Woolf seemed to hold that this is an option open only to women with some measure of economic independence. The compilers of this anthology, however, and some of the contributors they have chosen, go further and see women as colliding in the public crimes of men by not withdrawing their emotional support, even when they remain economically dependent on the man. This issue of collusion is raised most dramatically in the piece by Jill Tweedie on Teresa Stangl, the wife of Fritz Stangl, SS Commandant of two Nazi death camps. Despite her knowledge of the bloody crimes of her husband, Frau Stangl did not sever her sexual relations with him or withdraw her love and solace from him.

With this example in mind, Tweedie pointedly takes issue with the notion "that women are the natural guardians of morality" (p.156). Women have been assigned the task of preserving a small circle of ostensible "morality," that is, a family circle of calm within a storm-tossed world, a space to which men can escape for R&R when the going gets too rough. Let us consider, however, the factoring nuclear arms or exploiting the poverty of women in the underdeveloped world. Is that woman's nurturance an act of morality or is it not rather an act of collusion with immorality? Tweedie argues the latter, as does Elise Boulding also. She claims "that a great deal of the nurturance practiced by women is an enabling device to make existing societal defense systems work." Indeed Boulding finds the "emphasis on peacemaking as inherent in the women's familial role" misleading (p.199).

Nonetheless, the image of the mother as peacemaker, as protester against war, is a powerful one, and the members of the Cambridge Women's Peace Collective are drawn to it. The graphic chosen for their book's cover, Kathe Kollwitz's "Seed Corn must not be Ground," lithograph, 1942 (also reproduced on p.132), illustrates this idea. In this they depart from Woolf's analysis, which in no way celebrates mothering as a means to peace, perhaps because Woolf herself was not a mother. But many women active in peace movements at the turn of the century and again today, such as Holly Near, p. 254, claim that we have much to learn from the good mother.

Excerpted in the anthology is a speech by Jane Addams in which she uses an analogy almost identical to that developed by the South African feminist Olive Schreiner in her influential Women and Labour of 1911: the analogy between the mother and the sculptor. According to this analogy, by virtue of being creators, both the mother and sculptor know the cost of creative labour and will have serious compunctions about consigning their creations to destruction. Thus the pacifist/maternal feminist point of view is represented in the anthology.

On the balance, however. the members of the Cambridge women's Peace Collective do not so much locate a source of peace in women's motherliness as a propensity for war, as did Woolf, in "the domination of men over women and the subsequent polarization of so-called male and female characteristics" (p.7). As they write in their Introduction:

If the qualities of caring and nurturing are ascribed to those in society who have no political power, and the influence of those qualities banned from international relations. the opposite attributes of forcefulness and competitiveness rule unhindered (p.7).

Often hand in hand with the maternal feminist claim of women's inherent pacifism goes the belief in men's intrinsic violence. Many contributors to this volume do not share that view, as Woolf also did not, and point instead to the socialization of men to violence through war toys and military training and, as Bertha Von Suttner warned at the turn of the century, through the way "patriotic" history as taught in the schools bestows on war "a perfectly peculiar mystico-historic-political consecration" (p.67).