The Women's Peace Crusade was a grass-root, feminist, anti-militarist and socialist campaign. Thousands of women took to the streets in towns across the country, demanding a negotiated and just peace. Children and young women from the local Socialist Sunday Schools swelled the Crusades. There were badges depicting the Angel of Peace and leaflets handed out. Choirs sang. The Crusades attracted crowds of over 2000 or 3000 women and children, peacefully marching but banging dustbin lids, waving banners and football rattles, singing hymns and handing out pacifist material. Often they were heckled, threatened and their demonstrations broken up. By the summer of 1917, more than a million leaflets donated by the Labour Press and the ILP, along with Peace 'buttons', had been distributed throughout the country. But by the winter of 1917, new regulations under the Defence of the Realm Act meant that many of the WPC leaflets were seized and it became illegal to print or distribute leaflets on the subjects of war and peace.

The Crusade was organised by an ad-hoc committee of socialist women led by socialist Ethel Snowden. From June 1917, she wrote a Crusade column in the Labour Leader which was edited by her fellow socialist Katherine Bruce Glasier (Fenner Brockway, the previous editor, was in prison as a conscientious objector). The Leader also published the number of casualties each week from 1917. The numbers are truly unbearable, 23,000 in one week alone, in August 1917, during the battle of Passchendaele. The Crusade made clear the links between militarism and the arms trade, businesses profiteering from the war, the lack of coal and food. It brought a political and socialist perspective to the fore.

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