oa VROUWEN EN VREDE, MANNEN EN OORLOG?

Dutch radical feminist Wilhelmina Drucker’s take on feminism during the Great War

This article explores the connection between feminism and the fight for peace during the First World War. Although the Netherlands were officially neutral, the horrors of the battlefield, the position of women and the measures that needed to be taken were at the centre of a fierce political debate. I focus in particular on the special contribution to the Peace Movement by secularist feminist and leading figure of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century feminist movement Wilhelmina Drucker (1847-1925). Her criticism of the war spared neither men nor women and comprised three dimensions: an antimilitarist dimension, a legal democratic one, and an ultra-radical combination of feminism and Neo-Malthusianism.