Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is a non-profit non-governmental organization working "to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make known the causes of war and work for a permanent peace" and to unite women worldwide who oppose oppression and exploitation. WILPF has national sections in 37 countries.

The WILPF is headquartered in Geneva and maintains a United Nations office in New York City.

Organizational history

The International Women's Congress was attended by approximately 1,200 feminist pacifists from twelve countries, including Minna Cauer, Anita Augspurg, and Lida Gustava Heymann. WILPF developed out of the International Women's Congress against World War I that took place in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1915 and the formation of the International Women's Committee of Permanent Peace; the name WILPF was not chosen until 1919.

The first WILPF president, Jane Addams, had previously founded the Woman's Peace Party in the United States, in January 1915, this group later became the US section of WILPF. Along with Jane Addams, Marian Cripps and Margaret E. Dungan were also founding members. The British campaigner Maude Royden remained vice president of the international WILPF, and other British members included Kathleen Courtney, Isabella Ford, Margaret Hills, Catherine Marshall, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Ethel Snowdon, and Helen Swanwick.

As of 1920 the US section of WILPF was headquartered in New York City. Marian Cripps, Baroness Parmoor, who later served as president of its British branch. Richard J. Evans described the founders of WILPF as "a tiny band of courageous and principled women on the far-left fringes of bourgeois-liberal feminism".