Women writers on peace and war

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Women writers on peace and war
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul
Emily Dickinson: I many times thought Peace had come
Marguerite Duras: The civilizing mission
Eleanor Farjeon: Peace Poem
Margaret Fuller: America, with no prouder emblem than the Dove
Ellen Glasgow: Selections on war
Ellen Glasgow: The Altar of the War God
Ellen Glasgow: His vision of the future only an endless warfare and a wasted land
Ellen Glasgow: The Reign of the Brute
Ellen Glasgow: “That killed how many? how many?”
Ellen Glasgow: Then the rows of dead men stared at him through the falling rain in the deserted field
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Selma Lagerlöf: The mark of death was on them all
Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate
Amy Lowell: A pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?
Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
Lilika Nakos: Selections on war
Lilika Nakos: The dead man, the living, the house; all were smashed to bits
Lilika Nakos: Do I know what makes men kill each other?
Lilika Nakos: Do you think the war will ever end?
Lilika Nakos: The grandmother’s sin
Lilika Nakos: “Surely God didn’t intend this butchery”
Lilika Nakos: “What’s the war got to do with God?”
Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures
Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war
George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self
Gustave Flaubert and George Sand: Monstrous conflicts of which we have no idea; warfare suppressed or civilization perishes
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars

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