Peoples Mandate Committee Records

Peoples Mandate to Governments to End War was an international campaign begun on September 6, 1935, by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to express such overwhelming opposition to war that governments would not dare resort to it as a means of solving disputes between nations. The project's goal was to secure fifty million signatures from the citizens of fifty countries. By 1937 the signatures from Europe alone numbered over 14 million.

In 1936 the U.S. section of the Peoples Mandate separated from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and became a distinct organization under the name of the Peoples Mandate to Governments to End War, Committee for the Western Hemisphere. The executive board included many well-known reformers and pacifists, such as Carrie Chapman Catt (honorary chairman), Mary E. Woolley (chairman), Grace Abbott, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Lillian Wald, and Mabel Vernon (director).

Vernon, an energetic worker for the Mandate Committee and a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, was director from the organization's inception in 1935. Her first goal was to organize a "Peace Caravan" of women to drive across the United States, gathering signatures and support. Pleased with the success of this project, Vernon organized a "Flying Caravan" to establish contacts with feminists, pacifists, and other women in Latin America, the following year. By the end of the decade Women's International League for Peace and Freedom International had abandoned the Mandate as a strategy for peace. The American Committee was renamed the Peoples Mandate for Inter-American Peace and Cooperation. As the new name suggests, the goals of the organization emphasized an improvement of relations between inhabitants of the Americas. This was to be accomplished by further work through women's groups on both continents. Between September 1948 and September 1949 the group's name changed to the Peoples Mandate Committee (U.S.).