International Congress of Women

Hubertine Auclert wrote a speech calling for the right to vote for French women, but was not allowed to present it to the Congress.

[3] Emily Venturi gave a memorable closing speech, in which she declared Last evening a gentleman who seemed a bit skeptical about the advantages of our congress asked me, ‘Well Madame, what great truth have you proclaimed to the world?’ I replied to him, ‘Monsieur, we have proclaimed a woman is a human being.’ He laughed.

[4] The Congress was divided into 5 sections—each with their own individual area of focus for programming: Education, Professional, Political, Social, and Industrial and Legislative.

[7] At the Berlin conference, Mary Church Terrell gave her speech titled “Progress and Problems of Colored Women.

[9] Another important figure of the women's movement during the early 1900s who spoke at that conference was, Carrie Chapman Catt.

Notable speakers included Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cadbury, Anna Hvoslef, Millicent Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, Rosalie Slaughter Morton, Eliza Ritchie, Alice Salomon, and May Wright Sewall.

[15] Other attendees included Lida Gustava Heymann, one of 28 delegates from Germany; Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Emily Hobhouse and Chrystal Macmillan from Great Britain; Rosika Schwimmer a Hungarian pacifist and feminist who won the World Peace Prize in 1937;[15] Aletta Jacobs from Holand was another voice during this conference that spoke with other European women about promoting peace and then Emilia Fogelklou.

[16] Rosa Genoni was representing a number of Italian women's organizations, and she was one of the delegates nominated as envoys to visit belligerent and non-belligerent governments after the Congress to advocate for a halt to the war.

[16] In September 1915 a delegation went to the United States to meet president Woodrow Wilson to present the proposal for a "League of Neutral Counties" that could help mediating to end the war.

One member commented that the German delegation was ‘scarred and shrivelled by hunger and privation, they were scarcely recognizable’.