Forward! Remembering Women Peace Crusaders: Launch Event
There will be a commemoration of the Women’s Peace Crusade on 23 July 2016:
http://womenslibrary.org.uk/event/forward-remembering-women-peace-crusaders-launch-event/.
You are warmly invited to take part.
15:00 Assemble at Peace Crusaders monument outside People’s Palace, Glasgow Green,
for short performance and guided walk to Glasgow Women’s Library
17:00 Exhibition launch with refreshments
18:00 Screening of film, MARCH
Amid these politically charged times, many parishes may have been marking the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916 and has been marked across the country. It was a battle in which many Scottish soldiers gave their lives. Also a century ago, on 23 July 1916, in the midst of a War with at that stage an entirely uncertain result, the Women’s Peace Crusade took place in Glasgow.
Helen Crawfurd, one of the leaders of the Women’s Peace Crusade, speaking in Birmingham, 1917, said: “No matter what you do, we mean to make the voice of women heard, and that this ghastly slaughter shall cease.”
Eunice Murray, writing shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914, wrote: “I wish we who are not responsible for safeguarding our country, could pray the world into peace, could will it into peace. If war comes it is because the world has gone mad.”
Maud Royden, an early campaigner for the ordination of women, was during the First World War also a strong advocate of peace. In 1916, she wrote a pamphlet entitled: The Great Adventure: The Way to Peace. In it, she said: “You cannot kill hatred and violence by violence and hatred. You cannot make men out of love with war by making more effective war.”
And, she went on: “Truth is more than victory. We cannot tell whether defeat or triumph is better for a nation, or whose success upon the battlefield is better for the world.”
