Continuous Mediation: the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Extract

Peace on earth—the passionate longing of mankind everywhere. Peace is a word which is on everyone’s lips, and the desire for it in everyone’s heart— statesman and layman alike. The achievement of total and universal disarmament, the biggest step on the road to peace, is, as President Kennedy said only last year, no longer a pipe-dream of a few idealists: it is a stark matter of whether mankind is to survive on this earth or not.

Women, by their very nature, have always had the privilege and responsibility of feeding and nurturing the human family—hers the joy of bringing children into the world and hers the main responsibility for them till they are of an age to fend for themselves. She has a unique opportunity of moulding these children into the kind of beings with the kind of outlook she desires. Her power for good or evil is enormous. It is therefore of the utmost importance that women should be fully alive to the problems of the world in which these children have to live. Nowadays in the complicated state in which the human family lives, each nation and indeed each individual so interdependent on other nations and individuals, relying as everyone does on at least some of the produce of other countries for their very existence, women have a very special duty to extend their sphere of influence and their activities from their own immediate family to the family of the whole world. These are at least some of the reasons why women have a special interest in the achievement of a true and lasting peace, more than ever necessary today when the effects of artificially induced radiation, e.g. by the explosion of atomic weapons, are exceedingly grave, not only to the living, but also to the unborn, maybe for generations to come.