Event that would take place here at the National World war i museum and memorial. I was thrilled to have them become an official cosponsor and part of the program committee. It was also four years ago this mornings keynote speaker, and isor Erika Kuhlman were in contact with the peace history journal. It was around that time she was informing me that when her threeyear term at the journal finished, she planned to step down in order to complete her manuscript on the International Migration of german war veterans. Like any good organizational president , i tried to get her to change her mind since she had , been such a great editor and because i wanted to pass off the work of finding a replacement to my successor. She refused, but she did remain a valued member of the organization and is now serving on the board of the peace history society. Erika kuhlman is a professor and the former director of womens studies at Idaho State University where she teaches , courses in womens history, u. S. Industrialization and reform and transnationalism. Erika kuhlman received her ph. D. From washington State University where she conducted research on 20th century early peace movements. She has published extensively on the topics of women, gender and the First World War, including the books of little comfort, widows, and little soldiers. And she is currently working on a digital history project of german choral groups and the sound escape in the 1920s United States. Erika kuhlman has twice been awarded an isu outstanding researcher award and recently started a refuge scholarship for prospective Idaho State University students in response to the nationalistic sentiment surrounding refuges in politics today. Her talk, mustering support for war, gender conformity and inevitability of the First World War comes in part from her first book about womens protest of the First World War. Please join me in welcoming dr. Kuhlman. [applause] erika thank you very much for that gracious introduction, christy. I appreciate all the work thats gone into this wonderful conference, thanks to andrew bolton. Thanks for inviting me as well as david hosteter. So im going to start my remarks this morning with a little story. About a yeargins ago, when the university of mississippi held a conference called, gender, war and memory in the angloamerican world. I submitted a paper and was accepted. So i headed off to oxford, mississippi, for this conference. Like all conferences, it was a wonderful time to catch wake up catch up with old friends colleagues and a chance to meet , some new people. I noticed on the program was a scholar named lisa meyer, some of you may be familiar with her work. She published a book in 1998 called, creating g. I. Jane, society and power in the army corps in 1992. This came out just as i was trying to massage the book christie mentioned into my dissertation of my first book. I read it with much interest , even though her book was about world war ii. I was interested to see how women in that world war ii era responded to war, since my book was dealing with how women responded to the First World War. Her book obviously dealt with women who wanted to join the war effort in the military. My interest was more in women who wanted to stop the war. But i think it is always important to look at both sides to see the variety of ways women respond to war. So i was excited to see lisa meyer on the program. Her session came toward the end of the conference, on a panel with a couple of other folks. She gave her paper and addressed many of the questions i deal with, too, we probably, all those of us who do gender think about, about the confluence of women and war. She talked about the ways in which women were prevented from doing full military service in the Second World War because of , presumed physical weakness, they simply werent Strong Enough to do the job of soldiering. The presumed way in which women were thought to not have the mental capacities to do the job of soldiering. The way it was assumed their emotionalselves would overcome them and they would be unable to do the job needed. Probably the most interesting or maybe controversial point was the way in which it was assumed womens presence in the military would be a distraction to the men, who were assume dollars to assumed to be doing the real work of soldiering. They would be attracted to women who would be present there with them, and they would be unable to carry through their presumed duties in the military. So she gave a paper on this topic and was a very interesting paper and she received a lot of questions during the q a period after the session was over. And while she and the other Panel Members were talking after the paper had finished, there was a lot of interest in this notion of how women can become equally a part of the fighting forces the military. , a lot of folks talked about how now folks have accepted women into the military and the various ways with presented in terms of women being accepted to the citadel, for example, and women going to west point. Women becoming named generals, becoming decorated generals. The holdout at that point was women still werent accepted fully into the marines, but it was thought this would happen soon. There was talk about how women cant be considered equal to men unless they have authority and power over men. And that once women are leading military units into war that will happen where women you , will see women at the top of a fighting unit go into a battle and command and have authority over men, and that this is kind of the final step toward full equality. These ideas come from a variety of places, but among others, girta learner, the womans historian who talks about how women can be measured in society and women need to have Actual Authority and power over men. So these were the kinds of questions and answers going on in the q a session after lisas paper. And as i was listening to all of frankly,egan to feel , sick to my stomach. I began to think, well, yes, we do want to see women achieve full equality in society. But i began to feel sickened by the notion of i guess, women leading men into battle. And i started to wonder, you get those two little voices in your head. One says, oh, its the end of the conference, everybodys exhausted. I really wanted to go home by this point. Just you know sit and listen. , the other voice says, no, you have to Say Something, better Say Something now. Its time. So i kind of gingerly raised my hand and i said, i would never want to see a woman who wants to achieve something be held back from that achievement, i just wondered whether we really want to applaud the entry into the military of more people. And perhaps that part of feminists who are also pacifists might view this in a different way. And you know, all the attention was on me so people turned around and looked, whos saying this . [laughter] so i became really uncomfortable. Lisa was sitting up in the panel and she nodded appreciably and respectfully. And we tossed that back and forth for a little bit. Then i realized later, this is really the central issue thats been nagging at me for the past 20 years. How can women be fully equal into American Society . Can they still advocate peace . Can they still not support war . Or do they have to support war , did they have to be fully engaged in this aspect of American Society to be seen as equal. So this was kind of the question i realized was gnawing at me. So i want to get back to that question of whether women can be fully equal citizens in society and still advocate peace in just a minute. But i want to finish my story. So the next morning, everybody was leaving the conference and lisa and i shared a van ride to the airport. I got to know her a little bit better. You know i told her i had read , her book. I really appreciated her work. Militaryct had had a career before she got into her academic career and had been discriminated in the military and then i understood her position better. She had this great idea. She said, we should do a journal issue on this very question, have some kind of forum where people would submit papers and we could kind of get at this question. And i thought, that is a great idea. We sort of left it at that. Unfortunately, i didnt hear from lisa anymore and maybe thats not my fault for not following through. I still think its a great idea. So then, as i say, i kept coming back to this question how women can become fully equal in society and still seek peace. So then i started to think about may be other ways of getting at that question of thinking about that question. One other way might be to say, well, as women do become more fully integrated into society, does that result in a more Peaceful Society . Does that result in a reduction in the number of times that nations go off to fight wars . Well, you are thinking, she is thinking about Steven Pinkers book, the better angels of our nature, youre right. Thats one place it can be seen. And i have not read the 800 page book, maybe some of you have and i would welcome your perspective, but ive read a lot about the controversial nature what pinkers argument is and in a nutshell, its that our ancestors were horribly violent. He uses forensic data to talk about bashed in skulls and things like this to suggest then by the time we come to the 20th century, the organization, the societal nature of the way humans have organized themselves have actually resulted in less violence, that people will surrender their violent, more violent natures to the state and let the state deal with violence through law, through organized war and so forth. So in a nutshell, thats his argument. I guess, you know, thats a debatable point, whether or not the 20th century so the book was written i think in 2011, whether the 20th century has in fact been less violent. Way of been through war after war in my lifetime. We just had a man who brutally killed some 60 people and wounded 200 others at a music seemed an awful lot like an act of war. It is these kinds of things that make me go make me not believe what Steven Pinker is saying but uses women equality as societys sign we are less violent in our time. I think another coreollary we could use, would be to ask have womens presence in the military and lisa meyers work, the work was all about how it has worked through the Second World War and so forth, has their greater presence in the military made the military a Different Institution and perhaps led to the femization of the military and therefore a military thats less violent. And i have data, but the most recent data i could find was that about 15 of the u. S. Military is made up of females. And certainly, we have seen women graduating from westpoint , becoming decorated generals and so forth. But i am not sure that we can say anything about whether the military has changed, given those still relatively low numbers. 15 is not great. So again, i think this is a debatable point. Certainly the military touts its more peaceful objectives for example distributing relief, pacifying a situation that will then enable School Children to go to school. So we do hear about that aspect of the military perhaps these , days than we did before. Im not sure we can say womens presence in the military has changed that institution. But i think thats a debatable point. Certainly, i think we can say women have in fact achieved greater equality in our society in all different kinds of ways. After the First World War women gained the right to vote. The suffrage act passed after 1920. Womens historians will argue they gained that right to vote because of their support for the u. S. Government and its military during the First World War and then rewarded with suffrage. Other womens historians would argue that no suffrage was , already going to pass. The western states had already passed suffrage laws and so forth. But i guess the First World War for me certainly had that kind of confluence of really important changing situations in which women were on the verge of gaining suffrage just as the war happened. And for me, the emblem of that context was janet rankin, who was the first representative to go to the u. S. Congress in washington and not long after she arrived in washington dc from montana, wilson declared war and congress was asked to vote on his war declaration. So she was right there and she voted against the war deck clar declaration in 1917. So they have we have made strides in politics. We still have a long way to go, we still have not elected a woman president and not anywhere near parity in the houses of congress in washington, d. C. You certainly could talk about economic gains women have made. Theyre now welcome in just about any profession. They have made Great Strides. We can of course social and , cultural measurements are harder to take. Women have made Great Strides in many different professions , although as weve seen lately it frequently comes at a cost we almost dailyear now about Sexual Harassment that takes place in various occupations. Think wethat stride, i can than and then ask whether or not women having achieved greater equality has in any way changed the likelihood of violence, and of war as an institution that the state uses. So what i want to do now. And those are things i hope we can revisit. But what i want to do now is shift gears and talk about my research and the way in which ive tried to see whether women can advocate equality for women and still advocate for peace. And the best example that i came up with, as i was doing my research, was a group of ladies called the new york city womens , peace party. Did thaties had and work of continuing to claim womens equality and also advocate peace. So unlike a lot of suffragists at the time who then fell in with the war effort in the United States, these ladies set themselves apart from that and continued to be pacifists. They did most of their work through their newsletter newspaper journal, called four lights. So this journal has now been digitized. Its only a few clicks away on your computer screen. Back when i was doing my research, i had to read the microfilm at the peace collection. But now it is out there. You can see it. It is a fabulous, fabulous journal. What four lights did for me was allow me to see how that combination could work and how well it worked. And what i came up what i came away with was the ways in which you have to be radical in order to do those two things, to do feminism and pacifism at the same time. These women were really, really good at kind of turning conventions on their heads and seeing the world in a different way. These women, many of them were heterodoxy, the bohemian women in greenwich village, many single working women. Many had come against militarism, a mixed gender antiPreparedness Movement, as wilson began to head down the path toward war, they tried to prevent and throw a wrench in the Preparedness Movement in the United States. Four lights became their vehicle and kind of their organ. So, it did not last very long. Ill get into that in a bit. But i want to describe to you the way that this thing was set up. If you look at the mast head, it has an ocean. It has a huge wooden ship with multiple sails, kind of bobbing along on the ocean. Alongside that they have a quote. And they took as their inspiration magellan, so the , european explorer, and they said on the mast head there it says, then he showed four lights when he wished them to set full sail and follow in his wake. These ladies saw themselves as providing kind of a begin of of light thatn they hoped other people would follow. They then underneath that is a banner that reads, an adventure in internationalism. So they started publishing in january of 1917. So that tells you that as the nation was heading off to war, they viewed themselves as internationalists, not nationalists, like you might expect people would do at a time of war or close to a time of war. So that told me that this was going to be something different. What i think these women were able to do in their newsletter, was to take gender conventions, again, and really show how they operate in society, and so their newsletter, their journal was full of little vinnettes about how they operated to gain peoples acceptance of war. One of the best examples, they sent a reporter, they had a reporter sarah clegghorn, who , was in toronto, she saw in canadian Society Women were parading around the downtown area handing out cards to men, young men that they saw who were not in uniform. They would distribute white feathers to those men who were not in uniform and had not enlisted. They would give petticoats to men who had not enlisted. So the idea here is pretty obvious if youre not going to , be a soldier and protect me you might as well look like me , and wear petticoats. So the idea obviously is to shame men into thinking they have to do their duty and enlist in the military to protect women. As Canadian Women did this if they gained the enlistment of 10 men using the method of shame, they would get a piece of jewelry. A lovely piece of jewelry. So you know, you can see what is going on here. You have to fulfill your gender role for the country to go off to war. So that was one vignette i saw. Another thing i saw was the way they picked apart language, and the way they noticed how language was being twisted to certain ends. They talked about, for example, the notion of making the world safe for democracy. They really wanted to know, now, what does that mean . What does it mean to make the world safe for democracy . What do we mean by democracy here in this instance . They argued that the word, peace was now being conscripted. They talked about how th