The "women's international league for peace and freedom" and reconciliation after the great war

Erika Kuhlman

pp. 227-243

in: Alison S. Fell, Ingrid Sharp (eds), The women's movement in wartime, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

As men representing France, Britain, Italy, the United States, and other countries each played their hand to win their nation's advantage at the Paris peace table in the spring of 1919, newspaper and magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic depicted peacefulness nearly universally as a feminine figure in numerous cartoons and drawings. One German cartoon, for example, shows a crestfallen peace angel waving an olive branch as she sits next to an equally morose German peasant (Figure 12). "We aren't allowed to join the conversation" at Versailles, she laments. Neither pacifists nor the defeated enemy would be invited to help fashion the post-war world.