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as governmental foreign policy, empire building, and trafficking in human beings were intimately
connected to war and peace 1 . In the early 1870s American writer and leading suffragist Julia Ward
Howe called for an international women’s peace movement based on a universal maternal belief in
the sanctity of life. Her efforts failed, and it was only in the twentieth century with the advent of
World War I and the collapse of British, European, Russian, and Asian empires that women’s efforts
for peace and social justice begin to be more truly international in membership, outlook, and
concept.
This first international women’s peace movement was created in beginnings of the first global
conflict of World War I. The first international peace congress held in 1915 included women from
over 20 nations, mostly European countries then at war. 2 But by the mid‐1920s women from over 30
countries, representing all corners of the world, including Epaish Youssouf of Turkey, attended an
international peace congress. They were women of their time, usually not representing wealthy
elites or governmental bodies, but among the first generation of educated women in their home
countries. These peace activists were women with resources available for travel and were often
connected to women’s rights movements or had professional careers such as educators or doctors.
These women believed in themselves as important workers in the efforts to bring about peace in the
world.
Collecting on women and peace and archival desires:
The Swarthmore College Peace Collection is located in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. It was founded about
1930 as a library on internationalism for the students of this four‐year liberal arts institution, which
grants Bachelor of Arts degrees. Swarthmore College was originally founded 150 years ago by
members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), equally for young men and women. Working
for peace is a primary component of Quaker belief and tradition, as is a belief in the equality of
women. From its inception in the 1930s the Peace Collection was an internationalist library and
archives associated with collecting by and about women. Jane Addams, the first U.S. woman to win a
Nobel Peace Prize, internationalist, proponent of democratic ideals and supporter of immigrants,
donated her personal library of books on peace issues to Swarthmore College. This donation formed
the nucleus of the library. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the
organization of which Addams was a founder and first president, also donated its records to
Swarthmore College. The first Curator of the Peace Collection, Ellen Starr Brinton was a Quaker,
internationalist, and WILPF staff member. She was instrumental in establishing the administrative
framework of the collection, as well as the broad historical collecting of early original manuscript
materials and records. Brinton collected papers of her fellow peace activists and other organizations
such as the Women’s Peace Union, Women’s Peace Society, and mixed sex organizations in which
women had been instrumental, such as the War Resisters League. When U.S. historian Mary Ritter
Beard and Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer attempted to establish one of the first women’s
history archives in the mid 1930s, the World Center on the History of Women, they turned to Brinton
and the Peace Collection for resources on women’s historical role in peace and internationalism. 3
Brinton, like many of her contemporaries in the peace movement, believed that understanding and
valuing the culture and peoples of all nations would eventually lead the way to world peace. As
women have long been peace activists and internationalists, over fifty percent of the Peace
Collection’s vast resources (over 2.5 million paper documents, thousands of books, journals,
photographs and other images, audio visual recordings and artifacts), concern women’s efforts for
peace, both in women’s organizations and mixed‐sex groups. The resources in the Peace Collection
concern not only peace activities, but also women’s work in other social and public roles such as
politics, careers such as education, religion or as spiritual leaders, politicians, and social justice
leaders. 4 Ellen Starr Brinton collected vast resources on peace in the late 1930s despite an era of
growing militarism, growing disillusionment with peaceful solutions to conflicts in Asia, North Africa,
and Europe.
As part of its guiding institutional principles, Swarthmore College seeks to equip young people for
global citizenship, based in a liberal arts educational framework. The College also seeks to support