Gender at the peace table: Photographic visualizations of peacemaking in the First World War

Burgeoning work on peace photography often overlooks gender, despite its centrality to discourses and structures of politics and militarism. This chapter examines the convergence of feminist pacifism and photography in the First World War. The conflict's pre-eminent images of peace depict the victorious signing of the Paris Peace Treaty at Versailles in 1919. Though iconic, these images remain understudied and their gendered power dynamics unremarked. A close reading, however, reveals the ways in which women's absence - and, less obviously, presence - is photographically registered in the masculinist environment of the Hall of Mirrors. Lesser known, but equally compelling, is the photographic corpus of the nascent Women's International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which held peace talks at The Hague in 1915 and Zürich in 1919. By examining the production and dissemination of images both celebratory and defamatory, I assess what is at stake in photographically representing women's pacifism, and reveal the problems and opportunities for visualizing women who 'do' peace. WILPF's photographic tactics, I argue, claimed women's credibility as politically astute beings, with the right - and responsibility - to intervene in international affairs.