But a minority of pacifists in all countries still held up the mother as a symbol of love, compassion, and nonviolence. Aletta Jacobs (since her marriage Aletta Jacobs Gerritsen), who was president of Holland’s Association for Woman Suffrage, summoned women who wished to “protest together against the horrors of war” and perhaps even to “find a way to end the hostilities” to a meeting in The Hague in 1915.125 The national feminist associations in the belligerent countries refused to send delegations, but small groups from Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Great Britain, as well as from such neutral nations as Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada attended. These women formed the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (in 1919 its name was changed to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) and passed a set of resolutions that called for a negotiated peace. This document, which was sent to the governments of thirteen neutral and belligerent nations, influenced the “Fourteen Points” that were proposed later by the American President Woodrow Wilson.126
The meeting was chaired by a woman of great international prestige, the American Jane Addams. Though herself neither married nor a mother, Addams claimed that pacifism came naturally to women because of their experience of motherhood—an experience that transcended national boundaries. The same argument was made by Helena Swanwick, a British participant. “Two pieces of work for the human family are peculiarly the work of women: they are the life-givers and the homemakers,” she wrote in 1915.
War kills or maims the children born of woman and tended by her; war destroys “woman’s place”—the home. Every man killed or mangled in war has been carried for months in his mother’s body and has been tended and nourished for years of his life by women. He is the work of women: they have rights in him and in what he does with the life they have given and sustained.127
Swanwick and other delegates who returned from the Hague such as the German Anita Augspurg and the Austrian Rosa Mayreder set up branches of the International Committee in their own countries. Some, such as the German Helene Stocker, supported pacifism through journalism and organizational work.128
Following a socialist peace conference held in Switzerland in 1915, some French socialist women, including Helene Brion and Louise Saumoneau, took up the pacifist cause. Brion, an activist with a left-wing teachers’ union, was arrested for her antiwar activities in 1917. At her trial, where she stated fearlessly that “I am first and foremost a feminist. All those who know me can attest to it. And it is because of my feminism that I am an enemy of war,” she was defended by her friends Nelly Roussel and Madeleine Vernet.129 In 1917, Vernet founded a periodical, The Mother as Educator (La Mere Educatrice), in which she proclaimed that only mothers could save the world from “a slow death, a moral death, the worst of deaths. . . . We will help you with the moral education of your children!” she promised mothers. “We will show you the grandeur of your maternal role, we will give you confidence in yourself so that you finally dare, O mother, to occupy the place in society that belongs to you.”130
Meanwhile a new group that called itself Women’s Action (Action des femmes) was founded in France in 1915 and took up the struggle for woman suffrage that the larger organizations had renounced at the outset of hostilities. At first, this group’s program was highly patriotic. But by 1917, disillusioned with the war, the group turned to a pacifist ideology based on the matriarchal theories of Celine Renooz, who at the age of seventy-eight was elected its honorary president.
The group’s manifesto of 1917 invoked “the difference of the sexes in nature and mission” as a basis for female solidarity transcending class. “The male is violent and destructive; the female is gentle, altruistic, and constructive.” Whereas the age of matriarchal rule had been a “period of peace and happiness, called the ‘golden age,’ ” the rule of men had brought nothing but “an uninterrupted sequence of wars and horrible catastrophes.”131 The present war, stated the group’s secretary, Anne Leal, was merely the latest consequence of the “triumph of panmasculinism.”132 Women’s Action called for the legal recognition of a mother-headed family structure, maternity as a social function, and women’s entitlement to equality of opportunity in education, the professions, and political life. It also claimed “the right and duty to assume the moral leadership of humanity.”133 This initiative had considerable success—meetings often attracted over two hundred women— and helped to reinvigorate the suffrage struggle carried on by the Committee for Suffragist Action (Comite d’action suffragiste) in 1918.134
But motherhood proved to be a shaky basis for international solidarity. The vast majority of feminists in all countries refused to cooperate with the peace movement. Of course, one motive for this refusal was the ambition to deserve the rights of citizenship, including suffrage, through valiant patriotic service. But some were also skeptical about the pacifists’ conception of women’s nature. Like most men, most women defined themselves more by nationality than by gender. French women, stated the National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes frangaises), had always been sympathetic to pacifism and in the prewar years had aspired to “peace and international understanding, if not in the entire world, at least in Europe.” But “until the German women protested to their own government against its violations of international law and the crimes of its army against civilians, any cooperation with them would be a betrayal of the nation; the fact that they belong to the female sex was quite irrelevant.”135
Marianne Hainisch, the leader of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Osterreichischer Frauenvereine) declared that support for the peace movement was a betrayal of the Fatherland.136 The Germans too rallied to their men. “Nobody can look for an end of these sacrifices with more longing than we,” wrote Gertrud Baumer. “But with the knowledge of the greatness of the sacrifices we feel one with our people and our government. The men who take the responsibility for the decisions Germany makes are as dear to us as are the men who shed their blood for us on the field of battle. . . . Should we spiritually betray the men who defend our safety by belittling and insulting the inner forces which keep them up?”137 In an article written for Die Frau, Hanna Hellmann doubted that the notion that woman’s nature was inherently peaceable could stand against the historical fact that the majority of women had supported the war enthusiastically. “So we must not ask ‘how must women fulfill their nature,’ but rather admit that this is the way women have behaved. What can we conclude about their nature?” The pacifist doctrine made women into rather simple and stereotyped creatures. “If women are purely determined by their biology, then, if they are truly feminine, can they never feel any conflict between natural urges and intellectual convictions?”138
At the conference in the Hague, the statement of a lone dissenting delegate that she did not believe that “the average woman” was more peaceful by nature than the average man was met with derision.139 But the same skepticism was expressed by other women. The British journalist and suffrage activist Rebecca West criticized feminist pacifism as it was articulated by the Swedish child-welfare advocate Ellen Key. Like other peace activists, Key believed that the admission of mothers to the rights of citizenship would put an end to war. “When women have gained a voice in these decisions, the living human material that is now ruthlessly sacrificed. . . will be accounted the greatest riches of the State.”140 West, who had never belonged to Key’s international fan club, derided the notion that “now mere femaleness is going to end the war” as an expression, not of feminism, but of sentimental “woman-worship. . . Mere platitudinous assertions as to the niceness of peace and the nastiness of war are useless in such crises, and the ‘motherly’ advice of Miss Key that the belligerent nations should refrain from denouncing the sins of others… is actively mischievous.”141
Pacifists claimed that mothers’ love for their sons would always be a force for peace. But wartime images of mothers and their soldier sons did not inevitably carry a pacifist moral—indeed, they were much more often used to serve the cause of patriotism. In 1914, Britain had adopted the “Mother’s Day” holiday from the United States. A British pamphlet showed a gray-haired mother who imagined that her son was sitting at her feet while she knit him a pair of socks. “When you do come marching home,” read a letter from this fictional mother, “bring me back the same boy I gave my country—true and clean and gentle and brave.”142 The holiday spread to France by 1918, where a Catholic women’s organization, the League of French Women (Ligue des femmesjrangaises) organized celebrations in Paris and Lyon. The celebrations included patriotic films and music for children, and medals were awarded to mothers who were judged particularly meritorious.143 Italian propagandists urged mothers to reinforce the morale of the troops by encouraging their sons to fight, and compared the mothers of the fallen to the Virgin Mary as “mamma dolorosa, mammagloriosa.”144
All these sentimental images, whether pacifist or patriotic, were covered with contempt by the authors who claimed to speak for the soldiers themselves. Like other women, mothers were civilians, who were often resented for the safety in which they lived. “We’re divided into two foreign countries,” said a soldier on leave in Henri Barbusse’s novel, Under Fire, “the Front, over there, here there are too many unhappy, and the Rear, here, where there are too many happy.”145
In the all-male society of the Front, the only human ties that counted were to comrades. Mothers could not support their sons emotionally—in fact, the parent-child relationship was reversed as sons were forced to shield their mothers from the shocking truth. Sometimes mothers’ ignorance was portrayed as simply pitiable. A soldier in Barbusse’s fictional company who wrote a cheerful and reassuring letter to his mother was killed before he could send it. His comrade, who retrieved the letter, reflected that it “would have been read by the old peasant woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet nothing in the cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows like a dark spring on the walls of the trench.”146 While home on leave, the central character of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (which was based on its German author’s own experience as a front soldier) was asked by his mother if it was “bad out there.” He lied: “No, Mother, not so very. There are always a lot of us together, so it isn’t bad.”147 With mixed pity and aggression, the British soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon addressed the mother of the enemy.
Oh German mother, dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son,
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.148
But not all mothers were pitied—some were included in the poets’ indictment of an older generation whose stupidity and arrogance had sent so many young men to their deaths. The Countess of Warwick described a British mother’s response to her son’s death. “Harry’s colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor son’s bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition—ours has always been a fighting family.”149 In another of his poems, Sassoon pictured just such a Spartan mother, who responded to the news of her son’s death with pride that “Jack fell as he’d have wished.” The officer bringing the news, who had seen Jack “blown to small bits,” admitted that he had:
Told the poor old dear some gallant lies,
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt,
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.150
The British war poets, observes the historian Paul Fussell, had very little sympathy for the suffering of bereaved women.151 Neither did the German fighting men portrayed by Klaus Theweleit. Their literary works pictured mothers in the double guise of creator and destroyer, and denounced the “mother of iron who does not even bat an eyelid at the news of the death of the sons that she has sacrificed so much to raise.”152
These misogynist fantasies said more about the sons’ feelings of vulnerability than about the mothers’ actual behavior. Parents grieved in many different ways. Some tried to recover their sons’ bodies, others decided to leave them where they had fallen.153 Often, there was no body. Vera Brittain recalled the “helpless distress” of her fiance’s mother when she received his only remains—a few items of clothing, which gave off “a charnel-house smell.” “Take these clothes away into the kitchen and don’t ever let me see them again,” said Roland’s mother. “I must either burn them or bury them. They are not Roland.”154 Some bereaved mothers and fathers attended spiritualist seances, which gained in popularity during and after the war, in a desperate attempt to make contact with the dead.155 The German painter and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz struggled to express her grief for her son Peter. “Make a drawing: the mother letting her dead son slide into her arms. I might make a hundred such drawings, and yet I do not get any closer to him. … I am too shattered, weakened, drained by tears.”156 A replica of Kollwitz’s bronze sculpture of a mother cradling her dead son in her lap now stands in Berlin as a monument to all victims of war and political oppression. In the German working-class neighborhoods described by Ute Daniel, mental breakdown and suicide, but also laughter and curses, were among the reactions to bereavement.157
Contrary to the hopes of pacifists, the moral authority of mothers was not exalted by the war. On the contrary, maternalist stereotypes of innately peaceful and altruistic mothers were questioned by the many feminists who rejected the peace movement. And familiar cliches about mother-love, which had been degraded in the service of wartime propaganda, were consigned by spokesmen for an angry younger generation to the trash-heap of outmoded Victorian sentimentalities. In the interwar era, the mother would be displaced from her pedestal.