National sections of WILPF have been formed in several countries throughout the world, and it has been in these national sections that women have organized themselves for peace work at the grass-roots level. The files in Series III, which is the largest series in the WILPF Papers, contain materials on WILPF's national sections, and on other countries in which WILPF attempted to organize women and men for peace.
Since these records come from WILPF's international office in Geneva, Switzerland, the researcher will find a great amount of information not only on the organization and activities of WILPF's work in different countries, but also on the interaction between international WILPF and its national sections. There is also valuable documentation of occasional conflicts that appeared between a national section and international WILPF, between two national sections, or within a national section. Perhaps the major virtue of the materials in these files lies in their depiction of the frustrations, the agonies, the suffering, and the glimmers of hope encountered by women and men who have struggled to keep the peace movement alive in the face of the turmoil of twentieth-century international politics.
The files in Series III contain primarily correspondence between individuals in specific countries and the international office of WILPF. There is also a quantity of other types of materials like reports and resolutions of national sections; other reports dealing with specific topics; newsletters, annual reports, circular letters, press releases, and other publications of WILPF's national sections; printed matter like pamphlets, leaflets, flyers, broadsides, article reprints, and newspaper clippings; minutes of meetings within the national sections; lists of members; and financial records.
There are files in Series III on 96 different countries. For the 20 countries in Series III that have the most materials, individual descriptions have been added that detail topics, types of materials, and correspondents found in the files on that country.
The researcher should note that the amount of materials on the countries in Series III varies widely. In several countries, WILPF was unable to establish national sections because of a lack of either interest or the human and financial resources required to do so. Files on countries in which WILPF failed to establish national sections thus tend to contain very few items.
The files on national sections, on the other hand, usually contain a greater number of items. However many of the national sections that were established, especially in the European countries, were disbanded during the Second World War and reorganized thereafter. As a result, files on the national sections often contain significant gaps during the World War II period. In the case of an eastern European nation whose peace work was curtailed first by World War II and then by Soviet restrictions after the war, like Poland, the great majority of materials will date from before World War II when there was still an active Polish section of WILPF. The researcher can get a clear idea of the amount and scope of materials for each country by looking at the number of files for that country, years covered, and -in pertinent cases-the individual descriptions.