Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)
Peace Train to Beijing: The Fourth World Conference on Women
(1995, 58 minutes) Produced and directed by Robin Lloyd
Audience Level: High School/Adult
A revealing study of solidarity in motion, Peace Train to Beijing tells the story of 230 women and 10 men from 42 countries who cross two continents to reach the Fourth UN Conference on Women (August 7-29,1995). The train was sponsored and organized by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). During the three-week trek from Helsinki, Finland, participants meet with women's groups and political leaders, and put theory into practice as they create a "metaphorical community" on the train.
Included is unique footage of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Forum, where 30,000 women from around the world organize and strategize for women's rights, as well as interviews with South Asian author/activist Vandana Shiva, Rosalie Bertell, Cora Weiss and Dessima Williams.
Featured on the PBS series Rights and Wrongs, this is an ideal film to stimulate discussion in courses on women's studies, political science, and economics. Themes include: the impact of religious fundamentalism, women and militarism (nuclear and conventional), food security and trafficking in women.
The long version (58 minutes) is available in two half-hour segments, one primarily of the Peace Train experience, the other of the NGO Forum.
"I used this video in my course Contemporary Global Issues for Women. The students loved the film. It served as an excellent teaching tool. It introduced the international women's movement as well as a variety of issues we will be returning to throughout the semester." Valerie Sperling, UC Berkeley
WILPF 2004 International Congress in Sweden:
"Water, Women, Peace"
Produced by Robin Lloyd
Audience Level: Adult
A cultural tour of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's 2004 International Congress titled Water, Women, Peace, in Goteborg, Sweden: featuring the International Executive Committee, the Gertrud Baer Seminar, and comments by outgoing President Krishna Ahooja Patel and Johan Galtung.
Truth and Reconciliation: Can It Work in the United States?18 minutes
High School/Adult
Highlights from a symposium at New York University Law School in 1997, sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The aim of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions is to document a history of oppression or racism, and to acknowledge and honor victims. African-American, indigenous and community leaders, and South African officials discuss the applicability of a Truth and Reconciliation process in the United States. Includes comments by Bishop Peter Storey of Johannesburg; Grayce Uyehara, director of the Japanese American Citizens League; Andrea Carmen, director of the International Indian Treaty Council; and Adjoa Aiyetoro, an attorney with the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.
A Proper Bostonian, Emily Greene Balch
(30 minute) Produced by Ellen Mass Edited by Robin Lloyd and
Donna O'Donovan
High School/Adult
A tribute to this international innovator in social work and women's education, and a founder of the International Women's Peace Movement.
Emily Greene Balch was one of only two American women to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For her, it crowned thirty years of pioneering for peace.
E.G. Balch finished Bryn Mawr with honors, recipient of its first European Fellowship. She became a social worker and co-founder of Boston's Dennison House. Emily published pamphlets on public assistance and juvenile offenders and co-founded the Women's Trade Union League. Between 1913 and 1918, she chaired the Economics and Sociology Departments at Wellesley. Her two major works on American immigrants were used throughout colleges and universities. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, she helped organize, with Jane Addams, the International Congress of Women at the Hague (1915), which proposed continual mediation of the conflict. In 1919, this group became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was a pacifist during World War I, and worked with Woodrow Wilson to form the League of nations. Her book, Occupied Haiti, was instrumental in foreign policy. Emily published verse of spiritual poetry. She was the first to propose internationalization of Antarctica, a proposal that came to fruition. Throughout her later years, she continued to work on behalf of the United Nations.
This video documents the Wellesley College 50th anniversary commemoration of Emily Balch's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. Historians and Wellesley professors, WILPF's National President and local Boston WILPF members discuss her life and works and read selections from her journals.