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Dear friends and comrades, we celebrate today the founding of the Women's Organization for Peace and Liberty in the year 1915. Each of us, according to age and memory, will wish to recall some part we have played with colleagues in this campaign to pursue the aims for which our group was founded. When the war broke out in 1914, I was playing hockey on the sands of Newquay

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in Cornwall at the end of my first year at Girton College, Cambridge, where I was studying French and German language and literature. I had recently spent a year in Germany and several holidays in some months in France to improve my knowledge. I had no reason for hating Germany. In fact, I had enjoyed my stay among the German people and liked them. We returned to Sutton in Surrey,

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where our family lived. My father, my then distinguished civil servant, used to go to London each day. From then on, when not sent abroad, he frequently slept at his office. I was not back at Girton till October. When Belgium became quickly overrun, I began to wonder if I ought not to return but volunteer for some war work instead. Belgian refugees were flooding in.

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Some women in London had started a women's emergency corps to help take care of them. I went down to Tilbury and had my first sight of what war means to women and children. The worried old faces, the little hands clinging on, the bundles of household goods hastily tied up in sheets and bed covers. Our group helped to install the refugees in rooms found for them in London,

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and we received official thanks from the Westminster Council. Like most young people, I believed in my country but was bewildered by a war for which I had little enthusiasm. So, in the autumn, I went back to Cambridge, where soon the issue of conscientious objection began to disturb us at our studies. In 1915, the Ford peaceship came over from the United States,

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carrying with it some feminist American women, defenders of peace, who held a meeting at the Hague in an attempt to stop the war. Those of us in England who had supported the cause of the suffragettes admired this gesture from our American colleagues. I did not meet any of those fine women who became famous and who were, in effect, the founders of Women's International League for Peace

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and Freedom. At the time, their effect did not influence me. I was immersed in my studies, and I did not think it would help to stop the war. But at some time later, I joined the organization. There was one young American woman journalist on the Ford ship who went back to her own country, inspired for life by that adventure. She was then Lella Secor, and I knew her much later as Mrs.

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Sergeant Florence, wife of Philip, who was professor of economics at Cambridge and later Birmingham, both valiant supporters of left-wing and feminist causes. The Cambridge conscientious objection to war became centered on Bertrand Russell, his dismissal from Trinity College and prosecution for subversive writing and agitation. Students, men and women, saw him as a heroic

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figure. My closest friend at Girton, Dot Rinch, was studying under him for the mathematics tripos. Most of the men of my generation whom I met were either unfit for military service or conscientious objectors. The one man to whom all graduates of Cambridge owe an unpaid debt is C. K. Ogden. He stood his ground throughout the war, editing the Cambridge magazine in which he continued to print

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extracts from the foreign press. A pure intellectual, he could not conceive of any persons being so utterly foolish as to take part in the pastime of war. Into the bargain he founded the heretics, at which all might freely speak their minds on politics and religion at a time when men were still obliged to attend religious services in the chapels of their colleges. For many undergraduates

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of that generation, the question as to whether to break with their traditional religious faith was as hard as deciding on whether they believed in the war. I owe very much to the years of my friendship with Ogden. In 1917, after taking my tripos, I had a grant for continuing my studies of eighteenth-century thought in France. Just then, America came into the war. My father was

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director of the Ministry of Munitions. On account of his knowledge concerning oil supplies, he was asked to go to America and urge the government to assist us about oil supplies on account of the rate at which the Germans were succeeding in sinking our tankers. Together with an old school friend of mine, I went with my father as a secretary because his civil servant assistant

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disliked the threat of the submarines. For this war work, Gerton gave me permission to interrupt my studies. I was twenty-three years old, but knew very little about America except the current legend that America was a land of opportunity and Americans were our dear cousins. In New York, at street corners, war enthusiasm was already apparent, enlisting recruits with martial music

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and chants of, over there, over there. In spite of our war mission, the thought of more men for cannon fodder distressed me. When then we applied to the American government for help, we were referred to the Petroleum Executive Committee. This, we learned, consisted of the powerful Standard Oil Company and other oil companies. Whilst they entertained my father and his two secretaries

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lavishly, no help was forthcoming. On the contrary, the President of Standard Oil happily reassured his fellow citizens that they had no need to economize in gasoline. My father, listened to with respect, felt that we were achieving nothing. I had many opportunities for seeing American business and industrial establishments, oil refineries for instance, in action. I made my observations of

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the enthusiasm of the people for enterprise, profit and industrial technology. These were not our dear cousins, it seemed to me, but a foreign nation with a purpose and ambition for their own future. It appeared to me to be true that capitalists controlled governments. Thus, overnight, I became both a socialist and a pacifist. I foresaw that America was likely to

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set out, as we had done, on the road to imperialism. But more than this, I realized something of the industrial system and the dominance of mechanism in human life. While I was at that time in the company of those who served the war in New York, Lella Secor, she then also came very near a nervous breakdown at the failure of her strenuous efforts to keep

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America out of it. I learned the whole story from the book of her letters given to me a few years ago by her husband Philip in Birmingham shortly before he died. He and I collaborated on a book about C. K. Ogden. After the war, when Girton gave me a fellowship, my studies took me to Paris. I really only became active for peace after my visit to the Soviet Union in 1920,

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and then it was not so much the peace movement as pleas for disarmament that moved me, and the special issue of the failure of the West to recognize the Soviet Union and the consequent Cold War. WILPF stands not only for peace, but for freedom and international understanding. Most of my time in the 1920s was taken up with women's freedom, birth control, divorce laws,

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sex relations, equal pay and opportunity, the Six-Point Group, the World League for Sex Reform. As regards international activity, I found myself isolated. I was not a communist, and I was strongly anti-Marx, but I could not tolerate the anti-Soviet attitude of almost all the so-called pacifists of the West. I paid a second visit to Russia in 1929,

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where I found allies who had watched our birth control campaign, and I secured the presence of two Russian delegates to our London Sixth Congress. The war with Hitler's Germany later ended that very hopeful attempt to begin dealing with the many and complex problems of sex. During the war, when I ended my school, I had the good fortune to work in the Ministry

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of Information from 1943 to 1950, mostly in Soviet relations division on the paper British ally. It started when Russia came into the war as a symbol of the alliance between our countries. In those years, I felt happy that I was contributing to bringing my country and the West into closer relationship with the Soviet Union, even though it had taken the war with Hitler to

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produce this effect. Then came Hiroshima with the bomb. When Labour, on coming to power in 1945, had an alliance with the United States, renewed the Cold War and insults to their courageous ally, I then turned to the Soviet peace offensive, begun when Russia, having in 1949 made its own bomb, did not threaten the West, but put forward a worldwide peace petition and a peace council

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open to all who decided to take part. Numerous World Peace Congresses sponsored by the World Peace Council were in the West vilified as Soviet propaganda, considered to be preparation for war. Members of the British Labour Party who attended such conferences or pursued friendship with communist countries were expelled from the Labour Party. British ally, placed under the direction

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of the Foreign Office, ceased to be what its first editor had called it an experiment in friendship and became an instrument of political warfare. In 1950, the Foreign Office closed it down. In 1951, now free of my obligations as a civil servant, I accepted an invitation to lead a delegation of 20 women, which included Nancy Silverman, wife of Sidney Silverman, Labour MP,

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on a visit to the Soviet Union. The story from then on of my sharing in women's efforts for peace, both national and international, is in the book about to be published. In 1955, Women's International Democratic Federation, which is sponsored by the Soviet Union, organized a Mothers' Congress in Lausanne, which attracted remarkable support. An International Committee

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of Mothers, worldwide and both sides of the Iron Curtain, was formed. Andrea Andrén, an eminent Swedish doctor, was the chairman and I was asked to be secretary. The committee met at Lausanne in 1956, but the anti-Soviet poison was at work. People became afraid to join us. But from that date, for six years, until 1962, Andrea and I struggled on, trying to bring together

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women's efforts for peace, both sides of the Iron Curtain. Our committee drafted a Declaration of Mothers, which, with some difficulty about visas, our delegates took to the United Nations. My work for the committee took me also to the United Nations and to East Berlin, China, India, the Soviet Union, to meetings in Geneva, while Andrea went to Japan, and both of us were at the

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meeting of the committee in 1958 in Sofia. The last act of that committee was the Women's Caravan of Peace, which, starting from Edinburgh and London, supported en route by our members, went through every country of Europe except Holland, and included an open air meeting in Gorky Park, Moscow. This is the only mission which, with support from both sides, has genuinely

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bridged the Cold War, accepting without question the rights of both sides of the divide to their own ideology and social system. Our efforts met with hostility and derision in the West. My book about the journey was not published, and our remarkable film was treated as propaganda. We had difficulty in getting it shown. Andrea, who, as a Swedish citizen, had valued her neutral

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position, wrote to me that since we could not get the true cooperation needed to reconcile both sides, she was resigning. I considered what I should do. The Soviet Women's Committee called a World Conference of Women in 1962 in Moscow. It was well attended from many countries. I went with a sizable group from Britain and took part in the deliberations about resolutions.

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Significantly, women from Germany, both East and West, were present, Moscow being, at that date, the only place where they could meet. Among many of the tricky and tragic matters, such as the Vietnam War, which we had to consider, came, unfortunately, the unhappy division at that date between Russia and China. I came home from that conference to face the usual

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misreporting, but I was able to get one letter at least into the Observer in an attempt to redress the balance. Then, convinced, like Andrea, that there was at present nothing more that we and our Committee could achieve, I went down to my home in Cornwall, where I was needed by my family. You are all familiar with the years of protest, the growth of the CND with the

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Aldermaston marches, the decline of CND and its recent resilience and expansion. In spite of the strength of protests against national governments, no real progress has been made in ending the Cold War between West and East. Andrea and I had resolutely refused to allow the Mothers' Committee to espouse ideologies or concern itself with anything but the demand of mothers for peace

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and the care of the world's children. As nuclear weapons became more deadly and the Cold War intensified, I came to see the mothers' defense of their children as fundamental in that global campaign for human survival. Suppressed or ignored, that voice has always been there. Our cry from the depths of the womb, the voice of Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted,

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or the proud call, until that I, Deborah, arose, that I arose a mother in Israel. And now, today, we ask, we who give life, demand an end to war, we say, women for life on earth, women will go it alone, because, as I heard from the lips of a Greenham common woman, men are so silly. Indeed, like children, men keep on arguing. My democracy is better than yours, they say, and you shan't come and play in my backyard. As mothers, our children

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have needed us to stop quarrels and see fair play, and for all their pride, grown men, whether brilliant or brutal, also need women, not only as wives, but as mothers. Just like a woman, I hear a man say, illogical and irrational, you speak from your emotions. What is wrong with emotions anyway? They are the source of everything within us, even of that intellect which men boast of and cultivate, while, pressured from their savage emotions, they utilise it in war.

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Everyone knows that it is time to stop this nonsense about weapons, to discard pomposity and begin to talk of conciliation, harmony and peace. Peoples, nations, races, sexes must begin to learn to give up the habits of provocation and quarrelling. How can we commit the folly of destroying our planet, just when we have only just begun to learn how to live on it like real people, human beings, with concern for the benefit of all? Thousands of problems to

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solve, mysteries to probe. The human psyche is there with all that it can offer, in imagination, invention, abstract world of thought, music, poetry, drama, and the living human body with its beauty of form and grace of movement, gifts of an evolution and the breath of life itself which do not yet begin to understand. Within life, too, lies the riddle of our commitment to sex, which we have not even yet learned how to manage. But sex, retrieved from the mire in which we have

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buried it, can be seen as an element vital to love and happiness and civilization. Can we, by taking thought, add one cubit to our stature? Not by thought alone, though it is by all that has been written and spoken down the ages that we have come so far. Even here, men must understand that something women have to say has been left out of everything in the world. To men and women at enmity with one another, I would say, have you forgotten that it is by coming together in love that you will rightly

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beget your children, thus creating our human race? I speak, then, for those children in our society the least cared for, the most neglected by their ambitious elders. Yet only in what our children are, or may become, lies the future of life on this earth.