More IAW History

The Peace Congress of the courageous Suffragettes in 1915

In April 1915 in the First World War more than 1200 brave suffragettes from twelve countries crossed oceans and war borders to attend a Peace Conference in the Hague, to discuss peace in the world; international and permanent peace.

The Board, with twelve women from twelve countries, sat behind a table at the Zoo in the Hague. There were palms at the background and eight vases with flowers in front.

On April the 25th 2015, at the gate of the Peace Palace in The Hague, members of the International Alliance of Women and WILPF  paid respect to the brave suffragettes who demanded permanent peace 100 years ago in a world full of conflict. There were cheers and there was music.

A short history

In October 1914 Aletta Jacobs received a message from the German Affiliate of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance that Congres in Berlin could not take place in June 1915, due to ‘circumstances’. As President of the Dutch Áffiliate, the ‘Vereening voor Vrouwenkiesrecht´ (the Society for Women’s Voting Rights),  she consulted her members and  proposed to organize a Congress on peace in the Netherlands, a neutral country in World War I. It was announced in the December Journal of Jus Suffragii and received many reactions. Not all members of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance liked the idea, but surprisingly there was also a lot of worldwide support and sympathy.

Only six weeks to go !

President Carrie Chapman Gatt of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance had already returned to the USA. There were only 6 weeks to go ! Aletta put two experienced Dutch members in charge: Rosa Manus and Mia Boissevain. They started preparing for an international Congress on Peace on February 12 and 13 2015.

Several suffragettes from the UK, Germany, Havre (occupied Belgium) and The Netherlands came together in the American Hotel in Amsterdam. They first installed a sub-committee for drafting (12) resolutions for a Manifest, with Aletta as a member. There also had to be voting procedures and a programme, an office and a venue; there were invitations to be sent out, letters to be answered, contributions to be raised etc. The costs would be divided by the national branches of the USA, UK and the Netherlands.

When it became known that the famous American social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams would be President of the Congress, and that she would travel with a group of 40 American women to the Hague, expectations of a successful outcome rose high.

Jane Addams was a friend of  the American President Woodrow Wilson. In January 1915 she founded the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace in Washington which later, in 1918, became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, WILPF.

The start of the Congress had political difficulties. A group of 180 English women could not cross the Canal, because boarding was prevented by the government. At the last moment only a few could  attend. The American suffragettes were held up but got there just in time. For women coming from France it was extremely difficult to join the others.

Regardless, the Peace Congress was a fact. And from April 28 till May the 1st, during the four days of Congress, resolutions were  discussed and amended for Permanent Peace. In English, French and German.

“We women, in International Congress assembled, protest against the madness and the horror of the war, involving as it does a reckless sacrifice of human life and the destruction of so much that humanity has labored through centuries to build up”.

The Board, with twelve women, from every country one, sat behind a long table in the biggest venue the preparation group could find, the Zoo in the Hague. There were palms in the background and eight vases with flowers in front. The Congress was chaired by Jane Addams, sitting in the middle.

At that time there were no microphones. Translation was allowed (quietly) in small groups but shouts of silence were sometimes necessary.
There were discussions  about the ‘language’ of the resolutions and there were amendments. The number of resolutions grew from 12 to 20.  There was also a great harmony. All suffragettes stood together behind their ideals of permanent peace, saving civilization and progress in the world.

The resolutions

The resolutions are very readable and to the point. Some demands were, in short:
– democratic control of foreign policy;
– political enfranchisement for women;
– continuation of the Permanent Court of Arbitrage, founded in The Hague in 1899, proposed and in accordance with the idea of Bertha von Suttner;
– a Permanent International Court of Justice;
– a ‘Permanent Council of Conciliation and Investigation’.

The last resolution, NR. 20, was a very special one. Vice-President Rosika Schwimmer from Hungary and Vice-President of the Alliance, an excellent speaker,  suddenly took the floor and called out:

“If brains have brought us to what we are in now, I think it is time to allow our hearts to speak. When our sons are killed by the millions, let us, mothers, only try to do good by going to the kings and emperors without any other danger than a refusal.”

She proposed that after Congress delegations should visit government leaders of both neutral countries and countries at war, to discuss the Manifest with its resolutions and demands of permanent peace. A tremendous applause followed !

Read the Manifest 1915 ! It is very readable and written in English, German and French. Click here: Manifest 1915

The Peace Mission

At first Aletta was not very happy with this proposal. She liked to take up her struggle for voting rights for women in the Netherlands. She sincerely believed that, if women got voting rights, permanent peace would follow.
Nevertheless, she went on the Peace Mission, from May the 7th till July the 8th,  together with Jane Addams and other suffragettes. In delegations of three or four they visited government leaders and  ministers of Foreign Affairs in London, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Bern, Rome,  Havre (occupied Belgium), Norway (King Haakon), Rome (the Pope).
Other groups went to Washington, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Petrograde. The Manifest was also mailed to China, Japan and Latin-American countries.

In the Embassies the suffragettes were received with courtesy, but behind their backs the remarks were not always polite.
For example from Germany: “In wartime you always meet a certain amount of cranks”.

The Treaty of Versailles, 1918/1919

Were the ideas of permanent peace of the brave suffragettes of 1915 lost during and after the First World War? Yes and no.
One of their ideas can be found in the last of the fourteen points of the list Woodrow Wilson presented at the Treaty of Versailles, in 1918/1919.

14. A League of Nations should be set up to guarantee the political and territorial independence of all states.

Wilson was not well at that time and his 14 points did not make any impression during the complicated negotiations between deliberating European nations for the Treaty of Versailles.
Except for this 14th point, the idea of a the League of Nations.

The League was installed in Geneva and years later became the United Nations, in New York. The USA never became a member of the League of Nations, due to political differences.

The results

Woodrow Wilson and Jane Addams both received the Nobel Prize for Peace. The League of Nations later became the United Nations.
We still have WILPF, which organized this excellent 100-year Jubilee of the Peace Congress 1915.

And Aletta Jacobs?
On 19  September 1919 women and men in the Netherlands got the same political voting rights. And Aletta got a magnificent bust in the Peace Palace in the Hague on April the 25th 2015.

The bust was a gift from WILPF. It was and created by sculptress Lia Krol.

The names  and pictures of well-known suffragettes were carried in a flash mob by members of the International Alliance of Women and members of WILPF.

The smiling lady in an orange blazer at the front of the mob flash  is Liska Blodgett, initiator and  team member of the Peace Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Behind her, at the right in a green blouse, is Petra Keppler from WILPF, waving at us with a board of Jane Addams in an oldfashioned hat. Petra has organized the mob flash.

After the ceremony at the Peace Palace several of us met in the hospitable home of Lyda Verstegen, where we got an introduction from Anne Cecilla Klelling, Norway.
She had made an analysis of the criteria for the Noble Peace Prize for women (see the picture).

Joke Sebus,
member of the International Alliance of Women
and of the Dutch Society for Women’s rights, Women’s labour and Equal Citizenship.
Hilversum, January 2015

With due thanks to Ite van Dijk (WILPF) and Marina Scholtes (editor in English)
Voor de Nederlandse tekst klikt u hier

Sources:
– Article about the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. Jan. 1.1915 in Dutch
– Women at The Hague, The international Congress of Women and its Results, Jane Addams, Emily Balch, Alice Hamilton. Production by Harriet Hyman Alonso, University of Illinois Press, with due thanks to Kennisinstituut Atria (knowledge institute)
– Herinneringen, door Aletta Jacobs (Memories, by Aletta Jacobs)
– Aletta Jacobs, 1954 -1929. Een onwrikbaar geloof in rechtvaardigheid, van Mineke Bosch, Uitg. Balans. (Aletta Jacobs, An unshakeable belief in justice, by Mineke Bosch)

Useful internetsites
http://www.womenstopwar.org/
http://willpf.nl/
http://www.ub.gu.se/kvinn/portaler/fred/samarbete/pdf/internat_1915.pdf
http://nl.ask.com/wiki/Volkenbond?lang=nl&o=2802&ad=doubleDownan=apnap=ask.com
http://socialhistory.org/bwsa/biografie/manus
http://nl.ask.com/wiki/Nobelprijs_voor_de_Vrede?
lang=nl&o=2802&ad=doubleDownan=apnap=ask.com#Nobelprijswinnaars
http://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/nl/artikel/32273/aletta-jacobs-op-vredesmissie.html
http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/essay-10-07.html
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Fourteen_Points?qsrc=3044

IAW Membership Officer Pat Richardson has been awarded the order of the Australia Medal for service to women, and to the community of Nambucco Heads

May 2014 – Pat has been an outstanding Membership Officer of the International Alliance of Women. She also organised several cultural events in Nambucco Heads and wrote an interesting book of her aunt Queenie Averell, a nurse in World War I.

At the age of 52, Pat Richardson decided to go to University. She applied and was accepted to study a Bachelor of Communiations majoring in Radio at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Pat spent time at 2SER during her degree, but radio was not her only passion. She has published two books, and produced a third with the help of journalist Anne Skinner. That book contains letters her Aunt Queenie sent home while working as a nurse during WWI.

In addition, Pat has been heavily involved with the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the International Alliance of Women. Her work with these organisations has resulted in her being awarded a medal of the Order of Australia.

A quotation of  the Daily Telegraph, telling about the book Queenie:

The 107 letters from The Great War were in little rolls, tied up in old ribbons and secured with rusty pins — forgotten for 60 years until found at the bottom of a woman’s glory box. The gripping accounts trace the experiences and courageous work of Edith “Queenie” Florence Avenell as an Australian Army nurse in Egypt, France and England from 1915 to 1917.

At 25, Queensland’s youngest hospital matron enlisted the day after Gallipoli, writing from the front to her widowed mother Matilda and two younger brothers in Townsville, the first letter arriving in May, 1915.

The bright, hardworking and patriotic young woman known to be “flirtatious on her days off” journeyed to Egypt on the P & O liner Mooltan, which was serving as a troopship.
She began work in the Sultan’s Palace at Heliopolis treating the wounded from Gallipoli.

Queenie went on to serve in France and the Western Front, ­recording the harrowing conditions in the regular and poignant letters home to Australia.
The collection has been put together in a book by her niece Pat Richardson, from Nambucca Heads on the mid-north coast, documenting Queenie’s work to mark the centenary of Anzac.
The letters and diary extracts throw light on a rarely told side of the war and on the heroes who provided care, comfort and succour to the wounded and dying.

In one letter dated August 24, 1915, Queenie writes: “We do love our patients, they are such bricks with their awful wounds. One of my patients was hit with shrapnel in five different places. His eye blown out, left arm blown off and other wounds on the back and body. He is a brave fellow. He says he is not too bad but he thinks he got more than his share.”

And in September, 1916: “We are getting more stumps every day and now have about 300 without legs and arms. I have 30 leg stumps to dress every morning and 40 beds to make … the orderly helps me. Yesterday a crowd of boys were out having a snow fight, crutches everywhere in the snow and only their one leg.”

As the war ground on, in June 1917, Queenie admitted she was a changed person, writing: “We are not the fresh creatures of two years ago. I’m having another injection tomorrow night. It’s horrid stuff. Makes us sqearmish, similar to sea sick. I took two of my stumpy boys to London yesterday afternoon and I feel quite knocked out.”

By October, 1917, she had ­returned to Australia on the hospital ship Euripides.
After the war, while nursing at the Army Hospital at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane in late September, 1918, Queenie was struck down by acute ptomaine poisoning but was saved from death by Dr Harvey Walsh. She married him in 1919 but died at 46 from an aneurism of the brain on the day she reached A grade in golf.

LETTER EXTRACTS:
July 1915: “I am at the Palace now in the medical ward nursing soldiers with dysentery, typhoid, rheumatism and pneumonia. They come from the trenches mainly.”
July 1915: “The ear and eye ward is next to mine and would make you sick to see the blind young men aged about twenty with their hair almost white. The heat is awful and the work fearfully strenuous and the damn flies are so bad.
November 5, 1915: “Wasn’t that a terrible thing about those poor New Zealand nurses? They lowered a boat down on top of them and the poor girls had their limbs smashed and some were killed instantly.”
November 15, 1915: “One sister was found singing, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ on a plank after being hours in the water. She was bucking the other boys up.”

Picture: Pat Richardson in the garden of the Government House in Sydney between her daughter Wendy and her grandson Ian.

A short IAW History, by IAW membership officer Pat Richardson

The International Alliance of Women is one of the oldest international Feminist Lobby groups in the world. The original principles were worked out in Washington in 1902 and then ratified at the 2nd Congress in Berlin in June 1904….the major issue was to get the vote for women worldwide…and this date 1904 is always seen as the beginning of the Association, which was then known as ‘The International Woman Suffrage Alliance.

The founding groups came from Australia, Germany, UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, the USA and Sweden…and these countries are still the most active people belonging to the IAW…although the various names of the organisations may have changed, the core principles are still there. The opening words of the declaration will show that the cause was as just and as relevant today as it was then.  Vida Goldstein from Victoria (see the second picture) represented Australia. She is one of our most famous early feminists.

The first President was Carrie Chapman Catt (see picture) from the USA who served from 1904-1923 (see picture). The second was Dame Margery Corbett-Ashby, 1923-1946. However following these two Presidents, the term of office was reduced to two, three year periods. It also is helpful if the President is fluent in a couple of languages.

The structure of the IAW is that Affiliates are National Bodies, often groups of associations… Associated societies are more localised bodies, and then there are individual members…the organisations must be non-party political and working to improve the status of women….also we have many libraries get our journals and emails.

At present, the IAW has 30 Affiliated societies, and 26 Associated societies and many hundreds of individual members world wide…Some of our affiliates have millions of members and others only a thousand or so…and some of our associated societies could fit in a phone box!!!

IAW these days sees itself as representing women’s interests at the United Nations and many of our volunteers sit on NGO committees to do with that, in New York, Geneva, Paris, Rome Strasbourg at the Council of Europe, at the International Criminal court in The Hague, in Vienna (UNIDO), Nairobi, The Arab League, and the European Womens Lobby.

The organisation has kept up with the times, we have a monthly email newsletter, produced in The Netherlands with our editor, Joke Sebus, and a very up-to-date web site…www.womenalliance.org …kept up to the minute by our Web manager, Alison Brown in Indiana, plus our Journal, ‘The International Women’s News’ is produced three times a year, and has been produced at regular intervals since 1908…there is a Congress every three years, to which all members of organisations, and all individual members meet to discuss issues in workshops and panels…and the results of these discussions becomes the guidelines our representatives use for the next Triennium.

The following year (2014), there is a Congress, and this year (2013), an International meeting where Presidents of our various bodies can meet and discuss progress. The venue for each meeting is in a different country at the invitation of our various member organisations…so we get to see quite a bit of the world.
In November 2010 the Internationaal Meeting was being held at a Conference Centre out of Johannesburg and the major theme is ‘Violence against women’. Our President Rosy Weiss from Austria, with whom I have worked closely, had to stand down at the end of the Congress, as she has served two terms…
In June 2009 Congress was held in Heiden in the North East of Switzerland, where our affiliate the Assoc. Suisse Pour les Droits de la Femme, was celebrating their Centenary… …at the conclusion of the meetings, we embarked by bus diagonally across Switzerland on a ‘Tour de Suisse Feministe’ …where we were welcomed at Civic events, held Seminars and ended up in Geneva holding two seminars at the UN buildings there. Contrary to what you would expect, Swiss women only received the vote in all cantons in 1984. And Federally in 1971.
And in 2011 IAW was in Iceland, the country which is in the top of countries were women are working hard at gender equality (see the picture that announced the Icelandic side event at CSW).

All office holders come up for election at a Congress…and two terms is all anyone can hold a position…however, older members who have served in many capacities, usually then become Commissioners or Regional Directors and people like myself as Membership Secretary are ex-officio the board…

Membership Secretary

I have been Membership Secretary since 1996 and seem to get busier by the year…. As we have no central office, all Members of the Executive and Commissioners, and Board members must be computer literate and online…and contact is now rarely by post, but almost exclusively by email. I keep the master files, the Printers address file, also I deal with the library subscription Agencies and help the email newsletter editor keep on top of the email addresses for our members…I am answering emails every morning from all over the world.

Although IAW originally formed to get the votes for women, this role quickly expanded to cover all the problems women were facing, in the workforce, in Health, in Education, Trafficking, Violence against women, Peace, Prostitution…also, encompassing the fight against the sexual mutilation of girls… there is nothing our women have not worked on.
In the early years, the IAW was very involved in the formation of the League of Nations and Dame Margery Corbett Ashley (picture) persuaded Woodrow Wilson to include women in the original charter.

Then following the Second World War, the IAW set up their own committees into Commissions to mirror the different UN bodies… and of course, the IAW is very involved in the CSW Hearings in NY each February… This is when all the women’s NGO’s converge on NY and have forums and try to influence what is going on in the main sessions inside where conservative countries try to water down the wording of any motions on the floor.

The latest issue of our IAW Journal, (our Editor is Priscilla Todd, from WEL Victoria) has focussed on the CSW activities this past February in NY and anyone who is interested in this subject, please take one of the copies, cover page says ‘Beijing + 15’.. Our journal is usually produced in English and French, but this most recent issue is all in English….

Commission on the Status of Women

Many side events are held at the CSW and this year there were 7000 delegates from all the women’s NGO’s converged on NY… and our President has written a scathing report of the mishandling of the registrations by the UN…involving long waits and ticketing. Also about the UN proposing to combine their various women’s agencies under one umbrella. IAW Secretary General Lene Pind, at the start of the IAW website, is taking care of the e-communication on Ning.

CEDAW

Nearly all the countries at the UN have signed the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women), but for some, it is only lip service…and many countries have cultural reservations, many of which are real barriers to women’s advancement…… Australia’s only reservation is about women serving in the front line in the army in battle…

Human Rights Council

I would like to tell you about some of our active representatives at the UN. In Geneva, Helene Sackstein (see picture) is working very actively on Women’s Maternal mortality…making it a Human Rights issue…I have her statement here with the names of other International womens organisations supporting it.  I know that this local Zonta region is also working to provide birthing kits for use in third world countries…a very practical response to a continuing and mainly preventable problem.

World Health Organisation

Gudrun Haupter, from Germany, works very hard on Health issues affecting women and girls…in Geneva at the World Health Organisation. She also has a page of her report in our latest journal on Family planning and safe abortion.

Non Smoking – Climate Change

Soon Young Yoon in NY has made women and smoking her issue and works tirelessly for that. She also organised several side events on Women and Climate Change. Soon-Young Yoon is Vice-President Of IAW New York and also President of NGO/CSW/NY.

Food and Agricultural Organisation

In Rome at the FAO, (Food and Agricultural Organisation), our rep is Bettina Corke, a Scottish widow, who at the moment is living in a tent on the outskirts of L’Aquilla following the earthquake there last year…I was privileged to attend an NGO committee meeting with her there three years ago when I was staying in Rome on my way to Paris to our Board meeting. As she is the only native English speaker she takes the Minutes, as Italian is not an official UN language!!!

My own involvement in IAW was entirely accidental…I had moved to Sydney in the early 1980’s from Nambucca Heads and was doing a couple of days a week in the WEL office in the city…as a volunteer….I had belonged to WEL since its inception in 1972, although most of the time as a country member, (this is how I often visited WEL Coffs Harbour for various Seminars and events). However, I had by then had had my first trip overseas and declared, ‘No more Gothic cathedrals!!!’

Unbeknownst to me, WEL had decided to join the IAW as the Australian Affiliate, (the League of Women Voters of Australia, had by then folded nationally, although it is still operating in Victoria)…and IAW was anxious to have Australia still represented with an affiliated group. WEL was to be admitted that year in July 1982 in Finland.The thought appealed to me to be present at this auspicious occasion…so being of ‘unsound’ mind, I talked a good friend into accompanying me, and we set off for Finland via Bangkok, Hong Kong, Japan, then the Trans Siberian Railway, this while Russia was still behind the Iron Curtain, and Hard class on a ten day train ride is not recommended.!!!

Anyway, I was blown away by the women I met in Finland, the subjects and bravery they were showing…It’s not safe or easy to speak out in many countries of the world…and also I met Senator Pat Giles, who had journeyed from WEL W.A. to be in Finland too…

Picture: IAW President Pat Giles behind an Italian poster, during a demonstration before the building of the UN in a protest against the war in Iraq in 2003. We all had posters in different languages … Immediately, we were both elected to the Board of IAW…but were not really expected to do very much as Board members, except be present once a year in all parts of the world…and show some interest.

Well, all this changed radically in December, 1996, when Pat Giles was installed as IAW President, in Calcutta. And I was asked to do the new job of Membership Secretary, to relieve the Treasurer of some of her burden. (Well, actually, they couldn’t get a Treasurer unless they did).  I had no idea what was involved…I was by now living back in Nambucca Heads. I owned a very old Apple computer on which I wrote letters, played Bridge and produced a very rough Rotary newsletter every week and that was it.

When the IAW Master file discs reached me in July 1997, I found I had to have a new PC and be ‘online’…I always say, taking on voluntary jobs keeps you right up to date with technology….as nearly all organisations international or local now operate online. (Also, I had to produce labels for the UK Printers for the post out of our journals four times a year…keeping the label files in the order British Post required!!!)

And the result of all this new technology and internet activity is; I can live anywhere on the globe now and still be right in touch…I feel I am helping women all around the world from Nambucca Heads!!! I call the internet, and particularly email, ‘the Women’s Web around the world!’

I have not always been able to attend all the Board meetings since I became involved in the IAW…as we all pay for ourselves…although the Australian delegates always share rooms and stay at the cheapest accommodations, it still costs us a ‘mint’ in airfares to get off the ground.  However, I have attended many Board meetings, Congresses or Seminars, in places as diverse as Finland, Greece, Strasbourg, Melbourne, Calcutta, Vienna, Copenhagen, Odense in Denmark, Malmo in Sweden, New York, Paris twice, Sri Lanka, Ireland, the 2004 Centenary Congress in Berlin/Freiburg, New Delhi, The Hague, Switzerland,and South Africa.

As the Individual member’s representative on the IAW Board, I decided I would organise our individual members in the UK to meet…in London… So two years ago, on my way to the Board meeting in The Hague, I organised an afternoon tea in London with our Associated society, the Sri Lankan Women in the UK as the hostesses, to get all our UK individual members and our other Associated society, the Josephine Butler Society, together…it was held right across the road from Buckingham Palace…it went very well with all the various groups networking.

Unfortunately, owing to either family circumstances or lack of finances, I have missed going to Board meetings or Congresses in Athens, Israel, Burkina Faso, Japan, Mauritius, Iceland and the Dominican Republic. As well as the seminars and Board meetings, delegates manage to be entertained by Presidents, and Governors, including in November, 2007, the President of India, Mrs. Pratibha Patil, the first woman President of India and formerly Governor of Rajasthan…also in 2002, the President of Sri Lanka…

I said to Pat Giles once while we were being wined and dined in an ancient medieval Governor’s hall in Malmo in 1998…’Who would have thought when we were marching down George St. carrying the Banner on International Womens Day, chanting, ‘Not the church, not the State, Women will decide their fate!!’, that one day we would be entertained in such splendour.

We often take short tours either before or after Board meetings…plus we organise our own short side trips and this way, some of the more memorable things of a frivolous nature I have done, are riding an elephant in both Rajasthan and Sri Lanka, being on top of the Empire State building posing with King Kong…and posing a la Princess Diana, at the Taj Mahal and floating in a boat under Niagara Falls…

I often Eurail to the various cities and as I never travel light, (as I always take all my files and a stationery shop with me), I have had my bags drop all the way down the stairs at Copenhagen station.. Where I hoped someone would make off with them, so I wouldn’t have to face them again.

However, the most amazing thing I have ever been confronted with, was at a reception at the Governor of West Bengal’s palace…and seeing two large paintings of Gandhi and Lord Mountbatten…I wandered over, and peered into the glass case in front of me…and was standing in front of Gandhi’s ashes!!! To someone of my generation this was a great thrill.

 Rosa Manus

I would like to wind up my talk on IAW by telling you about one of our original IAW members and Vice-President, Rosa Manus…a Jewish woman from the Netherlands, who organised many IAW Congresses and meetings from 1904 onwards and worked tirelessly for Peace…organising a huge petition to The League of Nations in the mid-Thirties.
During the thirties she also founded the Womens Library in Amsterdam…and was begged by everyone to leave Holland at the beginning of the Second World War…however, she said she was a Dutch woman and refused. After the invasion of The Netherlands, the Gestapo deported her to a Concentration camp where she perished soon after…she was in her sixties then. They also closed the Womens Library, and took away all the books and records and must have sent them to Berlin….

By a miracle, in 1991 a researcher came upon the Library’s records in a Special Archive in Moscow…where they had been taken by the Russians at the end of the War… The Aletta Jacobs Womens Library in Amsterdam now has a microfiche of all their pre-War archives…. (33,663 of them). However, perhaps one day, all the original books will be found and returned too.

I hope I have given you some idea of the IAW and the history and individuals who have worked for over a century…for justice and equality for women worldwide.
Pat Richardson, IAW membership Secretary, P.O.Box 380,  Nambucca Heads. 2448. N.S.W. AUSTRALIA.iaw.membership@womenalliance.org, ph. +61 2 65686239.

Various Books by and about IAW and WEL or by their members

1.‘Woman into Citizen’… book By Arnold Whittick…1979 Athenaeum with Frederick Muller, London 1979….to celebrate 75th Anniversary of IAW. ISBN 0-584-97063-3

2. Leila J. Rupp “Worlds of Women’ The making of an International Women’s Movement…1997 Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01676-3, cloth; ISBN 0-691-01675-5 paperback.

3. 2004. IAW private production, for our Centenary in Berlin 2004. Produced by Helen Self and Marijke Peters from IAW archives and articles by present members.

4. 2003. Prostitution, Women and misuse of the Law…by Helen Self.“The Fallen daughters of Eve’. ISBN 0-7146-8371-X paperback.

5. ‘Among the chosen’…life story of Pat Giles…Freemantle Press 2010. ISBN 978192196022 paperback.

6. ‘Making Women Count’…a History of the Womens Electoral Lobby in Australia….Marian Sawer and Gail Radford. University of NSW Press. 2008 ISBN 978 086840-943 6 paperback.

7. The International Womens News…produced by IAW 3 times a year.

8. IAW Monthly email newsletter…

9. WEB Site www.womenalliance.org. Monthly newsletter is on the web site.

10.‘The Gentle Invaders, Australian Women at Work 1788-1974’ by Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon. Thomas Nelson (Australia) Limited SBN 17 005041 6 published 1975. Australia….Marian Sawer and Gail Radford. University of NSW Press. 2008 ISBN 978 086840-943 6 paperback.

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