Louise Weiss

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Overview

Louise Weiss born Arras, France January 26, 1893 (d. 1983). Journalist and dramatist; feminist; suffragist; politician. Promoted European unity; founded School of Peace, 1930; founded Institute of Polemology, 1945. Worked with League of Nations for post-WWI reconciliation; member of French Resistance, WWII; member of European Parliament, who later named their main building in her honor.

Quotations

"War is a catastrophe." (1914 Memories, Sandi Cooper "French Feminists", Peace & Change, Jan. 2011, p. 9; photo http://bit.ly/yro4Vx)

Rachel Weisz

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Overview

Rachel Weisz born London, England March 7, 1971. British actress. Supporter of World Food Program.

Quotations

“Every new mother wonders, 'what will I pass on to my child?’ Hunger is one inheritance no mother wants to give her child, yet millions of poor women have for generations. . . No child should inherit hunger.” (World Food Programme/Rachel Weisz; 2010 photo Wikipedia)

Ada Wells

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Overview

Ada Wells (née Pike) born Shepherd’s Green, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England April 29, 1863 (d. 1933). Pioneer New Zealand suffragist; peace advocate, spoke publicly against militarism, imperialism; opposed draft, aided conscientious objectors World War I.

Quotations

“War is organised murder.” (Oct. 1913, Voices Against War)

“She had been termed unpatriotic, and if to believe in the brotherhood of man was to be unpatriotic—well, then, she was unpatriotic.” (Lyttleton Times 1917, Voices Against War; 1918 photo Voices Against War.)

Rebecca West

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Overview

Rebecca West (née Cicely Isabel Fairfield) born London, England December 21, 1892 (d. 1983). Internationalist; author.

Quotations

"Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology."

"The whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything." (Marina Warner interview, 1981; photo wikicommons)

Ellen Wilkinson

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Overview

Ellen Wilkinson born Manchester, England October 8, 1891 (d. 1947). First female British cabinet minister, 1945; pacifist; Fabian Socialist; led march of unemployed, 1936; founding president of UNESCO, 1945.

Quotations

"Wars have got to be prevented. But prevention of war alone is not enough. We need the organisation of something positive—the positive creation of peace and the ways of peace. That is our task at this Conference." (as president of founding of UNESCO, Nov. 2, 1945; photo Spartacus)

Betty Williams

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Overview

Betty Williams born Belfast, Northern Ireland May 22, 1943. Founded Northern Irish Peace People with Mairead Corrigan, 1976; shared Nobel Peace Prize, 1976.

Quotations

"The only force which can break down those barriers is the force of love, the force of trust, soul-force. . . We are deeply, passionately dedicated to the cause of nonviolence, to the force of truth and love, to soul-force." (Nobel Acceptance Speech, 1977; photo Nobel)

Ethel Williams

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Overview

Ethel Williams born Cromer, Norfolk, England July 8, 1863 (d. 1948). British pediatrician; Socialist pacifist who opposed World War I, joining Union of Democratic Control; suffragist; delegate to WILPF congress Zurich 1919; supported postwar relief to former enemies.

Quotations

“We must find the path of cooperation of nations. . . We must use our great powers, our knowledge and our science for the social progress of mankind and not in senseless competiton which brings war.” (St. Louis, Lawrence World-Journal, May 16, 1924; photo reflectionsofnewcastle1914)

Sharon A. Williams

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Overview

Sharon A. Williams born Cardiff, Wales March 14, 1951. Professor of international law; judge. Served as Canadian member of Permanent Court of Arbitration, 1991-97; presided over Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY), 2001-03.

Quotations

“[T]he acts of torture committed by Milan Simić were barbaric and shocking.” (ICC v. Simic, Oct. 12, 2002; photo Int. Assn. Proced. Law; photo ICTY)

Shirley Williams

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Overview

Shirley Williams born London, England July 27, 1930. Daughter of pacifist Vera Brittain; co-founder internationalist Social Democratic Party 1981; Labour Minister of Education 1976-9: helped draft constitutions of South Africa, Russia, Ukraine as Harvard professor; leader in effort to reduce nuclear weapons.

Quotations

"It is only within such a multi-lateral framework that we can hope to negotiate international agreements covering arms control and disarmament and to grapple effectively with the poverty of the Third World." (Limehouse Declaration, Jan. 25, 1981; 1972 photo The Guardian)

Elizabeth Wilmshurst

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Overview

Elizabeth Wilmshurst born August 28, 1948. Professor of International Law; British negotiator of statute of International Criminal Court. Resigned from Foreign Office in protest of illegality of Iraq War, 2003.

Quotations

“I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution. . .
I cannot in conscience go along with advice. . . which asserts the legitimacy of military action without such a resolution, particularly since an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression.” (letter of resignation; photo BBC news)

Francesca Wilson

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Overview

Francesca Wilson born Newcastle-on-Tyne, England January 1, 1888 (d. 1981). Quaker relief worker; offered aid to Belgian children in England, 1914; France, 1916; Serbs in Corsica, 1917, and Tunisia, 1918; Serbia, 1919. Fed Austrian children, 1919; famine relief to Russia, 1922; children in Spanish Civil War, 1937-38; Spanish in France, 1939; Polish refugees in Hungary, 1940. Assisted UNRRA in postwar Germany.

Quotations

“How important every peasant and every starving child to the Sisters who nursed and fed then! Perhaps it is necessary to have this in war-time to redress the balance a little and to remind us that in the end delicate things outlast the coarse, that love is stronger than the waters that try to quench it and a child’s laughter is still heard when the roar of battle subsides.” (In the Margins of Chaos, 1945, p. 291; photo quakerstrongrooms.org)

Theodora Wilson Wilson

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Overview

Theodora Wilson Wilson born Kendal, Cumbria, England January 13, 1865 (d. 1941). English absolute pacifist; Quaker. Leader of war resisters. Author of 62 books, novels, and religious stories. Early member of Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); founding member of WILPF. Founder and editor of The New Crusader, which produced an “Affirmation Against War”, leading to the No More War Movement, 1921. Newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought described her 1916 antiwar novel The Last Weapon, A Vision as “the most powerful peace book yet published,” and was confiscated by government as subversive, 1917.

Quotations

“Does no one read history? Don’t they know that this war has been sown from other wars and that it will sow another?” (Those Strange Years, 1937)

Renate Winter

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Overview

Renate Winter born Vienna, Austria March 8, 1944. International lawyer and judge; expert on juvenile rights. International judge on UN Mission in Kosovo, 2000-02; judge to Appeals Chamber of UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, which established the crimes of recruiting child soldiers and forced marriages, 2002. President of Special Court, Sierra Leone, 2008-10.

Quotations

“My youngest [defendant] was so small, he couldn’t even carry a Kalashnikov.” (A Life Worth Living, Dec. 16)

“If women cannot lobby for better status in peacetime, we have no chance whatsoever of getting them better status during or after a war. If we cannot achieve that women are not viewed as objects but as subjects, then we have no chance to tell soldiers at war how to behave correctly.” (Vienna, April 6, 2006, building_peace_empowering_women; photo intlawgirls)

Jeanette Winterson

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Overview

Jeanette Winterson born Manchester, England August 27, 1959. Antiwar author, journalist, professor.

Quotations

“My view remains as it has always been; that war is a failure. There are no ‘just wars,’ and no ‘justified wars.’ Bush and Blair failed the Iraqi people and they have failed their own people.” (blog, Jan. 9, 2006; photo bookfans.net)

Gertrud Woker

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Overview

Gertrud Woker born Bern, Switzerland December 16, 1878 (d. 1968). Swiss biochemistry professor; opponent of chemical weapons; WILPF founder and benefactor.

Quotations

"There can scarcely be a greater contradiction than that between the far-reaching protection which the state guarantees its citizens in their civil rights and the brutality with which the same state exposes the same citizens to absolute annihilation whenever it follows in its relations with other states the robber and murder-instincts of wild tribes." (The Next War, 1924; photo Danish Peace Acad.)

Mary Wollstonecraft

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Overview

Mary Wollstonecraft born Spitalfields, London April 27, 1759 (d. 1797). British feminist pioneer, anarchist who opposed all war and violence; author of radical Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

Quotations

"Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished." (Vindication of the Rights of Women, pp. 89-90; 1797 portrait by Opie, Wikipedia)

Leanne Wood

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Overview

Leanne Wood born Rhondda, Wales December 13, 1971. Welsh antiwar politician; probation officer. Socialist; feminist. First woman head of Plaid Cymru, Welsh nationalist party, 2012.  Chaired Cardiff Stop the War Coalition, 2004-05. Arrested for protest against Trident missiles, Faslane Naval Base, 2007. Called for peace in Syria, 2013.

Quotations

“In Plaid, we are on the left; we're internationalist; we are anti-war and anti-privatisation.” (Economic and Social Research Council, “Nationalism and After”)

“Plaid Cymru consistently opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the very start and we continue to maintain that troops should be brought home.” (blog, May 10, 2010; photo Wikipedia)