Seeking to “reformulate the relationship between feminism, international relations [IR] and peace studies” (p. 5) in order to expose their complementary aspects, Catia Cecelia Confortini presents a theoretical and historical analysis of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) during the years 1945 to 1975. Over those years, she argues, the liberal internationalist peace organization developed a feminist critical methodology for emancipatory social change and sharpened its own critiques of the post—World War II liberal international system.

Through three case studies, Confortini traces the WILPF’s transformations in terms of understanding how the liberal economic order acted as a structural constraint to disarmament and the realization of international peace (Chapter 3), in terms of supporting processes of decolonization and independence/liberation movements in the Third World (Chapter 4), and in terms of understanding the Palestinian perspective and coming to support a two-state solution in territory occupied by Israel as a necessary element for resolving conflict in the Middle East (Chapter 5). After examining the WILPF’s organizational evolution—its internal debates, external relationships, revised policies, and activist strategies—Confortini concludes that during the Cold War era, the organization transcended some of its elitist origins and created and applied a feminist critical methodology that other organizations with similar liberal internationalist and Western roots could adopt in order to promote emancipatory (and feminist) social change in the future.

As Confortini explains briefly, the WILPF’s history dates back to World War I, when the organization’s members—“primarily … middle- to upper-class white Western women” (p. 15), including its well-known founders Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch—stressed what some feminist IR scholars have found problematic: the association of “peace” with women’s presumed essential nurturing qualities. But from its earliest years, WILPF also asserted women’s equal participation in male-dominated global governance. They also criticized the Versailles Peace Treaty for its unequal economic punishment and unilateral disarmament of the defeated powers, as well as the hypocrisy of the Western victor nations for failing to live up to the idealistic principles of liberal internationalism (freedom through liberal democratic government, self-determination for all nations, universal disarmament, and economic development for all). These stands demonstrated that WILPF was already offering some critiques of the liberal internationalist world order.

The author focuses her study on the WILPF in the aftermath of World War II as the United Nations was founded and “universal” liberal values were oftentimes imposed on states through the global governance system by dominant powers such as the United States. She makes a case for the WILPF’s continued evolution as a critic of the postwar internationalist order as the nuclear arms race became institutionalized and as the organization recognized racist and classist ideologies underlying international power relations between the First World and Third World, and between the West and the Middle East. The WILPF was and is “an insider to the liberal system” (p. 15), but by its critiques of the system and transformation of its own organizational practices through the application of its original feminist critical methodology, developed through praxis, the organization has “contribut[ed] to incremental emancipatory social change” (p. 16). Some readers may disagree with the legacy Confortini assigns to the WILPF’s “radical revision of its beliefs and practices” (p. 54), but if it is necessary to change minds in order to change the world, then the organization’s documented ideological transformations in this era may have laid the groundwork for global political and social transformations.

Chapter 2 outlines several critical theories and explains how they relate to and promote human freedom, and how they illuminate the feminist critical methodology that Confortini has traced by analyzing WILPF archival documents, secondary historical sources, and interviews with its leaders. As the author explains, constructivism as a critical IR theory contributes insights regarding the historical and cultural constructions of social, economic, and political structures and how they might coexist with activists’ agency in the international arena. Feminist theory provides critical insights regarding the necessary inclusion of women’s gendered perspectives to expose how gender power and other hierarchical systems of power operate in exclusionary and oppressive ways within the international realm.

Confortini also explains a concept defined by Brooke A. Ackerly that she draws on heavily when formulating her own explication of the feminist critical methodology that WILPF developed: that is, “Third World Feminist Social Criticism” or “TWFSC” (Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 2000). The TWFSC that emerged in the 1980s identifies three necessary components of emancipatory social change: organizational commitment to “guiding criteria” that shaped its activism; “deliberative inquiry” that drew on diverse perspectives coming from those with different relationships to power to determine organizational policy, and “skeptical scrutiny” that critically evaluated how organizational policies reinforced or challenged existing values and structures of power. Confortini asserts that these components, along with the addition of the all-important quality of “intelligent compassion,” a fourth methodological tool that the WILPF originated, were present as the organization transformed its approach to disarmament and peace activism, its support for decolonization struggles, and its institutional stance in relation to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the 1945–75 period.

“Intelligent compassion” is a phrase and concept that WILPF leader Dorothy Hutchinson articulated at the organization’s 1968 International Congress. Hutchinson used the term to characterize the distinctiveness of the organization’s method of social change work. WILPF women met their critics and challengers at international meetings and in conflicts over specific policies or approaches to contentious issues with intelligence, or the mental capacity to understand complex and difficult social, political, and economic problems, and with compassion, or the human capacity to empathize with others and feel their pain. Confortini likens this to Christine Sylvester’s notion of “empathetic cooperation” as a method applied by feminist IR scholars (“Empathetic Cooperation: A Feminist Model for IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23 [no. 2, 1994]: 315–34). Each of the substantive case study chapters describes the ways that WILPF developed and applied this four-part feminist critical methodology in the 1945–75 period. The concluding Chapter 6 expands on Confortini’s thesis that this methodology matters: It shaped the WILPF’s transformation as a peace advocacy organization. As a result, the WILPF became more inclusive in terms of its organizational membership and representation of multiple points of view, and, Confortini asserts, it became better equipped to identify and confront multiple forms of oppression inside the organization and out in the world, and more effective in its peace activism.

The epilogue recounts WILPF’s advances in peace activism since 1975 and asserts the organization’s continuing relevance even as membership numbers have dropped. Confortini summarizes the organization’s critical participation in UN world conferences during the Decade for Women (1975–85) and at the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing when the WILPF (and other women’s international organizations) began advocacy work that lead to UN Security Council Resolution 1325 adopted in October 2000. She also notes the WILPF’s ongoing engagements with, and critiques of, the UN’s women’s, peace, and security agenda in relation to disarmament (nuclear and other weapons) and in addressing gender issues in conflict zones. As Confortini concludes, WILPF’s ongoing challenge is to engage a more youthful and diverse membership and to adapt the feminist critical methodology it developed in earlier years to incorporate perspectives from new leadership emerging from the fastest-growing non-Western national chapters.

The WILPF’s record of Cold War era activities (1945–75), both in theorizing a “feminist peace” and in applying feminist methods that organizational members collectively defined for understanding—if not yet resolving—international conflicts, reveals layers of complexity to a historical era that is often remembered in black and white terms. The hard-headed realism that generally characterizes Cold War international actors in many accounts of big-power politics does not begin to describe the internal deliberations and external activism of the WILPF leaders that Confortini describes here. This book contributes to Cold War revisionist history, providing empirical evidence and new theoretical applications.