A Geek History of Time - Episode 330 - Interview With Dr. Mona Siegel on Her Book Peace On Our Terms Part I

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

see people when they click on this they'll see the title so they'll be like poor ed what is that even fucking mean however because it's england that's largely ignored and unstudied. I really wish for the sake of my sense of moral righteousness that I could get away with saying no. He had a goddamn ancestral home and a noble title until Germany became a republic. You know, none of this highfalutin, you know, critical role stuff. So they chewed through my favorite shit.

No, I'm not helping them. I'm going to say that you're getting into another kind of, you know, Mediterranean or psyche archetype kind of thing. Makes sense. Also, trade wins are a thing. Ha ha, just serious.

Like, no, he really has a mat on it. You know, we'll go upon a tangent. As we keep doing. Like, yeah, this is how we fill time. This is a key to be a key mystery of time. This is a key mystery of time, where we connect, murdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock.

I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California. And my son is away with his grandparents for the next at this point nine days. And on the one hand, we miss him terribly. On the other hand, we just had an entire day where it could just be the two of us doing grown-up stuff. And that was awesome. Mm-hmm. and so we're we're both wrestling with the weird the weird kind of pseudo guilt like we know we don't need to feel bad about it but there's that temptation to be like I shouldn't feel good that my child is gone but I'm having a lot of fun now um and so yeah we we yeah we had a wonderful day and he's he's having all the fun because he's getting to go camping with his

grandparents like for real going to a campground um and and that's awesome but my wife is like my mother isn't answering her phone she's turned it off she has my baby uh so you know we're we're wrestling with both sides of that but how about you well i'm damien harmony i'm a u.s history teacher up here in northern california um and the the news i have is not really news it's it's kind of to be expected, but last night we had our second to last show. Well, okay, I don't want to date this entirely. Last night we had an amazing show of capital punishment and Mark Berg was a contestant on it and he was normally, he used to be our host. He was our nine years long host and he wanted to be a contestant on it and he did very, very well and that was really neat. But it was it was such a

wonderful show it was it was like every single layer was just better it's like the opposite of a trauma lasagna like it was really yeah yeah oh it's so good um and i would just like to point out that if you can find another show where someone makes an ice cream pun about yoko ono and walt woodman fusion poetry you go ahead and go listen to that show then that's fine it was wow yeah that's that's deep magic it was amazing that's yeah well it was it was fantastic so yeah i i'm still kind of high off of it it was it was a really yeah and sorry for if you heard the the door closed my son brought me a water um so uh tonight uh i figured we do something a little different and uh have a guest come on um yeah big departure yeah really from from our year of laziness really uh just me

bringing on people I really want to interview. So we have in the chat with us or in the Zoom call with us a professor of tremendous respect on my part. She was my mentor coming up and that means that she has had to sacrifice more time reading Drek than anyone else. Dr. Mona Siegel, the history professor at Sack State, who is the author of two books, including the book called Peace on Our Terms, the Global Battle for Women's Rights after the First World War.

Dr. Siegel, Mona, how you doing? Thank you so much for joining us. Ah, well, it is absolutely my pleasure to be here. Thank you, Damien and Ed, for the invitation. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm glad to have you here. Ed, do you have any questions for Dr. Siegel before I jump into questions about the book? I'm sure you're intensely curious as to.

The only question that I have is, was he at? as difficult to get through a lecture with as he is to get through anything I need to say here. Because I get five or ten words into something. I get into my groove and there's a pun or there's a song reference or there's God knows what. And I mean, I can't really complain because it's what's kept us doing this as long. But like, did he do that to you too or am I somehow specifically? You are not special at all, Ed. This is Damien's mode of operation, probably in all walks of life, but certainly in the graduate seminar room. And he kept me on his toes, but he kept me

laughing, which not all my students do. So that's why I'm here with him tonight. I am happy to still have him as a part of my life. All right. Well, I feel vindicated. Thank you. Thank you so much. We call it Harmonian dialectics. It's really, you try to make a point, and I just pun off. You're sure there's not a diss on the front end of that? So. I feel like there should be. Yeah.

But yeah. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for being here. I'm almost as excited as he is to hear from you. So thank you very much. Thanks. So first question for you, right out the gate.

Do you want me call you Mona or Dr. Siegel for this? Oh, I think Mona would be better. Okay. First question for you then. right at the gate mona. What possessed you to write this book? Is this an area of your special expertise, or, you know, was this just a pet project? Like, what made you want to cover this era and this particular facet of this era?

So this book that we're talking about, piece on our terms is very narrowly focused on a moment in time, almost all. All of the events that take place in this book happened in the year of 1919, so over a century ago at this point. And it was a critical year in world history, as I know, both of you know, from talking with your students because it marked the end of the World War I. But it also marked the beginning of what we sometimes refer to as the liberal international order, the kind of institutions of international cooperation and economic independence. and democracy that, at least until pretty recently, we've taken for granted in the world. And it's a history that if any of your listeners have learned about it in a classroom, they probably learned about people like Woodrow Wilson or David Lloyd George, a lot of very important statesmen and diplomat who wore, you know, starch neckties and

wore top hats when they got dressed up and decided the fate of the world sometimes with the stroke of a pen. And I learned about this era early on in my own undergraduate and graduate studies and was fascinated by the kind of turning point it represented. But as an undergraduate, I studied international relations. I didn't study history. And it was just taken for granted that this was an era made by and four men, and that assumed male political dominance into the foreseeable future, even among men who weren't necessarily misogynist, but who just kind of took that world for granted. So, you know, I'm already being long-winded, Damien, but you asked me the question, why did I write this book? I feel like this book kind of bit me on the nose and demanded

did to be written. Because as I started researching, I started realizing kind of one woman at a time and one group of women at a time that women were dynamic actors in the making of this piece as much as men tried to exclude them. They came back at it and refused to be excluded. And both made a mark on the decisions that were made at the time, but also by their exclusion, men made particular decisions about the type of world that we would enter the 20th century. And so, you know, as I put these different pieces together, I said, yeah, I'm going to have to write a book about this. Nice. You know, reading it, the approach, it was interesting because like a lot of the women in here, there was a lot of finesse that had to occur when dealing with these.

men who wouldn't necessarily even take them as an audience or would take them as an audience as kind of an afterthought and things like that. And it reminded me of the way that we look for tuberculosis and people is we look for the antibodies. So the way that we look for women's efforts and what they were trying to accomplish, you almost have to look at like the ways that they were told no through a lot of like what these what these guys did and and and it's it's interesting what what struck out to me was the lack um and full disclosure when i was a graduate student under dr seagull she was my my um master's thesis primary advisor um and uh i was writing about how the fabians looked the fabians and the social democratic federation looked at women's suffrage and how my my contention was

that the way that they both looked at it was actually the same, they just came to different conclusions, and both of their approaches froze women out for longer when it came to suffrage. And so it's one of those, like, there's almost no mention of these women's efforts in these men's journals and memoirs and stuff like that, other than took a meeting with some nice ladies today, you know, and had some tea. And it just, it struck me how, how much that like the period at the end of that sentence contained so much more, um, uh, in terms of these efforts because very often this meeting was the culmination of efforts of this international organizations to send a delegation and have all these, like the amount of travel. Like, like the amount of just

like, I started thinking to the very small. How, what do you pass? how do you pack like you're going to be getting seasick you know like all of these like very very real things and and it just it it shows up as a barely a blip you know an ignorable blip because they had more important things to handle kind of thing and like and yet these women came out and they they turned up with like a huge agenda and a lot of efforts because they're sitting there going like we just lost our sons brothers and fathers and plenty of us us too because there were a million casualties that were civilian casualties during that war. And then, you know, the war brought, you know, the, the American flu to the rest of the world.

And then. The American flu. Yeah. I like to call it the Kansas flu. But, but, you know, and that killed a hundred million people, you know, at least half of whom were women, you know. And so I just found it fascinating yet again, like just looking at, like, just looking at, like, the silhouette of what was missing. Yeah.

You know, the spaces between the books that should have been filled, you know. It's actually interesting. The opening anecdote in my book starts with actually an American woman, Kerry Chapman, Cat, a very, very prominent American suffragist. And she's sick in bed. And she's sick in bed with the flu. They're pretty sure it's the Spanish flu. So I didn't name it exactly in my book.

But it actually starts with the pandemic. and came out, my book came out in 2019, so it came out in a pandemic year. Wow. Wow. That was, that's, that's, that's, that's wild. It's wild to me that this book feels so much older and I feel bad for just having read it this year, but. Better late than never. Right. You get around to it eventually, Damien.

But, but also at the same time, it's like, it only was, you know, five, six years ago that it came out. So, um, you used to term, oh, go ahead. I, I, I just want to know, um, because I'm, I'm working on my master's right now. And, and, you know, hunting up primary sources is, is still like a manful challenge. Like, it's, it's difficult. Where did you, where did you go to, to find the records that, that are there? were you looking at the like the archive papers of prominent suffragists?

Were you like, was it, was it presidential library kind of stuff? Like where did you find where did where did you find what you found? So I mean, the first thing I should say for, you know, readers who haven't read peace on our terms yet is that it's very much a global history. So, you know, while it opens with an anecdote about an American suffragist, it focuses in on women from the United States and from Europe, like you might expect study of the early 20th century. But it also focuses in on Chinese women at one point in time, on Egyptian women, at another point in time. It looks at African American women, several of whom crossed the Atlantic Ocean to be in Europe to weigh in. on both questions of gender justice, but also racial justice in the year and African So the question about sources is, you know, it was probably one of the most daunting things

when I kind of committed to doing this project is how in the world am I going to track down all of these voices because I'm going to build them from primary sources. I think I don't have the list in front of me. I think I visited about 14 different archives in the United States, in France, in England, and in Belgium. I don't speak Chinese and I don't speak Arabic. However, the Egyptian women whom I had studied were all very upper class and in the era in which they live. that meant that they were often more strongly tutored in French than they were in Arabic grammar. And so the first Egyptian feminist kind of newsletter was actually written and published in French and not in Arabic.

And so that I was able to consult in the French National Library. and the Chinese woman who is very much at the center of my story was spent part of her, well, she was trained in law in France. She spent part of her life in the United States. And so while I did get a few sources translated from languages that I didn't speak, for the most part, working in sources in French, English, and a little bit of German, I was able to put this story together, and it involved traveling all over the place. So the Women's Library at the London School of Economics, the Library of Congress in Washington D. Stee, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Papers that are in Boulder, Colorado, the feminist archive.

There's one in Angé, France. There's another in Brussels, Belgium, and I spent time getting dusty in all of them. That's awesome. Yeah, it did. Wow. That's my favorite part of being a historian is the detective work that goes into putting a story together. Some of the correspondence that I followed between these different women, I'd see one letter that was sent that ended up in an archive in Manchester. And the response would be an archive in Paris or Brussels.

And I had to kind of get at it from all angles before I could fully put that conversation. conversation back together. That is so cool. Yeah. It's like Indiana Jones, but with air conditioning. I know, but I didn't have the hat or the whip. So that's kind of a bummer, but yeah. Or the mass disregard for primary sources.

Right. Yeah. Or, or, you know, archaeological, you know, actual procedure. Yeah. Yeah. You use the term early on gender equality in a book. about a time that did not use that as a term. In some ways, it feels like we're using our present lens to look at the past.

How did you square that circle? Because I know that, you know, judging, I'm not even saying that you were judging the past, but readers will look at that and go, oh, wow, that was really neat how they did that. Or, oh, it's a bummer that they didn't do that. Judging the past is just kind of inherent in interacting with it because that's how, that's almost your first filter as a layman. So you're using a term that is current about a time that didn't have that term. What was your decision-making process in that? Yeah. I mean, in some of the framing interpretive work that I do, say in the introduction or the conclusion, I bring some

analytical language that, you know, you don't have to be a professor to use today. That's more just part of our everyday tools for understanding injustice in our world. But for most of the book, I spoke in their words and their language. And so they might not have been talking about gender equality, but they very openly said, how can we make peace if you exclude half of humanity? Or to pick up a term that Widrow Wilson liked to use a lot as they were beginning to talk about what it was going to mean to put an end to war. He talked about World War I having been a people's war, and so they needed to build a people's peace.

And, you know, I think that felt like a catchy phrase to him or his speechwriters. To women, they came back at it and said, how can you have a people's peace if you exclude half the people? And so, you know, a lot of the language that they used at the time was not, so terribly distant from the language we use now or certainly from the concerns that we have now. But I mostly let them speak through their language and through their eyes. Okay. So, yeah, go ahead.

If I may, and I'm sorry if I'm stepping all over your toes here, Damien. But as somebody who is less experienced working specifically with the lens of gender, when women were, were engaging in this activism, had they gotten to the point ideologically where they had envisioned a world of actual gender equality? Because, you know, it's phrased all the time as suffrage, you know, the suffrage movement and the, and, and, and, you know, and, and, you know, yeah, so that, that kind of stuff. was there like how common was the vision within within what we would today call feminist circles then how common was the vision of a world of full gender equality like was that was that a common thing was that still kind of fringe for many of them or you know i'm curious about that that part of that framing i mean you know part of what's caught up in a phrase or

or a term like gender equality is not just social rights or economic rights, but it's also an understanding of masculinity and femininity and how the values associated with those two kind of ideas and cultural principles affect the world. So particularly for the women whom I studied, who considered themselves pacifists. Some were outright pacifists.

They were Quakers who were. rejected war under all circumstances. Some it was less absolute than that, but who still saw working for the prevention of the return of war as the single most important thing that they could be engaged in or should be engaged in as women. For them, peace itself was a gendered concept. And for them, you know, it sounds perhaps quite essentialist to our ears, but to them, the fact that women were first and foremost life givers and nurturers meant that they looked at the something like war that was mass death on, you know, now an industrial scale, was something absolutely antithetical to not just a, you know, world in which feminist ideas are used to help

construct laws, but also a world in which gendered notions are more in balance, where the masculine and the feminine sides of human interaction and community and society and democracy were given equal value. Now, not all the women I studied would have articulated things in quite the same way, but maybe that helps bring out how ideas inherent in gendered understanding of the world were very much present and how they presented their ideas and how they conceptualized international relations and diplomacy and peace. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you. In many ways, World War I was the, see, that's what we're talking about for the need for women to, because, you know, looking at it from a suffragist perspective or from Alice Paul, well, maybe not Alice Paul, but Carrie Chapman, Kat for sure, the suffragist perspective of the reason women need the vote is to protect the family. We can no longer protect it from within the home because of industrialization.

And industrialization as a Tolkien fan, you know where that leads to. Everything evil. Right. And war, right? And so the idea of like, look, this is a war that killed more people than we've ever killed before.

Clearly, it's time to, like this became part of a, there's either a we supported you so we deserve it now that's women of england in a lot of ways but there were also like right behind them a a distinct thread of like you need us to be involved because y'all just killed yourselves for you know for four years straight and like on mass numbers and it was a valuation of the validation of femininity because that cult of domesticity previously had said oh well a woman is supposed to take care of the family and they're like okay then here's how we need to do this in a modern world and that's for the women who who subscribed to that and you know and they were able to use that as as a tool i mean you had social feminists you had like

the americanists you know the americans like jane adams and stuff like that saying we need protective legislation and and things like that so this this 1919 is like kind of the tail end of of like a 40-year cycle or a 40 year period of like tremendous change like it's not just frontierism it's it's urbanization it's it's there's massive numbers of people starving and and things like that and so they're like okay well if this is how you're defining us this is why we need the vote and you know I can just imagine the men going no no no not like that not like that you know no wait hold on yeah yeah I mean women were somewhat cut in a catch-22 when they were trying to assert their expertise and their value in something like, you know, defining peace negotiations.

Because on the one hand, they argued both from the heart, but also strategically to say that women have an expertise over peace that men cannot claim just from being nurturers, like I said before, and life givers. But on the other hand, it was that kind of effective and emotional side of women that made men convinced that they absolutely had to be excluded from the negotiations because they wouldn't be hard-nosed about looking out for borders or, you know, some of the or, you know, economic well-being or armaments or whatever it was. And so I think I have a line in my book where I said women were all.

almost seen as too peaceful to be peacemakers. And that was a really tough kind of strategic position to argue from. But women, you know, they had the slight advantage in this moment of time in that almost none of them anywhere in the world elected the leaders that created this war. Women in New Zealand already had the vote before World War I, women in Finland and a few others got it during the war. But for the most part, women were able to say, we did not create this war. This war was not of our making. And even for the ones who were quite patriotic or really supported their nation at war throughout the war years, it made it much easier to step back afterwards

and say, okay, men. I think Damien, you were saying this earlier, you know, you made this mess. And so now if we really want to not repeat this, again, now it's time to listen seriously to what women are saying and to include them fully, both in international and domestic politics going forward. And there's several socialist groups in England specifically going, see, we told you. They were like, you need, like the Fabian specifically said, you need women voting on the municipal level because they understand how housing inspectors. should go like yeah and and they were saying like once we get in there then we can get further but like

they they very much from a socialist perspective were like women need to be on the ground floor of these kinds of decisions because look what happens to the working classes when they're not so now I noticed in your book there's very obviously a seasonal organization did that fall in your lap or did you Did you have to kind of, like, at what point did it obviate itself to you? Because, like, I'm just going to read through some of the chapters. A new year in Paris, women's rights at the peace. Winter of our discontent, racial justice in a new world order. Marching, thank you for that, in Cairo, Women's Awakening and the Egyptian Revolution in 2019.

Springtime in Zurich, former enemies in pursuit of peace and freedom. May flowers in China, the feminist organization or origins of Chinese nationalism. And autumn on the Potomac, women, workers, and the quest for social justice. So it's very seasonal. When did it obviate itself to you? I mean, the chapters move thematically and chronologically through the months and the seasons of this year of 1919. And I think any global history or big international history, project is unwielding because, you know, you're telling lots of stories at the same time

and bringing in a lot of different historical characters. And so I think as I realized that a lot of these different groups of women, labor feminists who had their big moment, not until the International Labor Organization met in Washington, D.C., near the end of the year, October, November, but the May 4th movement in China, a lot of the kind of big dramatic moments did come at a specific moment in the year. And so I decided to kind of hang my chapters as the year developed. Most of them happening in the first half of the year because the Paris Peace Conference lasted in earnest from January to June of 2019, although negotiations continued to trail out for several years. The last of the post-World War I treaties wasn't signed until 1923. So anyway, a big

concentration on the first half of the year, but also looking at the kind of continued fallout, well, fallout sounds negative, but the continued innovation and organization coming out of the peace conference to the end of the year. You mentioned the peace conference going from January, June, and there were a lot of international women in Paris, again, a lot of delegations. Were there any barrier, like language barrier issues for them that they faced amongst themselves, not just with, you know, just because it's, many of them, it's their first time out of their own country, upper classes they may have been. Were there language barriers they ran into? You know, it's interesting. The women who came.

to Paris, for the most part, so the women who were trying to interact most directly with the statesmen and the diplomats who were, you know, deciding on the terms of the eventual peace treaties that came out of it. Most of them were quite educated, you know, from not necessarily the elite of the elites, but many, many college educated. And most had, uh, French and English or French or English skills. And so, and that's true. I mean, it might surprise people, but even there were two African-American women who played an important role in Paris and then also in Zurich, Switzerland that year.

But those two women, Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs Hunt, were among the first handful of college-educated African-American women in the United States, both had. strong French and English skills, and Mary Church Terrell had strong German skills as well. I remember one of them was wife to the, oh, Madagascar, our delegate to Madagascar at the time. Right. Yeah, Ida Gibbs Hunt's husband was a diplomat. They had been previously stationed in Madagascar. And he was a consul in France, actually, during World War I in a kind of urban industrialized city called San Antonio. So an African-American diplomat couldn't get a plum position in Paris, but quite impressively did hold this consulate position in southeastern France. So the labor women, it's interesting when they met in Washington, D.C., towards the end of the year, that was an even broader international mix of people.

There was a delegate from Japan who played a big role. there were delegates from Latin America and they did they had translator you know female translators I don't know if they recruited them from local colleges in D.C. or where they found them and there was a lot of simultaneous translation going on but French and English were by far the predominant languages that they spoke to each other through in this era. Gotcha. After it was clear that Wilson wanted to be an ally, but not an accomplice, did those who believed in him as a champion? Because there's a lot of hope that you pointed out in the beginning of the book, a lot of hope. Did they let that go or did they cling to it more? Like, oh, if we could just pull him

over? Or did they kind of see the real politic of it and be like, okay, that's as far as he's going. We're going to have to do most of the work ourselves. Right. Yeah. Woodrow Wilson, I mean, he, you know, he was viewed as the likely kingmaker of these negotiations from the time the United States entered the war not long after and his proclamations of, you know, making a world safe for democracy and all of that and just the important industrial as well as military role that the United States played at the end of the war. All of that put the limelight on Woodrow Wilson. And for European women who were kind of hitting a brick wall with most of the leaders of their countries in pressing for greater women's rights. They were heartened by the fact

that finally, belatedly and reluctantly, Woodrow Wilson came around to supporting American women's suffrage, first at the state level and then eventually supporting a federal amendment that eventually became the 19th Amendment. So they had huge hopes in him. They remarkably got quite a lot of access to him. That was something that really blew my mind while I was researching this book. You had, you know, delegations coming over from, you know, important places in the world like Egypt that couldn't get in the door to meet with Woodrow Wilson. The European and American and suffragists that I studied had at least four face-to-face audiences directly with Woodrow Wilson between January and April of 1919.

So, you know, I don't want to suggest that meant he was, these women were on his mind all that often, but he felt a certain amount of pressure. And when they, when, so the, one of the groups or conferences, meetings that I talk about, this is the focus of chapter one, was a gathering of French feminists in Paris that called themselves the, the inner, sorry, inner allied women's conference. So it was only allied women, but there were 30-some allies represented at this conference.

And they rapidly called together this conference when they realized that no women had been appointed as a plenipotentiary, as anyone that would have a stake at the table, and organized in order to figure out how are we going to get men to take our voices, seriously and our issue seriously. And they were able to meet directly with President Wilson face-to-face on February 10th, the opening day of their meeting. They got an appointment with him that night. And they said, we want you to create a women's commission. They had already created a labor commission, a League of Nations commission. These were advisory commissions to help manage these complex issues that they were negotiating. They said, we want a women's commission

staffed by prominent women who can tell you what decisions you should be making if it involves women and children. And Woodrow Wilson, you know, he had them face to face said, I will support you. I will do that. And then when he got, you know, he said goodbye to them. And a few days later when he was in the room just with the male statesman and, you know, closed doors and nobody listening in, said, eh, I told the women I'd raise this issue. I kind of would like them to be happy, but I don't want to do anything that might anger you.

And one by one, they said, no, this won't work in my country. No, this won't work in my country. And then they didn't even vote. They just kind of by acclamation decided this wasn't going to be something they were going to press. But what's even worse, Damienette is when he walked out of that meeting and knew he had to report back to the women that he had to disappoint them. he didn't blame it on all the men in the room he went back to them and said i'm very sorry but the men from eastern nations you know the men from asia essentially uh just couldn't put they just blocked this they couldn't support it so from india from um from japan that they were the problem

but there was a secretary taking minutes in that meeting and when you go back and look at those minutes to get back to Ed's question about sources, they're on record. And they say, you know, it was the Italian prime minister. It was the French prime minister. It was the English. They all were like, no way are we taking on this issue. No way do we see it as even important to the business we're doing here. But the racism of, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to blame this on the Asian, the non-white men, I thought was pretty horrific. Yeah. When you said that, it occurred. You you know, my initial response that immediately occurred to me was, yeah, well, Woodrow, good old Will. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, now, do you think that it was, that's his filter and that's how he remembered it? Or was he being a devious prick? Oh, no, this wasn't memory. He sat down and wrote them a letter that day and said the problem was the Asians in the room. And, you know, when I first saw that letter, that letter said, I forget if it's in Manchester or London where that letter is sitting somewhere in an archive.

And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder if that's the case. And later when I read the, it's, in fact, your readers can go look it up online. The Woodrow Wilson papers are all digitized. And when you get into wherever that meeting night was, it shows that all the men one by one said, no, we're not, we're not willing to do this. Wow. So when you, when you read that for the first time, was, was there a flash of that? Rick?

Yeah. I might have even used a stronger word than that. And I might have even said it out loud in an archive. I'm not sure about that. But, yeah. I'm going to ask you what that is off the air. Why didn't they just try pitting men's egos against each other? Like, you know, oh, Wilson couldn't get it done.

But, you know, who I heard could, you know, that kind of. You know, they did to some degree. So that, just that suggestion of creating a women's commission went down relatively early in the peace negotiations. I forget who dangled out there still the possibility that women might have some form of representation. And then Woodrow Wilson came home for a month in the middle of the Paris Peace Conference to take care of domestic business. And while he was gone, the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, picked up the issue again. And he said, why don't we appoint a woman to each of these commissions that most concern issues relating to women and children? And he kind of won up President Wilson and really enjoyed playing that role, particularly given that he was never a supporter of women's suffrage in France to begin.

with. And so they, and one of these ways the women, particularly those that were acting in Paris, were very savvy, is they used the media. They issued press releases all the time. They spun things. They let secrets leak out of the room if they thought it would help their cause. And so they started talking very sweetly about, oh, look, George Clemelsso is going to get done what Woodrow Wilson couldn't get done.

But then when that proposal came forward, that was voted down as well. So what the women eventually did receive was an opportunity to have an audience in front of two of the important commissions in the conference, the Labor Commission and the League of Nations Commission. And they essentially kind of got a half an hour here and a half an hour there, which given that initially they wanted to be seated at the peace take. table itself was kind of breadcrumbs. By the same token, if you read some of the headlines announcing that women had gained this entry into the negotiations, it was hailed as this tremendous breakthrough. And it is a reminder that women had virtually no political rights anywhere in the world. They were viewed as having no expertise when it came to things like international or domestic policy.

And so the fact that they got the ear of these, the most important men in the world in 1919 and were able to lay out a program and they were very organized. They came with very specific demands. And they only, you know, were able to achieve a couple of them, but they made the men respond to them, right? The men had to go on record when they said, no, no, yes, we're creating a world. made for democracy, but including women in that democracy can only come slowly over time and is not for us to deal with now, which, you know, was men going on record saying you can build

democracy without women. Right. And that to include women might retard the process too, like by implication. Yeah. So, I mean, based on that, how, and I'm trying to figure out how to formulate my question. So, so I beg your, your, uh, indulgence. How big a moment do you think that historically is in terms of the Overton window shifting in public consciousness? Because, you know, these women are, these women are using media as you're describing and in order to, you know, make, make their plays to try to make these gains and they get what to us nowadays is and I'm sure to them in the moment is is you know kind of an insulting amount of of you know participation that they're allowed to have in the process but like you said based on on what basically the

worldwide attitude was toward women's involvement in politics how important was this moment in shifting public perception of that do you think was was this a really big aha moment or was this like one small step forward like what how how big a leap was this to to people who weren't in the movement you know it's interesting um you know i mean first of all, you know, these women were making headlines sometimes in newspapers, you know, not always front page headlines, but so for newspaper readers who were paying attention, they would have known at least something of what was going on here. Most of the world was still illiterate.

You know, I want to be careful about what we say about, you know, about this as a global moment. But I think on the one hand for women and men who were. paying attention to this and seeing women acting on the biggest diplomatic stage in the world at the time, it was part of reimagining what that space might look like with women as a part of it. But the other way of answering your question, Ed, is that one of, I'd say, the two biggest breakthroughs that women did make actual tangible results of all this lobbying work they did was they convinced the members of the League of Nation Commission to include an article in the

covenant of the League of Nations. So that was essentially the founding constitution of the first world government that after World War II would become the United Nations. Article 7 of that covenant says that all positions in the League of Nations right up to the Secretary of the League itself would be open to men and women on an equal basis. And that doesn't mean that women flooded in and it was this egalitarian institution in the 1920s and 30s, but you did begin to have women serve in both policy and representative positions. And I would say that that was really important for a couple of reasons. I mean, it was interesting American suffragists back at home who were busy pushing for the 19th Amendment when that document was drawn up, you know, they said to

American newspaper reporters, wow, you know, if internationally, you know, we can recognize that women have real policy expertise that needs to be included. That says something here at home as well. And so, you know, that's part of the pressure for beginning to reimagine domestic politics. But the other thing that really came out of this is women understanding that they could now begin to work this growing international arena, standing governments, international labor organization, that they could use international treaties in order to push reform that their governments at home were dragging their feet on and kind of put international pressure on them. And, you know, some of the things that happened in the 20s and 30s after the period my book talks about is that Latin American women became hugely politicized and very, very active. And they used a lot of Pan American meetings in order to press for kind of hemispheric treaties that pushed an equal rights agenda in South America, Central America, North America all at the same time. So, you know, did it change the world overnight? No.

Did it begin to influence how people imagined international and political spaces? Yes. Did it open up a new universe of lobbying and influence making and policymaking to female expertise? It did that too. Okay. Thank you. And it's often a generation later after the first one out of the gate, you get a generation later, and another World War later, you get a lot more women involved in the decolonization

efforts worldwide. Although some of the women, we've really focused so far talking about the Western women in my book, but some of the women whom I discuss, particularly Egyptian women and also pan-women who consider themselves pan-Africanus, for them decolonization. and racial justice and women's rights and all of that was part of a package of democratizing global society. Most of my questions and stuff are coming in terms of chronology. So there are the questions about that.

So I'm struck by your inclusion. of Mussolini's friendliness toward women's suffrage in 1923. And then he did away with all votes three years later. It totally reminds me of Romulus with the Sabine women where he goes up to him. He's like, whoa, whoa, we'll let you be citizens of Rome and you'll have citizenship for you and your children. And they're like, okay, cool, what does that entail? And he's like, don't worry about it.

We're just going to, you know, we're going to do this whole thing. And then once they agreed, he has. had no clear definition of what citizenship for women meant. So yes, they had citizenship, but and so it just, it felt very, not quite bait and switch, but more like, oh, no, no, I'll give you these things. You'll have them just as much as everyone else, yank. And especially with when you mentioned the Italian delegates who were very friendly to, to these ideas at first. You know, There was an interview that I read from, oh, God, I forgot her name. I think it's only four letters long.

It's like Lohe or something like that. An American journalist who interviewed Mussolini, and she talked about this masculinity and the cheekiness of him and how he was able to, it was a different time, Ed. You got to remember, most people were starving, so having a man looking like him might have been attractive. But also there's just, you know, magnetic personalities. Well, and the puffing of the chest and all these things. Yeah. And just the freneticism, the odd charisma that some people sometimes have, right? Yeah.

And she talked about it about how at the end of the interview, she felt like she recognized that she had kind of been played in that, you know, she's like, I was charmed by him and nothing he said was charming. And it just was a really. Oh. And if only more people had. So Mussolini comes up in the very end of my book where I kind of look, jump ahead to 1923 to kind of see what has been accomplished, where some of these women that we meet over the course of the book have ended up.

And the big, the biggest international women's organization, the International Women's Suffrage Association, meets in Italy and welcomes Mussolini as a speaker at their conference. But it's early, it's not early, but it's early enough still in the fascist movement in Italy that it is kind of putting on different faces in front of different audiences. And it's that it's that modernism that the Italian fascist sought to embody that for a while looked as though embracing something, not like women's equality to be sure, but women's suffrage possibly. And I'm not sure that it was that Mussolini was proposing this because he already knew that democracy itself was going the wayside or just was kind of still throwing ideas out to see what was going to stick. No one's quite sure of how serious Mussolini was when he threw out occasionally teased the idea that women's voting might be a possibility, but it mattered none at all so shortly. I loved the story of Terrell and her passport because this was this there's this very narrow band of time where America prior to World War II where the United States enforced passports because it's a very narrow band of like prior to prior to this period of time nobody cared

and then then we really cared and then we stopped caring until World War II and then we started carrying, you know, canonically. I really like that, especially in light of what we're seeing right now in terms of travel. I was hoping that you could just kind of give Ed the, I don't want to say Cliff's Notes version because I don't want to minimize it. But the issues that Terrell specific, is it Terrell or Terrell? Terrell. Okay. The issue specifically that Terrell had getting her passport and how it came down to. to like the 11th hour. Sure, yeah.

So Mary Church Terrell just as a little way of background was a resident of Washington, D.C. She was an African-American woman, a civil rights activist already, and kind of an early promutation. She was a member of the NAACP, for example, but she was also a very prominent spokesperson in favor women's suffrage in the United States. And so when the group that eventually become the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom was forming its delegation of women to take over to Zurich to hold a conference and try and influence the peace terms. They invited her to be a part of it. And initially, the government, the United States State Department had said that they would authorize, I forget. I'm going to misquote my own book,

but initially some 20-some women they were going to give permission. And then they started getting nervous about what these women were going to be up to. And then they brought it down to 10 women and who was going to make the list. And so by the time Mary Church Terrell knew that she was invited, that it looked like the State Department was going to authorize the travel. All of these women had just a matter of days to get the passports approved and in their hands. And so it was a real scramble. And I think it was Ed who alluded earlier at the same, or maybe it was Damien. At the same time, they were packing their bags trying to figure out, you know, what do I need to wear on a cross-country voyage on a ship that's been stripped of all of its heating elements because, you know, it's been

move so that more weaponry can fit in there during the war. And so lots of practical decisions going on. And to top it all off, in 1919, she needed our husband's permission to get this passport as well. So she needed to get her husband, the judge, to come with her, to the, I don't actually know what office they needed to go to. And so this passport of Mary Church Terrell's is sitting in her archives in the Library of Congress.

And I talk about the photograph, her passport picture, because Mary Church Terrell, she was in the public eye most of her life right up through, you know, protesting the segregation of dime store counters, you know, in the 1950s. So she was always very, very careful on how she presented herself publicly because she was never seen just as a human being. She was always cast as a representative of the race to use the terminology of the time. And that meant, you know, an aura of respectability that went above and beyond what most people were capable of even creating. But in this passport picture, she's got hairs flying off in all directions.

Her, you can almost see a little bit of sweat on her upper lip. Her, you know, things are a little bit askew. You can see the real woman who, was moving heaven and earth in order to get the paperwork together, get her suitcases pack, get her mother lined up to take care of her children. Ed, you opened up talking about your kids, right? Yeah. And getting on the ship to head across to Europe to try and make a stamp on what was going on there. Yeah. She also, she, she was like big in education. Like, I think she was the first president of the D.C. school board, or was she super-in-

I don't know she was the first president. She was the first black woman to serve on the school board in Washington, D.C. That's what it was. Yeah. And, yeah, it was very, she taught colleges. Yeah, she was, she was all over the place teaching. And, yeah, I mean, she was so active. You said she was a member of the N.

She was actually one of the charter members. right um and if i recall correctly it if it hadn't been for jane adams it's possible that she might not have that terell might not have had access to the w i lfpf the women's international league for peace and freedom yeah she had she had met jane adams earlier and um jane adams was one of the people who most insisted that she didn't want it um on the one hand she didn't want an all white delegation um coming from the united states on the other hand, she did have a great deal of respect for Mary Church Terrell in particular. And so those two things made her very determined that she would have an opportunity to join this delegation.

And she was the only female delegate of color at this conference in Zurich, Switzerland. And when she was given the microphone, she specifically pressed women to call for the need for racial justice as part of a program of a women's peace organization going forward. I mean, it was kind of a takedown of the League of Nations. She's like, unless you are willing to do this, you are no League of Nations. Like, I'm Damien phrasing quite a bit here. And didn't it lead to her getting reprimanded by, it wasn't, it was a woman named Bulch?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Emily Green Balch was also a member of the, American delegation. She would later go on to be a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, as was Jane Adams as well. So very important women in pacifist circles. But when Mary Church, Terrell gave her speech before the, you know, thousand or so delegates and journalists and others who'd come to hear the plenary talk of this peace conference, she talked about things like the fact that

African-American men had spilled their blood in the trenches of Europe and also the importance of the rights that they gained through the Civil War. And so for somebody like Emily Green Balch, who considered herself much more of an absolutist pacifist, the fact that Mary Church Terrell was praising the efforts of men in uniform, not that anyone wanted to degrade soldiers, but to her, this felt like praising militarism in a pacifist conference. And the women, those two women clashed swords, not to use a not very pacifist metaphor. Then and they would at times later on as well. What was Terrell's response to that?

Did she have one or did she let that fire die down on its own? As far as I know publicly, she let it die down on its own. but in some of her private letters to friends, she really complained about having been slapped down and being really upset at the moment. Gotcha. Okay, so this is a question for my own indulgence. Can you please explain how Germans went from being Huns

to being white again after the war? Because they were represented, and Ed has covered this quite a bit when he talks about orcs and when he talked about Tolkien as well. How'd they go from being Huns to being white again? So, I mean, first of all, this terminology of the Germans as the Huns was part of Western propaganda during World War I. So the Entente powers, France, Britain, the United States, Russia, all really representing Germans, not just as the enemy combatant, but somehow culturally beyond the pale. And there was a lot of emphasis on atrocities committed against civilians in occupied

Belgium and in occupied France, some of which were very real and horrific, a lot of which were made up or embellished. But, you know, I'm sure you both have seen some of the World War I posters where Germans look more like monsters than they do humans. So the question is how how do you, you know, talk again, or how do you make peace, or how do you again bring into the fold of civilization, these people that you've demonized as monsters? And first of all, I'll say that not all women, let alone all people, were ready to do that in 1919. The women who met in Paris, whom we were talking about earlier, the Inter-Allied Women's Conference, was only among allies. the former enemies were not represented. They could not have gotten passports to Paris at that point in time in any case. But these women, many of whom, one of them, the Belgian delegate had lived

under German occupation during the war. The French leader who put this all in motion, one of her sons was killed in the trenches. And they were nowhere near ready to make that transition so soon after the war. The peace women, Jane Adams, and the, women who came to Zurich deliberately to say we cannot make a legitimate and lasting peace without talking without bringing everyone to the table they absolutely did invite German women and Austrian women and the way that they became human again after being Huns is that they met face to face okay and so they stopped being an abstraction one of the one of the the things that Jane Adams talks about in her memoirs and some of the other American and other delegates from the West in their letters was meeting up with this Austrian delegate, Leopolding Kolka was her name.

So Austria, Hungary, along with Germany, was the enemy during World War I. And when they had seen her during this meeting, we haven't talked about, but did take place among women during the war itself when she had looked healthy. and vibrant. And now they met her and were talking to her while there was a food embargo on on Central Europe until the terms of the treaty were hammered out. And she was emaciated. She was frail. Her voice was frail. And they were so horrified at seeing literally the physical effects of the war on this women. It made Jane Adams give up her comfortable room at a hotel and take a less desirable one. She felt, how can I be living in the lap of luxury? while my friend here is starving.

And so, you know, it still took a tremendous amount of will for Germans and French and English and Austrians to come together. They did not talk about responsibility for causing the war. That was taken off the table. That was never discussed. It was a question of how do we move forward from here and what is it going to take? And so they called immediately for lifting this food embargo while the negotiations were going on. And then these women became the first international organization anywhere in the world to condemn the Versailles Treaty. They were meeting just as the terms were being publicized for the first time.

And they condemned it as a vindictive peace and said it's only going to lead to future war. Boy, were they wrong. History, history proved them white. Right. I'm afraid to say. So, yeah, so they were able to do it, but not all women were able or willing to do it in that moment in time. Now we get to my favorite chapter of the book, which is the marching in Cairo, not just because you used a pun, but that certainly tipped it over the scales. But is it Huda or Huda? kind of in between

Hadasherawi Okay Hadasherawi God dang she was amazing first question actually do you think

that had Hadeshahari not existed what another woman would have stepped to the fore or was she singular in her vitality to the effort

in Egypt Hoda Shari was not alone in the pre-World War I and during World War I in her level of kind of political sophistication and her determination to play a part in her own nation's liberation from the protectorate that had been imposed by Britain during World War I. That's not to say that there were a million and one Hoda Sharaouis out there as well,

but there were other women also playing an important role in the anti-colonial movement in Egypt and soon thereafter in founding a feminist movement in Egypt. But that said, you know, there are figures in history that change history just by their presence. And Hedashirawi kind of had the full package. She had the intelligence. She had the determination. She had the money and the connections. She was from an extremely wealthy family in Cairo.

But she also had freedom because she, like many women, was married to a much older husband who passed away. And, you know, that liberated her then to have a kind of freedom that upper class women largely did not have in Egypt at the time. And she did play a pretty best. badass role in 19. She did. Do you think because, you know, so it sounds like, you know, column A, column B here, do you think, because I'm thinking of the men who got exiled to Malta, I'm thinking like that structural, almost a structural empowering of women in Egypt, probably accelerated their capability or like activated the extra suite of skills, you know.

know because okay now we have to do this you know and it's it's that necessary yeah i mean so just to fill in the history for anyone who's listening egypt was a protected had been more or less colonized by britain before world war one became a full protectorate uh britain during the war and when when britain did that they kind of said you know this is needed for the time being but when the war's over, we'll be ready to begin to, you know, transition Egypt eventually towards a sovereign state. And so as soon as the war ended, there was a nationalist movement known as the waft that began knocking on the doors of the Egyptian, I'm sorry, the British viceroy and those who were in charge and said, okay, we're here to negotiate and begin talking about what this

process is going to look like and Britain said no actually we're not interested in that conversation and when they kept knocking on those doors some of the leaders of that movement were in fact forcibly deported to Malta like Damien said and so both the wives of some of those men who were deported or wives of other men who were high up in the waft their husbands began sharing plans and sharing documents and all kinds of things because they said if we're all gone, if we're removed, if we can't speak, somebody else has to be able to step in. And that doesn't mean that women took over. But I think that you're right, Damien, that both in terms of bringing women equally into this anti-colonial movement

at the, you know, out of necessity, and also helping women to imagine themselves as people capable of running meetings or marching in the street. Especially the street tactics that I remember the husband's sharing with their wives and people starting to share like, okay, when this happens, this will happen, then you do this, you know, that kind of street level strategy. Yeah, although I should be specific and say that the women's marches through Central Cairo in March of 1919 when this protest that turned into a revolution, broke out. Many of the husbands told their wives they couldn't go and the women went anyway. So this wasn't always a matter of husbands and wives on the same page, you know, kind of moving forward hand in hand. There were women who were insisting on acting even when they knew it might anger their husbands because they were so committed to the cause. Yeah. So just as a question of

context there when we're talking about the group of people who were at the core of this anti-colonial

independence movement in Egypt were they culturally largely westernized I mean based on the lens

for context for you know modern listeners you know compared to what the culture and identity of folks in Egypt today looks like

would they like they this is a time before Islamism if I'm remembering my timeline right yeah so so in many ways were they more their their their ideals

surrounding decolonizing themselves were more secularized? Secularized? Well, secularized and... Because remember, they had been a, I don't know the right word, I'm going to say a colony of the Ottoman Empire prior to the British.

That's true. Like, it's not like Egypt existed and then the British showed up. It was they took it from the Ottomans who had held it for, oh God, I mean, that's your period of time teaching, right? Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't mean they lost their Egyptian identity either.

Yeah. And their version of religiosity and what have you. So what you're talking about is like a secularization, not necessarily Westernization. And she met with Ataturk at one point, if I recall. That guy was a pretty secular guy. Oh, immensely. Yeah, that was later. So I actually think it's pretty important to answer your question, Ed,

because there's an ongoing and very destructive kind of line of arguments, not just in Egypt, but throughout a lot of the Muslim world, that feminism or ideas about women's rights were a Western import, and that not just Egyptian women, but other women in the Middle East only began to embrace ideas like that because of contact from the West, and that, that this was, you know, somehow the colonizers' influence on women that led them to engage whether it was in, you know, insisting on a role within anti-colonial movements or particularly in insisting on women's rights movements. And that's just fundamentally not the case as, you know, any kind of close look at these women and at the society looks like a lot of the kind of

internal critique about patriarchy and about laws on marriage, on education, on all kinds of things, how they influence women came from within Egyptian society. They weren't necessarily Muslim per se. There was a large Christian minority in Egypt, too, and among some of the early writers in women's magazines and periodicals in the years leading up to World War I, some of them were Christian as well. But for women like Hoda Sharawe, they were arguing for women's rights from within a Muslim framework and did a lot of research themselves about what early Islam looked like and had pretty strong arguments arguing from within religious texts about Muhammad's own ideas about equality

that they felt like had been perverted culturally over the years and had very little to do with religion. So, I mean, the arguments that, you know, are featured in my book are not even about women's rights so much as they are about anti-colonialism and about national sovereignty. but the assumptions that women had a role to play in this movement and did play and, you know, kind of seized that, and their disappointment, women's disappointment, when at least partial independence finally was extracted from the British to have their own male counterparts tell them to go home and to ignore the fundamental assumption that they were claiming, and sovereignty for all Egyptian people, those arguments were coming up from within their own culture. And, you know, that's not to say they weren't somewhat exposed through the press or even some personal relations with some women from the West. But that wasn't the impetus. That was,

you know, part of the kind of international fruition of ideas at the time. Okay. This is a bit of a silly question. But in 22, Howard Carter, discovered and, well, robbed Tutankham's Tomb. Looted. Yeah, looted. The ensuing Egyptomania that came. Did that take any of the focus away in the press or in the international consciousness from the efforts that Sharaoui was making and the women's movement specifically in Cairo?

I don't think so. I don't think that the, you know, so Shari essentially went on and founded the Egyptian feminist union of a couple years, right around the same time period, just a little bit after. And it became an extremely important movement within Egyptian society and within the broader Arab world, but it wasn't capturing huge headlines internationally. Hoda Sharaway did travel. She traveled to the United States.

She traveled to France. She would, you know, stand up side by side with American feminists and French feminists. And so it's not as though she had no presence, but I can assure you that King, the opening of King Tut's tomb was capturing headlines in a way that Hoda Sharawe and feminists in Egypt could only dream of. Sure, sure. It just, it felt like, like, reading, reading all the things she's doing, I, I'm just, I'm just seeing the like the picture and picture display in my head of like the countdown to

Carter and just being like oh the fetishization's coming and then anything Egypt becomes you know vaudeville songs and stuff like that um how much did she expect the liberation of Egypt from British protection like how much did she actually expect it to happen 100% awesome and how much did she expect women to be

denied the vote in a newly minted liberal democracy I mean she was furious she was furious I mean even before the question of

who was going to get full political rights in a new constitution she was already furious when so the waft was the name of the nationalist

movement that was organizing this anti-colonial revolution. And women formed a waft women's committee that the men were very, very happy to rely on when it came to things like organizing boycotts of British goods and carrying petitions into a city in their baskets because they wouldn't be searched the way men would be searched. So in many respects, they seem to be embracing women as if not equals, you know, if not equals, you know, strong and important partners in this movement. Right. And but again, before independence was even one, the male member, male leaders of the waft, you know, return from Malta, returned from Paris, organizing in Egypt as they began consulting with what they considered important groups about what, what are going to be our

bottom line demands with the British. They didn't. invite the waft, I'm sorry, the women's waft committee to issue their opinions. And she wrote a letter to Saad Zagul, the head of this movement that just tore his head off. She's like how, she said, not only are you insulting us, she said, but look at the message you're giving to the world. You're telling the world that you want to found an Egyptian democracy and you're telling us already that we don't matter. And so, you know, I don't know her secret heart of hearts. I don't know. Sure. But it's pretty clear how piss she was. Right. But she, but yeah, no, these women who participated, you know, and the ones that I have the most access to were the most

elite among them, but there were working class women who protested on the streets, some who lost their lives in these protests. And they did so expecting a new age of sovereignty, not just for their nation, but individual sovereignty as well. Ed, it looks like you got a question going. Just a reflection that there must have been some very, very awkward households. When those guys got back from Malta and it was like, yes, we're home. We're, yeah, yay. And they come home and then, you know, their wives find out, oh, so nothing for us, huh?

Yeah. Just we've been, we've been out here like everything you just listed. Like, you know, do you know how many baskets of pamphlets? I carried under under the nose of red coats like well and there there were so many like there's so many pictures of women at this time holding up the flag of the revolution and like being very like you said if not considered equal partners by the men in the movement being a vital backbone to the movement and then for that to just not not be given is. Yeah, but it's a pretty familiar story in world history, I have to say. It is, it is not in any way unique to Egypt. Like, no, I'm reminded of Anne Moody's coming of age in Mississippi, specifically, about how all the civil rights workers who are doing very good work expected the women to stay up late and do the cooking and do all this. right and and stuff like that so it just yeah um i want to pivot to one of my favorite uh people to

beat up on in in history and that's henry ford um i was expecting Winston Churchill but okay no uh i know that Adams and Ford both went across the ocean in 1915 to pursue peace now Ford did it because he said that the Jews were behind all of it I don't think that was Adams' take. And Rosica Schwimmer had contact with both of them. And I know that Adams was at a luncheon that Ford had hosted at the Biltmore Hotel. And Adams objected to his plan of bringing peace as being too flamboyant, right? And then she got sick right.

No, then he got sick right before he went. Was his anti-Semitism a turnoff for her, or was that not on her register because it was just kind of in the soup that everybody swam in? Yeah, I don't know if I can answer the question. So Rizika Schwimmer was the women you alluded to. She was a Hungarian pacifist who was in the United States when World War I broke out and went on tour with another British suffragist to try and convince. Vince Woodrow Wilson to intervene immediately and bring these people to the table before things spun out of control. Right.

And then she went on and was involved along with Jane Adams in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And so you're right that both Jane Adams and Henry Ford were part of this broader group of pacifists trying different angles as early as 1915 to, you know, to try and help the war. But your specific question had to do with Ford's anti-Semitism. And I don't know Jane Adams was a prolific writer. I don't know her writing well enough to know if she commented on that. I mean, she had a lot of, you know, female Jewish collaborators and friends in the movement. But, you know, a lot of people were willing to overlook anti-Semitism when it was convenient.

So I'm not entirely sure I can answer that question. Did his, because reading about Ford's efforts for other podcasts, I did a history of square dancing, and so Ford figured in very heavily there. But Ed's just regretting the four episodes of it. Having flashbacks is what's going on, yeah. But his efforts toward peace were roundly mocked. like not necessarily to his face because of how rich he was but um a lot of people were like what is he doing this is ridiculous this is this is stupid um did his efforts suck any air out of the room for jane adams's efforts did was there splash damage at at his abortive attempt i'm not

sure i mean so he had this peace ship that went over to europe and they were going to Norway and Sweden, I think. Right. And force everyone to the table and not let them, you know, out of the room until they'd negotiated and stuff. And then never got any real traction. And he kind of back, like you said, he kind of backed out before it really got started. And your right was somewhat ridiculed in the press. At the same time, Jane Adams headed across the ocean at the invitation of a Dutch suffragist by the name of Aletta Jacobs, the first female. doctor in the Netherlands, even before Margaret Sanger, a real promoter of contraception for women at a time when it was illegal and an abomination. So anyway, Aletta Jacobs had invited women,

again, from both sides of enemy lines to come together in the Netherlands, which was neutral, while the world was at war. And then the American women who crossed the ocean really took their lives in their hands. That was a scary, a very scary time to agree to something like that. And the United States wasn't in the war yet. We were neutral. And there was some sympathy for the efforts that the women engaged in at the time. They, in turn, after their meeting, managed to get one-on-one meetings with the heads of state of all the major powers involved. on both sides of the war, and essentially got, you know, they were trying to say, tell us, you know, what is it that would take you to come to the table?

Like what, give us a starting point so that people know that we're not just shooting at each other, you know, what would take to begin to launch negotiations. And when they returned to the United States, they had an audience with Woodrow Wilson. They presented the ideas that had been adopted at this conference at the Hague, in the Netherlands. And Wilson said, he's like, I'm going to study these. And actually, when he met with Jane Adams again at the end of the war, he showed her those pieces of paper that were all crumpled at the edges and had sweat marks on them.

And he said, look, I've really been studying these. And a lot of people pointed out that some of those 14 points in his famous 14 points very closely echo what the women had presented to him. So in 1915, Jane Adams, you know, not everyone took her seriously, but because the United States was still neutral, there was some support and validity for this effort they were engaged in. The problem was for Jane Adams was after America entered the war in 1917, Jane Adams was still speaking out for an immediate negotiated peace and helped or did help, well, was one of the prime movers behind. creating a women's peace party in the United States. And then suddenly the press completely turned against her. She was in a busybody.

Teddy Roosevelt, who had previously asked her to be the one to actually formally nominate him for president, turned around and said she's just a prattling idiot. And she had very lonely time here in the United States after the United States entered the war. Yeah. I noted that Belgium was like really hostile to women taking part in the Zurich conference. Like Belgium was especially hostile. Was there a particular aspect? I mean, they were in many ways like the the kicked orphan of the war.

So is that what's going on there? Like how dare you go and break bread with the people that victimized us? There's three eaps. You know, there's there's so much that happens. to Belgium during this war, was that why they were so hostile to women going to the Zurich conference? Yeah. That was the meeting of enemies, right?

That was the one where they met with German and Austrian women. The Belgians? The Belgians being hostile to the Zurich conference. Right, yeah. I mean, they were hostile to that conference at the Hague in 1915, and they were hostile to the Zurich conference that brought pacifist women together. in 1919. And yeah, it just 100% had to do. They experienced the war as an invasion, which it was as Germany refusing to recognize their neutral status. And they lived under

great hardship over the years of occupation. I, you know, I, you know, with a century of distance, have extraordinary respect for the women who were able to come together. across enemy lines so very shortly after the war. I mean, the only other organization was able to do that so soon after the war were radical socialists who had rejected national borders to begin with. Everybody else, scientists, you know, everybody needed more time. Even the Red Cross was still kind of chip. Yeah. Just and so, so yeah. Got it on that one. And it was inconceivable.

The French were pretty hostile to the idea, but there were a few women who got through and who were, you know, were as convinced that the blame game wasn't going to move anything forward, but for the Belgians, it just wasn't imaginable. Yeah, I mean, because, you know, France was a major belligerent in the war. So you've got some of the, well, we got some of it. We got our licks in, too. Whereas Belgium, it's not to say that they didn't fight courageously. They absolutely did.

But they absolutely were just completely invaded. Their fight was a very different fight. Right. They experienced real, you know, economic hardship. I mean, not quite outright starvation, but severe hunger. And, you know, men forcibly conscripted for labor and, you know, all kinds of things that were really real, not just hardships, but, you know, verging on atrocities and, you know, forgive and forget, yeah, that's easy for us to say when we haven't just experienced that

ourselves. Well, in a huge, in a huge portion of their countryside was literally physically just devastated. Like, physically their country was, was blasted into a moonscape. You know, I just, I'm still getting over, like, how badly do you? You have to fuck up for the Red Cross to be like, I don't know, man. Fuck you. Wow.

Yeah. And at the same time, Belgium, like, kind of how very dare you when you've got the Congo? There is a little. That was one of the interesting comments that Ida Gibbs Hunt made. So Ida Gibbs Hunt was the wife of the diplomat who had been stationed in Madagascar and who, had a lot of contact with African colonial soldiers fighting in World War I and so when there was all of this propaganda

around poor Belgium occupied Belgium, helpless Belgium and she kind of said yes that is true but have we forgotten what Belgium has been doing for decades now in Africa so maybe not not saying

we shouldn't be pitying Belgium now but saying this is why we need a broader global lens if we want to understand what justice is going to mean at the end of this war. I mean, it was a world war, but the Europeans made sure that they had center stage in the victim narrative, especially. But it's like, well, wait a minute, you've conscripted all of these colonial soldiers. I would just like to point out what it takes to get to that point, you know, and, you know, can we talk about that? No, we're not going to talk about that. Okay, keep waving the flag.

The Indian regiments would like a word. Right. Do you think of the Zurich resolutions had gained more purchase, Hitler would have had less fertile ground? The Zurich resolutions, yes. Not necessarily everything that women were proposing. Sure. But so, you know, one of the big, so again,

Zurich were the pacifist women. And so one of their points of. argument or complaint was the Versailles Treaty calls for disarming Germany, why isn't it calling for disarming everybody? They were strong proponents of global disarmament during the inner war period. And one of the statements they wanted was that the global community was committed to the idea that no mother should ever put their child to bed hungry. Right.

And, you know, so those were pretty socially radical ideas and would have taken it. They still are. Well, you know, it would have taken just a remarkably different mindset and a different set of institutions to even begin to implement. But that would have created a very, very different world than the world of, you know, of an imposed piece. that that you know initially was the cause of so much resentment that that fueled the early Nazi party and the deprivations that that came of that too you know it's interesting you say

they they would have had to come such a long way for that I'm Damien phrasing on that but at the same time Herbert Hoover is moving so much food um to get it to people who are hungry which made everybody really wonder what he was doing as president but like there there is a huge effort toward getting getting it so that no mother should have to send her kid to bed hungry like there's a huge effort toward that that's happening roughly around the same time or it's starting to gin up and so it's it seems like it's almost it's okay if we do it privately but if we do it governmentally it's just not tenable like there's this real you know i i feel like that's i feel like that's that's where the societal divide was is you know that's bleeding hard pinko stuff

hoover famous famous yeah yeah oh yeah well i mean obviously yeah but you know the way the way it gets phrased in things like absolute statements of no no mother should have to put her child to bed hungry, you know, for anybody who is, you know, terrified of an economic system that isn't, you know, based on, you know, constant universal growth. Right. And work or starve. Like, you know, or if you're coming from a place where, like, you know, there has to be some level of inequality in the system.

Right. Or the system just is going to fail. I think, I think, I mean, my own take on it is that. but Dr. Segal, what does that, does that hold water, do you think, or? I mean, these women were pretty, not just, I mean, obviously these ideas were radical, but a number of them were either social Democrats or communists and, you know, really allied themselves with more radical political positions, not all of them, but some of them did. And, but, you know, that was, that was part of, you know, what they imagined it was going to take to build world peace.

Oh, go ahead. Sorry. I'm trying to remember my high school world history and the economic, the particular economic house of cards that led to the depression happening. And I'm wondering, you know, based on what you're saying about the points of the Zurich conference, could the policies that led to the Depression have been avoided if the Zurich conference had been listened to more? Well, I can confess to you right now that even though I had four years of economics in college myself, that was my worst subject. So things like the stock market, but, you know, I mean, the stock market crash, it was rooted in idea of private enterprise and profit that is at least somewhat antithetical to the view of a kind of global distribution of resources that these women imagined. I mean, you know, this, they didn't put that forward as a detailed policy, you know, action piece. It was a global aspiration, but an economy built on that kind of aspiration wouldn't be built on speculation in the same way.

Well, a big part of what I was thinking of was a big part of the system at the time had, it was reliant very heavily on loans that had been given to nations that were having to pay reparations in the wake of the war. So that they could give reparations to the people who owed America money to fight against the ones who needed the reparations. Yeah. Yeah. You know, cyclical, like the kind of thing that finance bros are like, oh, no, we got a whole system figured out. We're just generating money on paper. It's brilliant. You know, and I'm wondering if there hadn't been, you know, if Zurich had been something that people had listened to more.

I get the sense that that could have been at least ameliorated. Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of reparations or of one side needing to cover the costs of this conflict was something that these women objected to. I mean, the German women who participated, who were extremely radical and not at all in the mainstream of their own culture. you know, they were careful to say, you know, before we start screaming and yelling too much about the mistreatment that we're getting here, maybe we should think about what it meant for Germany to have occupied these lands and have stolen the resources, you know, economic resources of, you know, France and Belgium and these other states. And, you know, the idea that any reparations were necessary, you know, nobody was kind of getting in. into those kinds of weeds. But that was part of why the women in Zurich said to begin with, you can't forge a lasting peace with only one side at the table. There needs to be at least some buy-in, if not outright consensus,

that the way that we're going to dig ourselves out of the whole of this conflict that we've been engaged in for so long is not going to destroy anybody either economically. but you know it didn't really economically destroy germany but psychologically it did and so that that um you know those types of issues would have looked very differently had this particular set of women had greater weight in defining the terms so i'm gonna uh end this episode with this question and then in the next episode we will pick back up uh because i'm i'm really looking forward uh to talking about Sue Mae Chang and her story. But so to end with the women in Europe, it really reads like the Allies took the Zurich

proposals as like an overreach and got really mad about it. Do you think that the lesson here is that men are too emotional and prone to overreacting when challenged and shouldn't be involved in statecraft? Are they just too hysterical to do this kind of work? I mean, one of my favorite quotes was from a British woman at the Zurich Congress after the fact, writing her memoirs later, looking back at the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty. And she kind of said, you know, if this was the peace that men were capable of making, you know, why in the world did we ever think that women should be excluded from this process, right? Like, if this was the best that they could do, then no, we had the wrong people at the table. Again, it's that whole like just vaguely waving around going like, this is why.

This is why you can't have nice things. Yeah. So, okay. Cool. Well, this is just the end of part one because we've, per the usual, so many, so many questions, so many wonderful answers. there's there's more um so uh ed um i'm not going to ask what you've gleaned because we're not done going through it yet uh but do you have anything that you would like to recommend for people to read or take in um a total departure from from what we've been talking about but i'm

going to very strongly recommend dan jones's uh history of uh the wars of the roses speaking of, you know, men in positions of power being overly emotional and tied to their own ego. Testerical is the term. Yes, testarical, yes. And I'm stealing that. And I'm going to find a way to use that in my classroom. Yeah. Which will probably get me a letter in my file at some point.

But whatever. Yeah. But Dan Jones writes a very compelling. very easy to read. It's not academic, but it's very well done, very well-written history of the conflict between, you know,

the two sides of the House of Plantagenet, that I think there is a little bit of relevance in the sense that, you know, the bitterness of this particular, conflict and the bitterness that was engendered by World War I both led to these situations where at the end of World War I we have a cycle that leads into World War II and the Wars of the Roses just would not fucking end or you know decade upon decade upon decade because each side was just left nursing their their grievances and their wounds

for so long and so anyway that's that's going to be my recommendation It's The Wars of the Roses by Dan Jones. It's a great book, Will Worth, picking it up and reading. How about you? I'm going to recommend Not So Quiet. It's actually a novel that I was first introduced to by Dr. Siegel, by Helen Zena Smith. It's essentially, it's a companion piece to All's Quiet on the Western Front. And it's, what do you call it, ambulance drivers, women ambulance drivers.

and talking about it's a very feminist take on the the just idiocy of the war and I don't mean like idiocy like zigfield follies I mean like the tragic idiocy the the absolute terrible bone stupid um senselessness that's the word I'm looking for of of the war and the like complacency of patriotism and it's just a real good critique on on on stuff like that. I'm actually going to make my daughter read it this summer. But, you know, because I'm a teacher dad, so I make the kids do reading. But I recommend everybody go out and get a copy of Not So Quiet

by Helen Zena Smith. So, and Dr. Siegel, what are you going to recommend to folks? Well, first of all, thank you for recommending Not So Quiet. That makes me happy that that novel stuck with you. Yeah.

I always love to send people to read primary sources and read people in their own words. We've talked a lot about Mary Church Terrell tonight, the African-American pacifist, feminist, civil rights activist. Her memoir is titled A Colored Woman in a White World. And it could have used a better editor, but she tells so many absolutely amazing stories that I think people would get a lot out of reading about her story, both for perspective on international events, but also domestic events that are pretty important to the world we live in today now. Cool.

Thank you. Very cool. All right. Let's see. Dr. Siegel, is there anywhere that you want to be found, are there things that you've published that you want to guide people toward or other interviews that you want people to go and listen to that you've been a part of, panels that have been videoed, stuff like that, anything if people want to find more of you besides just enrolling at sacramento state

university and taking history classes come and join me in the classroom yes i mean you can google my name and you'll find lots of different things out there um i'm particularly proud of a piece that i wrote for the new york times in 2019 uh that looks at the activity of labor feminists in this time period and the role that women played in developing paid maternity leave, international women did, and developing paid maternity leave. So I don't know if you'd hit a paywall, but that would be a particular short but meaningful article that I would send people to look at. Wonderful.

Very cool. And Ed, where can we be found? We collectively can be found on the Apple podcast app, on the Amazon podcast app. It took me a moment to remember that one. And on Spotify, we can also, of course, be found at our website at wauwobobabwobah.gehistreetime.com.

Wherever you have found us, please take a moment to give us the five-star review that you know our guests deserve. And also make sure to hit the subscribe button so you can get more of this kind of awesomeness. And how about you, sir? Where can you be found? Well, I mean, I opened with talking about my capital punishment show.

I should close with talking about it. You probably missed the August 1st show. So I'm going to say go to the September 5th and the October 3rd and the November 7th show for capital punishment in Sacramento, California, at the Sacramento Comedy Spot. If you go to saccommodyspot.com, you will find the calendar there going by the tickets. It's just 15 bucks. And we have really cool merch.

like really, really awesome merch. So you should bring another $20 for a shirt or buy an enamel pin. Or I put my children to work making buttons if you want something bigger and made with child labor. That's cool. We've even got stickers for you. So all kinds of good stuff. But more importantly, oh my God, if you want to hear people punning about types of sandwiches and what kinds of clothing they wear during sex, look no further. and capital punishment.

So 9 p.m. 1st Friday of every month, September 5th, October 3rd, November 7th. So cool. Well, Dr. Siegel, thank you so much for joining us. And we're going to have you back for the next episode. And at the end of that, I promise. I will actually plug your book.

But everybody go by a piece on our terms by Mona Siegel. But thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. For a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.