Oldfield, Sybil

About the author: Sybil Oldfield was born in London, half German, half English. Her German grandmother, a feminist, pacifist socialist, was placed under Schreibverbot during the Nazi dictatorship. Her mother was classified as an ‘enemy alien naturalized by her marriage’ in Britain in WWII. The family emigrated to New Zealand, where Oldfield had her high school and first University education. She returned to London to study under Barbara Hardy and has taught English and Women’s History at the new University of Sussex, UK, since it was founded in 1962. She is the author of the first annotated Bibliography of the Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550-1900, and is currently compiling the first Biographical Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians, 1900-1950.

Alternatives to Militarism 1900-1989 Women Against the Iron Fist Revised 2nd Edition

2000 0-7734-7765-9
This revised edition contains a new introduction by the author. This book describes the significant and previously undervalued contribution made by women to pacifist thought in this century. The work begins with an analysis of the set of beliefs underlying Bismarckian military doctrine, and goes on to contrast militarism with the pacifism of such prominent thinkers as Maude Royden, Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Scholl, Helen Keller, and Christa Wolf. The result is a fuller and more balanced account of pacifist thought, which is imbued with a vision of men and women working together in the common cause of humanity.