About WILPF Portland
JANE ADDAMS
On April 28, 1915 a unique group of women, led by Jane Addams, met in an International Congress in The Hague, Netherlands to protest World War I then raging in Europe. Some 1,300 women from warring and neutral nations assembled to work out a plan to end the war and lay the foundation for a permanent peace. The organizers of the Congress were prominent women in the International Suffrage Alliance who saw the connection between their struggle for equal rights and the struggle for peace. Out of this meeting the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom was born. WILPF’s first International President was Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago and the first U.S. woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Portlander Grace De Graff, Kenton School principal and National Teachers League president, served as a delegate in 1915 along with Jane Addams at the Women’s International Peace Congress, the Hague.
Aboard the steamship Oscar II during the 1915-16 Henry Ford Peace Expedition, Grace De Graff along with Kate Devereux Blake and Florence Holbrook, prepared a document which bears repeating today. "To the Teachers of All the World" they wrote:
”In your hands more than any other lies the future of the world. You must choose whether you will train the rising generation in the militaristic spirit that has engulfed Europe in death, desolation and misery or whether you will use your every endeavor to counteract the legacy of hate that will be bequeathed to the children and will teach them that only in the time of peace is the progress of the world possible."
Portlander Grace De Graff, Kenton School principal and National Teachers League president, served as a delegate in 1915 along with Jane Addams at the Women’s International Peace Congress, the Hague.
Aboard the steamship Oscar II during the 1915-16 Henry Ford Peace Expedition, Grace De Graff along with Kate Devereux Blake and Florence Holbrook, prepared a document which bears repeating today. "To the Teachers of All the World" they wrote:
”In your hands more than any other lies the future of the world. You must choose whether you will train the rising generation in the militaristic spirit that has engulfed Europe in death, desolation and misery or whether you will use your every endeavor to counteract the legacy of hate that will be bequeathed to the children and will teach them that only in the time of peace is the progress of the world possible."
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