EDITH BALLANTYNE & THE PEACE WOMEN

The 99-year-old luminary of the global peace movement, Edith Ballantyne, looks back on her own life and meets a young generation of women peace activists whose lives are threatened by war.

The 99-year-old luminary of the global peace movement, Edith Ballantyne, is a role model for a new generation of women peace activists around the world. She looks with concern at today’s situation and wants to share her life experience with us before she falls silent forever. From the long-time president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the mastermind of a global peace movement, we can learn how world peace can be actively shaped.

Edith thinks of peace in a radical, comprehensive way. Peace is based on the interplay of social justice, equality, democracy, diplomacy, disarmament, and coexistence as the foundation of a way of thinking critically of capitalism. Her younger comrades-in-arms, Shirine Jurdi in Lebanon and Nina Potarska in Ukraine, implement these ideas in their countries, in an almost hopeless struggle for peace and against the loss of freedom. While Edith identifies the current trouble spots and enters into dialogue with her comrades-in-arms, she provides insights into her own life story, the difficulties she has gone through and how she has managed to keep fighting.

As a 16-year-old (1938), she herself fled the Nazis from Sudetenland to Canada, where she was taken out of slave-like conditions by staff of the then WILPF and learned English. It was through this help that she first became a peace campaigner and president of WILPF, an organization whose ideals she holds dear, but whose dependence and corruption she criticizes.