When the Inhabitants of a City Are United: 'Abdu'l-Bahá to American Women on Peace

In Issue 8 of Volume 5 of the *Star of the West,* dated the first of August, 1914 — the very week the long peace of Europe broke into the catastrophe of the Great War — the editors printed a Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed to a body of American Bahá'í women on the question of their duties in the work of universal peace.

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The timing, in retrospect, is striking. The friends in Chicago were reading the Tablet in the same days that the German army was crossing the Belgian frontier and the British were declaring war. The Master's words, written some time earlier from 'Akká, suddenly took on the weight of a reading of the disaster that had just begun.

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He opened with the diagnosis the Western world had not yet been ready, in peacetime, to hear.

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> Today the greatest affliction of the world is war.

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The sentence was not, in 1914, a platitude. It had become, in the first weeks of the war, a description of what the friends were now watching unfold. The dispatches from the Continent were filling the American papers. The boys, on both sides, were beginning to die.

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The Master then turned to the question of women's particular contribution. He did not frame it as a sentimental observation about feminine moral superiority. He framed it as a structural argument. The capacity of any society for high achievement — in peace as in everything else — is bounded by the capacity of the half of its population that has been excluded from public participation.

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> If the community of women attains advancement and power, many > matters that are now beyond our capacity will be accomplished.

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The clear implication: the prevention of the kind of war the world was now beginning was one of those matters. As long as the governments of the world were composed entirely of men, and as long as the political imagination of those governments proceeded from the warrior's mental habits, the move toward disarmament and arbitration that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been advocating for decades would not be made. The advancement of women — their entry into the public business of decision — would change the calculation.

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He turned then to the practical scale on which the work was to begin. He did not address the women as if their work was first of all in the parliaments of nations. He addressed them at the scale of the house and the city.

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> When the people of one house show affection toward each > other, how beneficial it is; when the inhabitants of a city > are united and harmonious, how much mutual assistance results.

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The order is incremental. The peace of the world is not built first in the diplomatic conference. It is built first in the household where mother and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister have learned to extend the affection the wider political world has not yet learned to imitate. The peaceful city is the sum of its peaceful houses. The peaceful nation follows.

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The American women who received the Tablet in 1914 — many of whom were just then beginning to organize the suffrage campaigns that would in 1920 give them the vote — read it as a charter for their own slow public work. The world they had been called to build was not, in the first place, the world of their own ambition. It was the world the Master had foretold and the world the war had now made indispensable.

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