The UN’s International Women’s Year generated enthusiasm for women’s peace work

At a time when both feminism and the peace movement are facing significant challenges, we can learn from how earlier generations of women and peace activists overcame challenges, generated enthusiasm, and collaborated with each other.

2025 has marked the 25th anniversary of the UN Security Council’s adoption of its groundbreaking Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The resolution was the first time the Security Council recognized women’s important role in peacebuilding. Its adoption was the result of strong commitment and pressure from numerous actors, including from women’s organizations.

Significant preparatory work for the resolution had taken place five years earlier, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The conference adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which included a chapter on ‘Women and armed conflict’. Among other things, the document confirmed the importance of women’s involvement in peacebuilding. 2025 has also marked the 30th anniversary of the Beijing conference.

Connecting ‘women’ and ‘peace’

The coming about of the Beijing Platform for Action and Resolution 1325 depended on the existence of organizations that lobbied for the recognition of the important role played by women in peacebuilding. These were organizations that already viewed women’s peace work as especially important, having developed this viewpoint over several decades. Key among these organizations was the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the world’s oldest peace organization made up of women.

From the 1940s to the start of the 1970s, WILPF barely mentioned the word ‘woman’ in its work for peace. But by the 1990s, WILPF had become one of the driving forces for the recognition of women’s role in peacebuilding. In my research for my master’s thesis in history, I wanted to explore when, how and why this change occurred within WILPF.

The UN’s International Women’s Year was the starting point

By analyzing WILPF’s archives from the 1970s and 1980s, I built up a picture of how the organization gradually became more concerned with advocacy for why women should work for peace and disarmament. This perspective started to develop in 1975, which the UN designated as International Women’s Year (IWY). The IWY’s official themes were equality, development and peace.

WILPF feared that the third theme, peace, would receive less attention than the others. To remedy this, the organization decided to participate actively in IWY with the aim of ensuring that peace was properly discussed at the year’s events. This gave the organization an opportunity to promote peace work to other women’s organizations, and to establish itself amongst them as an authority on the subject. While WILPF emphasized the importance of women working for peace, the focus of events that WILPF organized in 1975 was peace and disarmament, not ‘women’.

Linking peacebuilding to feminism

Not long after 1975, WILPF began to argue that the arms race had an especially negative impact on women, that it was an obstacle to equality, and that women had a particular duty to work for peace.

In its efforts to recruit more supporters to its campaign for peace and disarmament, the organization highlighted the relevance of these topics to women. By linking peacebuilding and disarmament to feminism, WILPF took questions about war and peace out of the male domain. In doing so, they also legitimized their own work for peace, as a peace organization made up of women.

WILPF’s linking of peacebuilding to feminism was also an outcome of the influence of the women’s movement on WILPF during that period. WILPF’s rhetoric changed, and it adopted new methods. For example, in the early 1980s WILPF arranged mass demonstrations. These would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The organization gradually attached more weight to the power of women coming together to work for peace and disarmament. This gradual change in emphasis formed an important basis for WILPF’s work for women and peace in the 1990s.

Dialogues and collaborations

In 1975, WILPF had collaborated with other women’s organizations in connection with IWY events. I thought it was particularly interesting to see how these collaborations developed over the ensuing years, and how women in WILPF were inspired by – and increasingly more open to – collaborating with other women.

In 1975, women from WILPF participated at the ‘tribune’ – an event for organizations that was arranged to coincide with the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City. They reported back enthusiastically from the event, where women from diverse backgrounds had met and discussed the year’s themes. In 1980 and 1985, WILPF itself played a key role in the planning of similar events. Increasingly, WILPF came to see collaborations and dialogues with other women and organizations as important aspects of its work for peace.

Becoming a key driving force

As time went on, WILPF took a clear position on the importance of women’s involvement in peacebuilding. The adoption of this position can be linked directly to the focus in Beijing and in Resolution 1325 on women’s work for peace. By making their own work relevant to IWY, through increased collaboration and interest in the work of other women and other organizations, WILPF laid the foundations to become a key driving force for the recognition of women’s work for peace.

At a time when both feminism and the peace movement are facing significant challenges, we can learn from how earlier generations of women and peace activists overcame challenges, generated enthusiasm, and collaborated with each other. This process empowered them, and when the time came, they were ready to provide both knowledge and ideas, ready to work together to be heard and recognized in questions about war, peace and justice.

• Maja E. B. Reiss is a former Master’s student at PRIO. Her thesis in Modern International and Transnational History Bringing "Women" into Peace: How the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Reclaimed Its Identity as a Women's Organization During the UN Decade for Women was completed at the University of Oslo in September 2025.
• This text was published in Norwegian by the Masterblogg at Kilden. Translation from Norwegian: Fidotext