Fifth Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Was a Woman
Nobel Peace Prize 1905
Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicita von Suttner, born Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau, Austria, 1843-1914
Author. Honorary President of the Permanent International Peace Bureau (Bureau International Permanent de la Paix), Bern. World famous for the novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down your Arms).
The biography below is quoted from Nobel Lectures, Peace 1901-1925, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972:
Wanting to «be of service to the Peace League ... [by writing] a book which should propagate its ideas», Bertha von Suttner went to work at once on a novel whose heroine suffers all the horrors of war; the wars involved were those of the author's own day on which she did careful research. The effect of Die Waffen nieder [Lay Down Your Arms], published late in 1889, was consequently so real and the implied indictment of militarism so telling that the impact made on the reading public was tremendous. And from this time on, its author became an active leader in the peace movement, devoting a great part of her time, her energy, and her writing to the cause of peace - attending peace meetings and international congresses, helping to establish peace groups, recruiting members, lecturing, corresponding with people all over the world to promote peace projects.
In 1891 she helped form a Venetian peace group, initiated the Austrian Peace Society of which she was for a long time the president, attended her first international peace congress, and started the fund needed to establish the Bern Peace Bureau.
In 1892, with A. H. Fried, she initiated the peace journal Die Waffen Nieder, remaining its editor until the end of 1899 when it was replaced by the Friedenswarte (edited by Fried) to which she regularly contributed comments on current events (Randglossen zur Zeitgeschichte) until she died. Also in 1892 she promised Alfred Nobel to keep him informed on the progress of the peace movement and, if possible, to convince him of its effectiveness. No doubt she felt that she was beginning to succeed when she received a letter from him in January of 1893, telling her about a peace prize he hoped to found, one which, after his death in 1896, his will showed he had indeed established.
Bertha von Suttner, along with her husband, worked hard to gain support for the Czar's Manifesto and the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, arranging public meetings, forming committees, lecturing. She sent accounts of the Conference itself to the Neue Freie Presse and to other papers, in other countries, and in the following year wrote articles and initiated meetings to popularize the idea of the Permanent Court of Arbitration set up by the Conference.
Although grief-stricken after her husband's death in 1902, she determined to carry on the work which they had so often done together and which he had asked her to continue.
She now left her quiet retirement in Vienna only on peace missions, which often included arduous speaking tours. She continued to write, but only for the cause of peace. By 1905 when she received the Nobel Peace Prize - at a fortuitous time financially - she was widely thought of as sharing the leadership of the peace movement with the venerable Passy. In the years that followed she played a prominent part in the Anglo-German Friendship Committee formed at the 1905 Peace Congress to further Anglo-German conciliation; she warned all who would listen about the dangers of militarizing China and of using the rapidly developing aviation as a military instrument; she contributed lectures, articles, and interviews to the International Club set up at the 1907 Hague Peace Conference to promote the movement's objectives among the Conference delegates and the general public; she spoke at the 1908 Peace Congress in London; and she repeated again and again that «Europe is one» and that uniting it was the only way to prevent the world catastrophe which seemed to be coming.
Read the entire biography at the Nobel Prize site.