Feminists in France pioneered an opposition for war by women when they began to speak out on policy matters. An eloquent example is provided in Virginie Griess-Traut's "Manifesto of Women Against War" during the war scare of 1877; this was followed by her 1883 petition, submitted with Maria Deraismes and members of the Society for Ameliorating Women's Condition, which urged the French government to accept a recent American proposal for an international arbitration commission to reconcile differences between national governments that might otherwise lead to war. "Armed peace," noted the petitioners, "is no less ruinous and demoralizing than war . . . and should not constitute a normal societal state of affairs if it does not lead to a serious guarantee of maintaining the peace."
The World Committee of Women against War and Fascism was directed by Gabrielle Duchene, a feminist with a rich activist past, seconded by Bernadette Cattanéo. Solidarity with Victims of Fascism was organized. The press of International Red Rescue published Women under Fascist Terror, Women on the Front of Solidarity and Combat, with a list of the victims made public at a big meeting at the Mutualité meeting hall in Paris.
Thereafter, intellectuals joined the World Committee: Irène Joliot-Curie, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 and appointed Under-Secretary of State for Scientific Research in 1936. Also attracted were: Andrée Viollis, coeditor of the weekly publication, Vendredi, her journalist daughter Simone Téry, and the physicist, Luce Langevin.
In the aftermath of World War I and especially in the 1930s, when renewed militarism and warmongering by aggressively masculinist regimes in Europe reached a peak, when population politics became a subject of great national concern, and when racial and ethnic exclusionism was promulgated as national policy by National Socialists in Germany, it is hardly surprising that........
