| Women International Democratic Federation | |
| Abbreviation: | WIDF |
| Formation: | December 1945 |
| Type: | NGO |
| Purpose: | Association of World's Women Organizations |
| Headquarters: | San Salvador, El Salvador |
| Location: | 23 Calle Poniente & Avenida Las Victorias #123, Urbanización Palomo, San Salvador |
| Region Served: | Worldwide |
| Language: | English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, German, Portuguese |
The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) is an international women's rights organization. Established in 1945, it was most active during the Cold War when, according to historian Francisca de Haan, it was "the largest and probably most influential international women's organization of the post-1945 era". Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, its headquarters were moved from Berlin to Paris. In 2002, with the election of Márcia Campos as president, the office relocated to Brasília. Subsequently, in 2007 the WIDF secretariat was located in São Paulo. Since 2016, the president has been Lorena Peña of El Salvador and the world headquarters has been located in San Salvador. The WIDF's magazine, Women of the Whole World, was published in six languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish.
WIDF was founded in Paris in 1945 as an anti-fascist organization with the intent of engaging women in efforts to prevent war and to combat the racist and sexist ideology of fascist regimes. At its organizing conference, Eugénie Cotton was elected as president and the organization's goals were defined as promoting active participation in the fight against fascism and in favor of world peace, in protecting public health with particular focus on child welfare, in improving the status of women's rights, and in building internationalist friendships among women.
During the Cold War era, WIDF was described in recovered FBI files as Communist-leaning and pro-Soviet. The international day for protection of children, observed since 1950 in many countries as Children's Day on 1 June, was established on the initiative of a WIDF campaign held in 1949. In 1951, the organization was banned by French authorities and relocated to East Berlin. Other international women's organizations became concerned that WIDF would use appeals to rally participation in women's rights and motherhood as propaganda to increase anti-American sentiment and promote communism. At various points in its history, the WIDF enjoyed consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations. It was as a result of proposals from WIDF representatives on the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) that the United Nations declared 1975 as International Women's Year.
From the beginnings of World War II left-leaning women who were communist, liberal, or socialist were active in the fight against fascism and the spread of the racist and sexist ideology of Nazism. During the war, many of the activists, who were primarily aristocrats and intellectuals, took part in anti-fascist conferences throughout Europe, and began to develop a transnational framework for social and political policies that would prevent future conflicts. Eugénie Cotton attended a meeting of the French: [[Union des Femmes Françaises]]|italics=no (Union of French Women) in 1944, which sparked the idea for forming the Women International Democratic Federation. Subsequently, she attended a celebration of International Women's Day in London in 1945 where she met with a group of women from Belgium, China, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. Although the war had ended only six months earlier in Europe and was still continuing in Asia, consensus was reached to form an International Initiative Committee and host an international congress to bring left-leaning women together. Sponsors of the event were the French: Union des Femmes Françaises|italics=no and the Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee. WIDF's internal sources about its origin are vague in regard to the political affiliations of the founders, focusing instead on their involvement in resistance and anti-fascist movements during and immediately following the war, and their intent to establish an organization which was open to all progressive women.
The congress was held between 26 and 30 November 1945 at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris. As a result, 850 delegates from 40 countries, representing 181 women's organizations, attended the founding meeting of the Women's International Democratic Federation. Cotton was elected president of WIDF and served in that capacity until her death in 1967. The organizational goals were defined as promoting active participation in the fight against fascism and in favor of world peace, in protecting public health with particular focus on child welfare, in improving the status of women's rights, and in building internationalist friendships among women. The delegates adopted an International Charter of Women, which aimed at creating global standards protecting women's rights and opportunities as citizens, mothers, and workers. They also had numerous debates about the voting system to be used; the naming of the organization, replacing the original wording using "anti-fascist" with "democratic"; and whether WIDF would have any authority to control member organizations.
The delegates ultimately decided to host triennial congresses with votes on issues based on the size of the population that each national delegation represented. The executive council, made up of a delegate from each member country, was to meet every year. The secretariat was composed of a secretary general and four staff members, who would carry out the management of the federation's business, with the exception of bookkeeping, which was assigned to a three-member commission. Among the founding members were Elizabeth Acland Allen (UK), Cécile Brunschvicg (France), Tsola Dragoycheva (Bulgaria), Dolores Ibárruri (Spain), Ana Pauker (Romania), Kata Pejnović (Yugoslavia), Nina Popova (Russia), Rada Todorova (Bulgaria); Jessie Street (Australia), and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (France), Among the women sending congratulations and support for the founding of WDIF were Clementine Churchill, wife of the British Prime Minister; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, and Isie Smuts, wife of the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa. Gabrielle Duchêne, a vice president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Margery Corbett Ashby, president of the International Alliance of Women, attended the congress. Ashby later wrote to her husband that failure to organize women in the Near East would result in the communist women's dominance there.
After the founding of the WIDF, an intense rivalry developed between the three major international women's groups – the International Alliance of Women, the International Council of Women, and the WIDF. Both the International Alliance of Women and the International Council of Women claimed to be apolitical, but according to historian Francisca de Haan, the leading scholar on the WIDF, they "used imperialist notions of western superiority to support their claims for women's rights". Both organizations condoned colonial and imperial systems and stressed the importance of democracy in achieving fundamental human rights such as freedom of conscience, press, and speech. Their members were typically conservative, upper-class, Christian women from Europe, or places such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, where large numbers of Europeans had settled. After World War I, the International Council of Women and International Alliance of Women actively recruited affiliates in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, but the leadership tended to be from Europe and the United States, the congresses were held primarily in Europe, and the official languages of the groups were English, French, and German.
To resolve women's issues, the International Alliance of Women and the International Council of Women fostered interaction with ruling elites. For example, the International Council of Women and the WILPF, created in 1915 by members of the International Alliance of Women and other elite women's groups, approached peace activism by urging heads of nations towards pacifism and avoidance of war through diplomatic channels and improved understanding of cultural differences. Fears of red-baiting prevented Western organizations like the WILPF from criticizing colonial systems and exploitation until the 1960s. Publications such as International Alliance of Women member Adele Schreiber-Krieger's Journey towards Freedom (1955) emphasized the role of western women in assisting women from the "third world" in eliminating prevalent customs like child marriage, foot binding, seclusion, veiling, and widow sacrifice, without evaluating how western systems impacted colonized women or crediting women of the Global South or the Eastern world for their own efforts in asserting their agency.
WIDF regarded peace as a prerequisite for fighting against fascism and obtaining rights for women and children. Unlike the pacifist western feminist groups, WIDF members did not see peace as the avoidance or absence of war; rather, they viewed it as the achievement of social justice and the cessation of oppression and exploitation. The organization strongly supported decolonization and national independence movements, and was active in the anti-war movement pushing for peace in Africa and Asia. WIDF organized its activities directly with its women members, bypassing government officials. It was typical for the organization to send letters to members urging action and protest over government policies. For example, the organization rallied Frenchwomen to have their sons refuse to participate in colonial wars, and urged American women to protest the use of germ warfare in Korea. Between its congresses, WIDF also organized large conferences to address peace, motherhood, and women's issues.
WIDF's membership and leadership included women from throughout the world. Although primarily held in Europe, its conferences were also held in Asia, and Latin America. It was an explicitly anti-racist organization, whose members were working-class. For example, at its founding, the WIDF board established a vice presidency post for a Chinese delegate, which was filled by Cai Chang in 1948. The executive council that year consisted of members from Algeria, Argentina, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, China, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, USSR, and Yugoslavia. Egyptian feminist Saiza Nabarawi, who was a vice president of the International Alliance of Women, attended WIDF's 1952 Vienna Congress and was asked by the board of the IAW to choose which organization she preferred. She resigned from the International Alliance of Women's board and became a vice president of WIDF in 1953. WIDF's monthly magazine, which became a quarterly publication in 1966, Women of the Whole World, was produced in six languages – Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish from 1946 to 1990.[1]
The US affiliate of the WIDF, the Congress of American Women formed in 1946, along the lines of the popular front. Although the Congress of American Women declared itself to be independent of political alliance, the Communist Party publicly endorsed the organization upon its founding. That same year, the Indonesian: Kongres Wanita Indonesia|italics=no (Indonesian Women's Congress, Kowani) formed and joined the WIDF because of its support for decolonization. WIDF members participated in a fact-finding mission in 1946 through Latin America, visiting Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, to build networks and learn about the issues women faced there. They collected reports from women in India and Algeria to evaluate how the lack of development programs led to poverty and how economic policies and customs systemically exploited agricultural workers. In 1947, WIDF was granted consultative status category B for the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). To assess the conditions of women living under British colonial rule in Asia in 1948 another WIDF delegation toured British Burma, British Malaya, and the Dominion of India. A similar trip, which was scheduled to evaluate the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, had to be canceled because Dutch and French authorities refused to grant visas to the WIDF members.
The observers compiled their report The Women of Asia and Africa, in preparation for a conference planned for 1948 to be held in Calcutta (now Kolkata), in honor of India's independence from the United Kingdom. The report detailed the need to reach out to rural women, whether they were peasants, owned land, or were refugees; and to confront gendered policies that created inadequate health care, food, and wages for women or subjected them to trafficking and cultural practices that impeded their safety and security. It also focused on informing activists in the West about the issues associated with imperialism, under-development and the violence colonial wars caused for other women.
Immediately following India's independence, its Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru began implementing policies to silence dissent, imprisoning or driving activists and communists underground. Neither land reforms to protect peasants and rural women nor changes to hiring and wage systems to produce job and income stability were implemented. WIDF activists recognized that there was no difference between the struggle against colonial administrations or newly created governments, meaning that their demands for a realignment of power hierarchies to include working- and middle-class women would not be supported. To that end, the conference was rescheduled to be held in 1949 in Peiking (now Beijing). It was the first anti-imperialist and pan-Asian women's conference bringing together women from Africa and Asia. That year, WIDF also led a campaign to establish Children's Day, an international day dedicated to protection of children, as an annual observance on 1 June.
The United States had not endorsed a policy of containing communism until after the communists came to power in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War. US focus was on Europe, and specifically the Soviet actions in Berlin. Thoughts by both superpowers that China would become a Soviet ally caused the cold war to heat up. The Congress of American Women was targeted by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the United States House of Representatives (HUAC) in 1949 due to the support it had been given by the Communist Party. The committee described WIDF as being a communist front using feminism as a guise to lure women to join the organization and concluded that the organization was a wing of Soviet propaganda mechanisms which used a peace campaign to promote disarmament and foster the communist take-over of democratic nations. The Indonesian group Kowani withdrew from WIDF in 1949 because of objections by some of its affiliates to the organization's ties to socialism, but the following year, another Indonesian organization, Gerwis (later re-named Gerwani), affiliated with WIDF. The Congress of American Women disbanded in 1950 because of the negative reactions to the HUAC report.
Twenty-one WIDF activists from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe spent twelve days evaluating the conditions on the Korean peninsula during the war in May 1951,. The investigation was focused on North Korea and attempted to objectively evaluate government claims of civilian casualties. Among the delegates were Nora Rodd (chair, Canada), (vice chair, China), Ida Bachmann (vice chair, Denmark), Trees Sunito Heyligers (secretary, Netherlands), Abassia Fodil (Algeria), Monica Felton (Britain), Kate Fleron (Denmark), Candelaria Rodríguez (Cuba), Hilde Cahn (East Germany), Eva Priester (Austria), and Lilly Wächter (West Germany), among others. They wrote a report, We Accuse, which was translated into Chinese, Korean, English, German, and Spanish, and described the bombing raids carried out by the United States Air Force and war crimes committed by the United Nations Forces. WIDF's report caused apprehension on the part of the US government about public opinion of its Korean activities, and specific concern within the United States Department of State and the United States Women's Bureau about accusations of germ warfare, which were picked up and investigated by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. The US government sought to red-bait the authors, and the CIA covertly funded the Committee of Correspondence to work against WIDF.
Women United for United Nations, a group of 30 women's organizations established in 1947 to disseminate information about the activities of the UN, prepared a critique of the WIDF report, which the Department of State widely disseminated through Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe. Women United also sent their report to women's organizations and major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Delegation members thereafter faced arrest and interrogation for treason upon returning home. Several of the WIDF delegates were terminated from their workplaces and imprisoned, but none waivered in their belief that the report was factual. Rodríguez and another Cuban WIDF activist, Edith García Buchaca, led a campaign advocating prevention of Cuban troops from participating in the war and were successful in changing public opinion, which had previously favored Cuban participation. The United States, with support from Britain, led a successful crusade in 1954 to strip WIDF of its consultative status for the United Nations, largely because of its anti-colonial work and exposé on Korea. French authorities banned WIDF in 1951 after its activists launched a campaign against French aggression in Vietnam and urged French women to refuse to allow their sons to participate in the war. The organization relocated to East Berlin where it began to strengthen its ties to the Soviet Union. Held in 1953 in Copenhagen, the third congress attracted 613 delegates from 67 countries. Among the nearly 2,000 attendants were over 1,300 guests and observers. The Indonesian delegation, led by Soerastri Karma Trimurti and a number of other members of Gerwani, included women from the Minahasa Women's Union, Indonesian: Wanita Democrat|italics=no (Democratic Women) and Indonesian: Wanita Rakyat|italics=no (Women of the People) organizations. The focus of the congress was fostering peace in light of on-going conflicts like the Korean War and the war to end French rule in Vietnam. Resolutions were adopted at the congress to support an immediate end to both wars and to publish a Declaration on the Rights of Women. The declaration included provisions for the right to work, maternity leave, and equal pay for women; creation of child care and kindergarten centers for working women; protection of the civil and educational rights of women and children; support for women's suffrage and the right to political representation; equal rights with men in owning property and protecting peasant women's land ownership; and the right for women to freely associate and participate in organizations.
Throughout the following decades, WIDF continued to host world-wide conferences, including the 1952 Conference in Defense of Children held in Vienna, the 1955 World Congress of Mothers hosted in Lausanne, 1959 Women of Latin America Conference held in Santiago, Chile, the 1960 Copenhagen celebration of WIDF's 50th anniversary, and the 1961 Afro-Asian Women's Conference of Cairo. The organization published documents, such as French: Pour la defense des droits de la personne humaine (For the Defense of Human Rights), to reiterate their position that human rights included women's rights. The WIDF would not be readmitted as a consultant body to the United Nations until 1967, when newly independent former colonies pressed for a restoration of its status. In 1969, US-USSR relations entered a period of détente, and that year, WIDF was elevated to Consultative Status A. The improvement in relationships, between the United States, USSR, and resumption of US relations with China in 1972, allowed nations in the Global South, which had become the majority of members of the United Nations, to assert their power and oppose policies of the superpowers, leading to a broader focus on women's issues by the organization.
At the WIDF council meeting in East Berlin in 1971, preliminary discussions took place about hosting a year for women. The Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement hosted the WIDF council meeting in Sofia in 1972 and first proposed the idea of a UN-sponsored international women's conference for 1975. WIDF activists (Iran) and Hertta Kuusinen (Finland) promoted the idea within the Commission on the Status of Women. WIDF members of the Hungarian: Magyar Nők Országos Tanácsa|italics=no (National Council of Hungarian Women) and Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan: Consiliu Național al Femeilor Române|italics=no (National Council of Romanian Women) promoted the idea in Women of the Whole World. When the WIDF raised the suggestion for International Women's Year to the Commission on the Status of Women, it did not gain traction because of WIDF's observer status. Undeterred, the WIDF drafted a proposal, which was presented to the commission by Romanian official representative Florica Andrei, a member of the National Council of Romanian Women, a WIDF affiliate. After the proposal was seconded by Helvi Sipilä, the Finnish representative of the commission, it was passed by the commission and presented to the UN General Assembly, which adopted a resolution in December 1972 to honor women with International Women's Year in 1975; however, it did not approve hosting a conference.
WIDF activists made their own plans to host their organization's 30th anniversary congress in East Berlin in October 1975. Patricia Hutar, a US representative to the Commission on the Status of Women, suggested that the commission revisit the idea of a conference in 1974 to avoid the appearance that only communist women were supporting the initiative. The UN General Assembly approved hosting what would be the World Conference on Women of July 1975 in Mexico City, but authorized no funds for the event. Individuals and affiliated organizations of the WIDF participated in both the UN Conference and the WIDF Congress. The Mexico City Conference spawned the United Nations Decade for Women, establishing calls to draft the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and host follow-up World Conferences on Women in 1980 and 1985. WIDF members were involved in both of the conferences and the proposal for CEDAW. The WIDF Congress was attended by women from 43 African nations, 33 Asian countries, 29 European states; the remaining 33 countries were represented by delegates from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.
In 1976, the WIDF sponsored an international conference in Sofia, Women in Agriculture, focused on educational training and developing cooperative farms in the Global South. The organization co-initiated the drive for UNESCO to recognize 1979 as the International Year of the Child. In 1980, the WIDF worked to establish a second United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) center in Sofia to focus on training women from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for leadership positions in the socio-political-economic fight for their rights. The WIDF also established similar development courses for Latin American women which were hosted at a facility in Havana. These courses continued through 1985, leading up to the UN's Third World Conference on the status of women, known as the Nairobi Conference. WIDF activists also visited the war-torn Palestinian territories and Western Sahara. According to Regina Marques, a member of the WIDF board of directors in 2021, the organization was honored as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 1986 by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the WIDF headquarters moved from Berlin to Paris. The federation was reorganized in 1994 under the leadership of Sylvie Jan. At the 1995 World Conference on Women, many WIDF activists from Eastern Europe explained that their organizations had been dissolved and their voices had been silenced. In 2002, when Brazilian member Márcia Campos was elected president, the office relocated to Brasília, and in 2007 the WIDF's secretariat was located in São Paulo. Campos was succeeded by Salvadoran Lorena Peña after her election at the 2016 WIDF Congress of Bogotá, and the worldwide headquaters moved to the Palomo neighborhood of San Salvador at 23 Calle Poniente & Avenida Las Victorias #123. Peña continued to lead the organization in 2023.
The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) has a number of non-English names, including:
According to de Haan, Cold War policies and investigations and repercussions from the investigations of McCarthyism had long-lasting effects on knowledge about the WIDF and international women's interactions after World War II. Although it was inaugurated in Paris, the WIDF was described by 20th-century scholars as originating behind the Iron Curtain. Cold War stereotypes impacted the legacy of the organization, effectively erasing it from the history of international women's movements. When the WIDF was described by scholars or activists, it was depicted as a pro-Soviet, communist front organization, which received both political and financial support from the USSR. Some of these accounts were based on recovered records of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because the official stance of communism was to view feminism as a "bourgeois ideology promoted by upper-class women seeking to advance their own interests at the expense of class solidarity", the perception of the WIDF was that it was not a women's rights organization but rather an organization designed to spread socialist ideology. Historian Celia Donert states that the activists of the WIDF were involved in developing transnational socialist networks and that the political context of party and state ideology impacted how they advocated for women's interests, but that they were focused on resolving women's issues.
Focus by scholars on the social and cultural history of the Cold War and increased feminist scholarship on communist women's activism since the dissolution of the Soviet Union have led to a clearer understanding that women's international relationships were more complex and diverse than previously acknowledged. The full history of the WIDF is difficult to ascertain, as there are only partial organizational records from Berlin. Chinese records are not widely available to academics and many records appear to have been lost. De Haan stated that records of the early organization in France remain in private hands; some materials were destroyed, and others moved multiple times.
Scholars of the 21st century have subsequently described the WIDF as an active feminist organization advocating for women's rights, and not merely a communist attempt to manipulate women. The WIDF, according to academics like Elisabeth Armstrong and Suzy Kim, played an important role in supporting women's anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In examining the WIDF's role in the peace movement, Suzy Kim refuted that feminism and pacifism declined during the 1950s, stating that WIDF activists launched their campaign for women's rights and global peace during the Cold War with their anti-war campaign against the conflict in Korea. She also concluded that long before second-wave feminists began promoting intersectional analysis, the WIDF incorporated the principles of evaluating overlapping factors such as class, gender, race, and religion to determine how inequalities were perpetuated globally.
Scholar Taewoo Kim made a study of the Korean commission and its report, stating that declassification of military documents and research by South Korean academics, have confirmed that the conditions described by the WIDF commission were true. Omissions in the WIDF report that some of the atrocities committed resulted from the activities of Korean right-wing youth groups were possibly due, according to Kim, to reliance on North Korean interpreters and government manipulation of some of the witnesses. Kim also found the WIDF report significant in that it reveals and documents sexual violence against women during the war. De Haan called the WIDF "the largest and probably most influential international women's organization of the post-1945 era", an assessment which was seconded by Taewoo Kim.