This world crisis came about without women having anything to do

Hear, O children of justice and sorrow, the bold words of Alice Paul: “This world crisis came about without women having anything to do with it. If the women of the world had not been excluded from world affairs, things today might have been different.” In these words lies both accusation and prophecy. For Paul, warrior of suffrage, saw that the calamities of the twentieth century—wars, greed, oppression—were the fruit of a world ruled only by men. The absence of women from councils of power was not accidental, but deliberate, and its cost was measured in blood.

For history has long borne witness to the exclusion of women from decision-making. Their voices silenced in parliaments, their wisdom dismissed in courts, their compassion barred from the councils of war. Men, wielding unchecked authority, plunged nations into chaos, from the trenches of the Great War to the rise of tyrants. Paul’s words strike like lightning: this crisis was not of women’s making. And yet women bore the suffering, burying sons, rebuilding homes, enduring hunger and ruin.

Consider the fate of World War I. It was declared and waged by men in power, yet women filled the factories, tilled the fields, and mended the broken. When the war ended, women were still denied the right to vote in many lands. Paul and her sisters in the suffrage movement cried out that if women’s voices had been present in the halls of power, perhaps nations would not have rushed so quickly to slaughter. Perhaps compassion, so often nurtured by women, would have tempered the lust for conquest.

History gives us glimpses of what might have been. In times when women leaders have held sway, voices of peace often rose. Consider Bertha von Suttner, whose book Lay Down Your Arms helped inspire the peace movement and earned her the Nobel Prize. Her vision was ignored by the statesmen of her day, but her voice proved what Paul declared: that women, when included, bring different truths to the table of the world.

Therefore, O seekers of wisdom, let this teaching burn within you: the crisis of the world is not inevitable, but shaped by who holds the pen, the sword, and the gavel. To exclude women is to rob humanity of half its wisdom, half its strength, half its compassion. Paul’s words echo through the ages: if women had not been silenced, things might have been different. And if women rise now to full equality in the affairs of nations, things yet will be different.