cover image One Woman's Passion for Peace and Freedom: The Life of Mildred Scott Olmsted

One Woman's Passion for Peace and Freedom: The Life of Mildred Scott Olmsted

Margaret Hope Bacon. Syracuse University Press, $39.95 (394pp) ISBN 978-0-8156-0270-5

This biography of peace activist Mildred Scott Olmsted (1890-1990) is also a history of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), an organization founded in 1915 that continues to work for global peace today. Bacon ( The Story of Quaker Women in America ), who helped Olsted sort her private papers and conducted many interviews with her during the last decade of her life, provides a wealth of detail in a portrait that does justice to this remarkable woman. Although Olmsted's energy, capacity for hard work, stubbornness and persistence enabled her to build and expand the WILPF, they also made her a driven and difficult person, in Bacon's view. Her long marriage to Allen Olmsted, also an activist for social justice, was punctuated by frequent quarreling, and her three children felt that their mother was distant. Photos. (Dec.)