International conference of socialist women against war

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The International Conference of Socialist Women Against the War was a conference of the socialist women's movement in Bern from March 26th to 28th, 1915. It was directed against the First World War .

At the end of the 19th century, a proletarian women's movement emerged in Europe as part of the labor movement, which hosted several international conferences such as B. hosted in Copenhagen in 1910. The conferences dealt with women's rights in general, but especially with discrimination against working women. However, they always took a position on other global political issues. Actually, a third women's conference should have taken place in Vienna as early as 1914 following the planned International Socialist Congress. Both events did not take place because of the outbreak of the First World War. Instead, Clara Zetkin prepared a women's conference in Bern in March 1915.

The meeting became the first noteworthy peace rally in which participants from both the Central Powers and the Entente took part. Participants from Germany, England, France, Russia, Poland, Holland, Italy and Switzerland accepted the invitation. A total of 25 delegates were present. However, neither the German nor the French women were official delegates of their parties. At that time, both parties still clearly supported the governments of their countries.

This made the split in the socialist parties clear on the international level. During the conference the first tensions between supporters of the Bolshevik line, mainly Russians and Poles, and the participants from other countries became noticeable. A manifesto “To the comrades of all countries” was adopted and distributed. In it, the conference turned against the slogan of a national defense war and called for an immediate end to the war.

Participants

Web links

  • Gerd Callesen: The international socialist women's conferences digitized
  • Negotiation report as an attachment to the Berner Tagwacht from April 3, 1915 ( PDF )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Annette Eklund Hansen: The International Conference of Socialist Women 1910 in Copenhagen, in: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume III / 2011.