Fotografía de autor

Sobre El Autor

Harriet Hyman Alonso is professor of history at The City College of New York, CUNY.

Obras de Harriet Hyman Alonso

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
female

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Reseñas

On April 23, 1926, Lynn Frazier, a first-term Republican from North Dakota, introduced a proposal in the United States Senate for a new amendment to the Constitution. Despite being just three paragraphs long it was breathtaking in its scope, declaring war illegal and prohibiting the government and its citizens from waging, supporting, or even preparing for any form of armed conflict. Though the resolution was not reported out of the Judiciary Committee before the end of the congressional session, Frazier reintroduced the measure nine more times over the course of his Senate career, and was stopped only by his defeat in his bid for a fourth term in 1940.

While the senator never corrected anyone who referred to the resolution as the “Frazier Amendment,” the credit for actually writing it goes to the Women’s Peace Union (WPU), a group of activists committed to a nonresistant ideology. As Harriet Hyman Alonso demonstrates in her study of the organization, its ideology and goals reflected both the vibrant peace sentiments of the 1920s and the experience of the women’s suffrage movement, which many of the WPU’s members had been a part of and which had pursued a similar strategy in order to win the vote for women nationwide.

It is because of this background that Alonso begins her study of the WPU by examining its origins in the reform movements of the 19th century. She finds much affinity between the women of the peace movement and the model provided by the abolitionist campaigner William Lloyd Garrison. Though his absolutist position and rejection of violence put him on the fringe of the antislavery movement, it served as the inspiration for a nonresistant women’s peace movement that developed slowly in the decades after the Civil War.

With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the women of the peace movement had both a new momentum to pursue change and a model to follow. The disillusionment following the First World War created a public climate sympathetic to peace, one that spawned a number of groups dedicated to its realization. What distinguished the WPU from its counterparts was its dedication to nonresistance and its goal of passing a constitutional amendment. Founded in 1921, the Women’s Peace Union of the Western Hemisphere (the group’s full title, and one that reflected its combination of American and Canadian activists) spent the first five years of its existence organizing its members and sounding out sympathetic senators who might be willing to support their proposed amendment.

Though the WPU succeeded in getting the resolution introduced, the women knew that this represented only the beginning of what they believed would, like the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, require a decades-long campaign. This necessitated speaking tours both to promote the amendment and to support Frazier’s 1928 reelection campaign lest his defeat be attributed to his sponsorship of the amendment. Yet while these early efforts proved successful, the women soon encountered two crises which sapped the movement of much of its energy. The onset of the Great Depression diminished interest in what seemed an irrelevant issue and eroded fund-raising efforts. Moreover, this reduced interest coincided with the growing exhaustion of the handful of women who shouldered the burden of the WPU’s workload. Though the WPU continued its activities throughout the 1930s, the reduced involvement of its core activists, coupled with the growing menace of war, rendered the organization a shadow of its former self by the end of the decade, with its hopes of constitutional revision dead.

The story of the WPU in Alonso’s book is one of what a small group of dedicated idealists can accomplish, as well as of the factors that limited their achievements. She is a sympathetic chronicler who doesn’t attempt to hide her admiration for the women she is writing about, yet this never inhibits her ability to analyze critically the movement’s flaws and the factors in the WPU’s failure. Because of this her book is vital reading for anyone interested in the often-overlooked history of peace movements in America and how the obstacles they faced frustrated their ability to effect change.
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Denunciada
MacDad | May 25, 2021 |
I won a copy in a GOODREADS giveaway.
 
Denunciada
tenamouse67 | Jan 14, 2018 |

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Obras
7
Miembros
77
Popularidad
#231,246
Valoración
3.8
Reseñas
2
ISBNs
13

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