Anniversary into the United States entry into the First World War and would focus on those who embrace peace and refuse to support the war effort. They wanted to know whether or not phs could merge our 2017 bienniel conference with their. 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, professor Erika Kullman and i were in contact with the peace history journal. It was around that time she was informing me when her three year 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 kullman is a professor and former director of womens studies at Idaho State University where she teaches courses in womens history, u. S. Industrial reform and transnationallism. Dr. Kullman received her ph. D. From washington State University where she conducted research on 20th century early peace movements and conducted studies in womens gender and First World War, including the book of little comfort and Fallen Soldiers and she is currently working on a digital history project of german choral groups and the sound escape is in the 1920s United States. Dr. Kullman 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, petty coats and white feathers about womens protest of the First World War. Please join me in welcoming dr. Kullman. [ applause ] thank you very much for that gracious introduction, christie. I appreciate all the work thats gone into this wonderful conference, thanks to andrew bolton. Thanks for inviting me as well as david hosteter. I will start my remarks with a story. It begins about a year ago the university of mississippi held a conference called gender war and memory and 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 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 in 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. I think its always important to look at both sides to see the variety of ways women respond to war. 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, the confluence of women and war. She talked about the ways in which women were prevented from doing full military service in 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 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. 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 when the session was over. While she and the other Panel Members were talking after the papers had finished there was a lot of interest in this notion of how women can become equally a part of the fighting forces of the military. A lot of folks talked about how now folks have accepted women into the military and women being accepted into the citadel and women going to westpoint and 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. 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 ah mong others, get da 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. These were the questions and answers going on in the q a session after lisas paper. As i was listening to all of this i began to feel frankly, sick to my stomach. I began to think, well, yes, we do want to see women achieve full equality in society. I begin to feel sick of the notion of women leading men into battle. 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. Sit and listen. The other voice says, no, you have to Say Something, better Say Something now. Its time. I gingerly raised my hand and say i would never want to see a woman who wants to achieve something be held back from that achievement, i wonder 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. All the attention was on me so people turned around and looked, whos saying this. I became really uncomfortable. Lisa was sitting up in the panel and she nodded appreciably and respectfully. 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 fully engaged in this aspect of American Society to be seen as equal. This was the question i realized was gnawing at me. 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. I want to finish my story. 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. I told her i had read her book. She had been in the military before 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. I thought, that is a great idea. We sort of left it at that. Unfortunately, i didnt hear from lisa any more and maybe thats not my fault for not following through. I still think its a great idea. I kept coming back to this question how women can become fully equal in society and still seek peace. Then i started to think of other ways getting at that question 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 . If youre thinking wow, shes thinking about Steven Pinkers book, the better angels of our nature, youre right. Thats one place it can be seen. Ive 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, 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. The book was written in i think 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 wound twod twod wounded 200 others at a music concert and seemed an awful lot like an act of war. This led me not to believe what Steven Pinkers saying but uses women equality as societys sign we are less violent in our time. I think another corollary we could use, has womens presence in the military and lisa meyers work, 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. I have data, the most recent data i could find was 15 of the u. S. Military is made up of females. Certainly, we have seen women graduating from westpoint becoming decorated generals and so forth. Im not sure we can say anything about whether the military has changed, given those still relatively low numbers. 15 is not great. I think this is a debatable point. The military touts its more peaceful objectives for example distributing relief, pacifying a situation that will then enable School Children to go to school. We 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 historians would argue, no, suffrage was already going to pass. The western states had already passed suffrage laws and so forth. I guess the First World War for me 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. 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, d. C. From montana, the vote wilson declared war and congress was asked to vote on his war declaration. She was right there and she voted against the war deck clar rays in 1917. Weve made strides in politics. Still have a long way to go, still havent 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 professor. Theyve made Great Strides. We can 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 hear almost daily now about Sexual Harassment that takes place in various occupations. Given that stride, we can ask whether or not women having achieved greater equality has in any way changed the likelihood of violence and war as an institution that the state uses. So what i want to do now. Those are things i hope we can revisit. What i want to do now is shift gears and talk about my reach and the way in which ive tried to see whether women can advocate equality for women and still advocate for peace. 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. These ladies had did that work of continuing to claim womens equality and also advocate peace. 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. Its out there. You can see it. Its 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 turning convention on their heads and seeing the world in a different way. Many of them were part of heterodoxy, bohemian women 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. It didnt last very long. Ill get into that in a bit. I wanted to describe to you the way 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. They took as their inspiration, magellan, so the european explorer, and they said on the mast head there it said, then he showed four lights when he wished them to set full sail and follow in his wake. These ladies saw themselves as providing a bye con of light they hoped other people would follow. They then underneath that is a banner that reads, an adventure in internationalism. They started publishing in january of 1917. That tells you 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. That told me 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 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. The idea is pretty obvious, if youre not going to be a soldier and protect me you might as well look like me and wear petticoats. The idea is to shame men thinking they have to do their duty and enlist in the this 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. You see whats going on here. You have to fulfill your gender role for the country to go off to war. 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 motion 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 the word peace would appear alongside the same tents as the word force and questioned how language was being used by president wilson and others to put the nation in this wartime footing. One of the best examples of their critical eye was when they wrote an article that was critical of the nation. This is a magazine that still exists today. This is a magazine owned by a pacifist named oswald garrison. He was the son of a famous female pacifist. The nation would actually, not too many years after 19