during the First World War

Abstract

Women’s pacifism in the course of the First World War is a chapter of collective memory that has never become a shared memory.The idea that war is “men’s business, not ladies”, is largely responsible for it. Paul Fussel summarises this attitude: correctly or not, as he writes in The Great War and Modern Memory, the current idea of the Great War derives primarily from images of the trenches in France and Belgium. Given this, it is not something unusual that outstanding events such as The Hague International Congress of Women (April-May 2015) is still a neglected chapter of women’s history. This paper focuses on the event and other significant experiences in women’s partecipation in the Great War.