Historically, many young men have been easily seduced by the imagined glory of war, and old men are all too often the ones who fan the violent flames. Meanwhile, women throughout the ages have carried the terrible burden of both.
Serious peace activists embrace a complete upturning of the tables and nothing less.
It should not be surprising therefore, that there is a veritable litany of women amongst the known peace-activists of history. Nor that there is a multitude more who have never made it into the limelight. The miserly inclusion of just seventeen women recipients of the noble peace price is less a reflection of women’s contribution to non-violent struggles historically, and more, a sad indictment of the male dominated process, at least until recently.
In one of my previous posts, I said it takes real courage to become a people of peace. The women, who take part in non-violent action for change, are the real deal exemplars of such courage. We are not talking here about nice, safe and easy. Non-violent peace activism is entirely the opposite. Neither can these radical peace seekers be categorized by ethnicity or religion. Their commonality is that as women they inherently abhor violence, and have an intrinsic desire to seek a better, equal, peaceable, very different world, than the current status quo.
When it comes to causes, the list remains plentiful and not infrequently these sisters of ‘peaceful but profound change,’ find solidarity with each other across a whole range of issues, from one end of the globe to the other.
Not all peace activists are anarchists in the sense of wanting root and branch change of the very foundations of current socio-political structures. But many of them both women and men ultimately find themselves in that spiritual and or philosophical space.
Like the South-American liberation theology folk I wrote about in a previous post, serious peace activists embrace a complete upturning of the tables and nothing less.
Without doubt, for many, anarchy is a necessary consequence of peace activism. I told you they’re a radical bunch! And within the written annuls of radical peace anarchists, is the American Dorothy Day. Hailed by some as one of the most influential American women of the twentieth century, she was the quintessential peace-anarchists, ‘anarchist supreme.’1
Pacifist vision of a better world for all.
A champion of the poor, never far from controversy, co-founder of the catholic worker movement, Day was on the front line of non-violent activism for most of her long life. Uncompromising until the end, her outright antiwar, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, pacifist commitment has few modern parallels.2 She was first imprisoned and beaten as a young woman while protesting with the suffragists in 1917. One of many incarcerations for civil disobedience, which saw her arrested for the final time at the age of seventy-five, in 1973.3
What now remains is her extraordinary legacy, a beacon on the hill, of the rigors and possibilities of non-violent peace activism. In the future, similar accounts will be written about women from every corner of the globe who are now active, and no less gallant, in pursuit of a pacifist vision of a better world for all. They are the champions of our age, who give inspired hope amidst the ongoing struggle for ‘peace with justice’.
- Brian Terrell, “Dorothy Day’s Anarchism is the Antidote to Disappointing Political System.” National Catholic Reporter. April 19, 2016. https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/dorothy-days-anarchism-antidote-disappointing-political-system [↩]
- Stephen J. Krupa, “An Introduction to Dorothy Day.” America Magazine: Jesuit Review. August 27, 2001. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2001/08/27/introduction-dorothy-day [↩]
- John Loughery and Blythe Randolph, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 1-10. [↩]
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