This contribution comprises Documentation of the launch of Peace with the Earth, an English translation of the 1940 pamphlet Fred med jorden by the Swedish suffragettes and peace activists Elisabeth Tamm and Elin Wägner, at the 2021 PARSE conference on Violence.
The launch was hosted by Gothenburg university librarians AnnaLena Bergquist and Sanna Hellgren, together with editor of the pamphlet and HDK-Valand doctoral researcher in artistic practice Åsa Sonjasdotter. In addition, it included a performative presentation by artist and researcher Åsa Elzén.
Elin Wägner and Elisabeth Tamm by Hjälmaresund, Fogelstad, August, 1921, photographer unknow Reproduced with the kind permission of KvinnSam, the National Resource Library for Gender Studies, The University Library, Gothenburg.
Peace with the Earth was written at the outbreak of the World War II by the Swedish suffragettes and peace activists Elin Wägner (1882–..) who was an author, and Elisabeth Tamm (1880– ..) who was a politician and a practised organic farming. This English translation is the first edition in another language. It is published by Archive Books, a community invested in un-weaving repressive narratives and reclaiming the archive itself as a tool for un-fixing, de-archiving and re-archiving through non-hegemonic models.
The wish to translate and make this pamphlet available to a wider audience today has several reasons. The place it speaks from is not often referred to, neither in history writing and political theory, nor in the fields of agronomy or environmental studies. It gathers experiences made in the interrelated movements for women’s suffrage, peace, and organic farming taking place as resistance-from-within the aggressing imperial powers during the first half of the twentieth century. The participants of this network were radical, intellectual, non-conforming women, many of whom would most probably would call themselves queer today. They operated between and across established, accepted and legally sanctioned societal structures such as patriarchal family orders, scientific disciplines, political parties, and religious communities, which means that their actions are poorly documented.
The activists of this movement recognized that war and war-like relations cannot be undone until patriarchal and colonial relations are overcome. They also recognized that, as Wägner states in the introductory chapter: ‘This involves a paradigm shift and all that it entails in terms of social change’.
The still ongoing and to incomprehensible scales escalating exploitation of Earthly life by corporate, state sanctioned powers, re-actualise the call of this pamphlet. To translate and re-read it across languages, countries and practices today is a way to reconnect to the wider discussions that the learnings captured in this pamphlet have emerged from, for the current debate to gain continuity, debt and scope. What have stirred the wish to re-visit the debates of this movement is the analysis of how, in order to overcome violent, extractive relations, peace not only between all people on the Earth is necessary, but as much with the Earth itself.
