World War I marked the birth of the “modern” American Peace Movement. The movement represented a marked departure from the conservative, elite-minded approach to world peace espoused by internationalists and arbitrationists, who filled the ranks of organizations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Edwin Ginn's World Peace Foundation. The “modern” movement insisted that peace was more than the absence of war and that social, economic, and racial justice at home was an extension of that struggle for global harmony. Leading the way in this endeavor was the birth of a separate women's peace movement, a movement that began during the war.
Eschewing the prewar male-dominated peace organizations in the United States, women such as Jane Addams, Julia Grace Wales, Alice Hamilton, and Emily Green Balch, among others, injected a dose of political feminism in the postwar peace crusade by establishing their own organization, the Women's International League...