100 Women Writers on Peace and War
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Women writers on peace and war (with regular additions)
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100 Women Writers on Peace and War
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Maria Abdy: May the gentle Dove of Peace extend her snowy pinions o’er us
Lucy Aikin: Gentle Peace with healing hand returns
Lucy Aikin: Sickening I turn on yonder plain to mourn the widows and the slain
Ellen P. Allerton: Peace After War
Joanna Baillie: And shall we think of war?
Joanna Baillie: Do children return from rude jarring war?
Joanna Baillie: Thy native land, freed from the ills of war, a land of peace!
H. Lavinia Baily: By the Sea. An Argument for Peace.
Isabella Banks: Absolve our souls from blood shed in our country’s cause
Isabella Banks: The bugle of war, the bugle of peace
Isabella Banks: “Glory, glory, glory!” As if murder were not sin!
Isabella Banks: Lay down weapons, war should cease
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Peace and Shepherd
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The storm of horrid war rolls dreadful on
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: War’s least horror is th’ ensanguined field
Charlotte Alington Barnard: Peace Hovers
Katherine Lee Bates: Children of the War
Aphra Behn: No rough sound of war’s alarms
Aphra Behn: The pen triumphs over the sword
Adelaide George Bennett: The Peace-Pipe Quarry
Elizabeth Bentley: On the return of celestial peace
Elizabeth Bentley: Terror-striking War shalt be banish’d far
Matilda Betham: All the horrid charms of war
Mathilde Blind: All vile things that batten on disaster follow feasting in the wake of war
Mathilde Blind: Reaping War’s harvest grim and gory
Mathilde Blind: Widowing the world of men to win the world
Jane Bowdler: War’s deadly futility
Vera Mary Brittain: August, 1914
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: War’s human harvest
Caroline Clive: The bloody words of ruffian war
Elizabeth Cobbold: Earth’s bosom drenching with her children’s blood
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: Lilies and Doves
Eliza Cook: Selections on peace and war
Eliza Cook: Crimson battlefield. When the world shall be spread with tombless dead.
Eliza Cook: I felt a shuddering horror lurk, to think I’d mingled in such work
Eliza Cook: No bloodstain lingers there. The plough and the spear.
Eliza Cook: Not where bullet, sword, and shield lie strown with the gory slain
Eliza Cook: Who can love the laurel wreath, plucked from the gory field of death?
Isabella Valancy Crawford: The Forging of the Sword
Isabella Valancy Crawford: War
Emily Dickinson: I many times thought Peace had come
Augusta Theodosia Drane: It needs must be that gentle Peace prevail!
Marguerite Duras: The civilizing mission
George Eliot: Tart rebuke of crude war propaganda
Emma Catherine Embury: Proud soldier turns from scenes of war
Laura Bell Everett: The Skein of Grievous War
Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies
Marianne Farningham: Give Peace
Anne Finch: Enquiry After Peace
Mary Weston Fordham: Ode to Peace
Margaret Fuller: America, with no prouder emblem than the Dove
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Flag of Peace
Ellen Glasgow: Selections on war
Ellen Glasgow: The Altar of the War God
Ellen Glasgow: His vision of the future only an endless warfare and a wasted land
Ellen Glasgow: The Reign of the Brute
Ellen Glasgow: “That killed how many? how many?”
Hala Jean Hammond: War’s black hatred
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying
Felicia Hemans: Selections on peace and war
Felicia Hemans: Say to the hurricane of war, – “Be still”
Felicia Hemans: Speak not of death, till thou hast looked on such
Felicia Hemans: A thousand voices echo “Peace!”
Felicia Hemans: Thousands doomed to moan, condemned by war to hopeless grief unknown
Felicia Hemans: War has still ravaged o’er the blasted plain
Mary Heron: Bid brazen-throated war and discord cease
Mary Heron: Ode on the General Peace
Martha Lavinia Hoffman: The Song of Peace
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”
Jean Ingelow: Methought the men of war were even as gods
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Zofia Kossak: Every creature has its day. War and crocodiles.
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Selma Lagerlöf: The mark of death was on them all
Vernon Lee: Satan’s rules of war
Lily Alice Lefevre: The Bridge of Peace
Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate
Isabella Lickbarrow: Invocation To Peace
Amy Lowell: A pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?
Caroline Atherton Mason: Enemy, oh, let our warfare cease!
Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conscientious Objector
Emily Huntington Miller: Hymn of Peace
Ruth Comfort Mitchell: He Went for a Soldier
Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace
Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
Lilika Nakos: Selections on war
Lilika Nakos: The dead man, the living, the house; all were smashed to bits
Lilika Nakos: Do I know what makes men kill each other?
Lilika Nakos: Do you think the war will ever end?
Lilika Nakos: The grandmother’s sin
Lilika Nakos: “Surely God didn’t intend this butchery”
Lilika Nakos: “What’s the war got to do with God?”
Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite
Sara Louisa Oberholtzer: The dawn of peace is breaking!
Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures
Amelia Opie: Grant, Heaven, those tears may be the last that war, detested war, shall cause!
Frances Sargent Osgood: Peace and the olive branch
Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!
Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease
Mary Robinson: Selections on war
Mary Robinson: Anticipate the day when ruthless war shall cease to desolate
Mary Robinson: Dread-destructive power of war
Mary Robinson: Impetuous War, the lord of slaughter
Mary Robinson: The soldier sheds, for gold, a brother’s blood
Mary Robinson: Spread once more the fostering rays of Peace
Mary Robinson: The wise shall bid, too late, the sacred olive rise
Christina Rossetti: They reap a red crop from the field. O Man, put up thy sword.
Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war
Vita Sackville-West: Man’s war on his fellow creatures
George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Anna Seward: Fierce War has wing’d the arrow that wounds my soul’s repose
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Kate Brownlee Sherwood: This one soft whisper – Peace
Louise Morgan Sill: I am the Hell-god, War!
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
M. B. Smedley: Where is the ministry of peace?
Charlotte Turner Smith: The lawless soldiers’ victims
Charlotte Turner Smith: Statesmen! ne’er dreading a scar, let loose the demons of war
Charlotte Turner Smith: Thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood!
Charlotte Turner Smith: To bathe his savage hands in human blood
Madame de Staël: Voting for war, pronouncing their own death sentence
Sara Teasdale: Spring in War-Time
Edith Matilda Thomas: Air war: They are not humans.
Edith Matilda Thomas: The Altar of Moloch
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
Phillis Wheatley: From every tongue celestial Peace resounds
Ellen Wheeler Wilcox: The Paean of Peace
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace
Jane Wilde: Peace with the Olive, and Mercy with the Palm
Helen Maria Williams: Heaven-born peace
Helen Maria Williams: Now burns the savage soul of war
Sarah Williams: Groaning for him they slew
Margaret L. Woods: The forgotten slain
For peace, against war: literary selections 
Thank you for all your effort!
And thank you in return for your consistent support. To avoid copyright infringement problems the list had to exclude most everything written (and translated) in the last 50-75 years.
Dear Rick, Thanks for reaching out. It’s good to know that you’re out there sharing resources to work against war as a solution to conflict. Will share your article’s link with the members of Women Against War who do the same work, with our website, listserve, lobbying, vigils and programs.
Thank you for the generous and encouraging message and for all you and your colleagues are doing in this most important of all work.
To avoid copyright infringement problems the list had to exclude most everything written (and translated) in the last 50-75 years.