Born the Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau in Prague, then Austria (now the Czech Republic), the posthumous daughter of an Austrian army field marshal, Suttner spent the first half of her life accepting the military traditions which she would later try to subvert.

      As a young girl, Suttner studied languages and music and traveled. At age thirty, she decided to strike out on her own to relieve her mother of the financial burden of her care. She took a position as a governess for four girls in the Viennese Suttner household where she met her future husband, a younger son of the family. In 1873 she left briefly for a sojourn in Paris where she worked as Alfred Noble's secretary. They would remain life-long friends and correspondents. Bertha returned to Vienna to marry Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner over the objections of his family. The newlyweds left immediately for the Caucasus where they remained for nine years, often earning a precarious living by giving lessons in languages and music and eventually, and more successfully, by writing.

      In 1885 the Baron's family relented and the couple returned to Austria. Suttner became increasingly active in the campaign against the arms race. Continuing her correspondence with Noble, Suttner often expressed her fears that his invention would lead to increasingly deadly wars. Inspired by her work, Noble provided for the Noble Peace Prize in his will to honor a person "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congressess."

      Her well-researched anti-war novel, Lay Down Your Arms! (Die Waffen Nider) (1889), was an instant sensation; and its influence on the burgeoning peace movement has been likened to the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin on the anti-slavery movement. Eventually the work was translated into at least 27 languages. She did not limit her peace activities to writing, she founded the Society of the Friends of Peace (Gesellschaft der Friedensfreunde) in Austria and was the vice-president of the International Peace Bureau (Friedensbüro) in Bern.

Other women later received the Noble Peace Prize including:
1931	Jane Addams
1946	Emily Greene Balch
1976	Betty Williams
1976	Mairead Corrigan
1979	Mother Teresa
1982	Alva Myrdal
1991	Aung San Suu Kyi
1992	Rigoberta Menchu Tum
1997	Jody Williams

      Influential in the international peace conferences held throughout Europe, she lead an entire delegation of peace activists to the First Hague Convention of 1899. Despite being the only woman at the Convention, her voice and ideas were heard and the Convention ended with many successes: the creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (later to become the International Court of Justice), a convention on war for the protection of civilian populations, and the establishment of rules of conduct for war.

      Her international reputation for peace was so highly acclaimed that in a 1904 tour of the United States she was even received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. Although Suttner had inspired Noble to establish the Noble Peace Prize, ironically, she was not the first person to receive it even though she did finally receive it in 1905. Although she died just a few months before the beginning of World War I, her legacy endured. The Treaty of Versailles created the League of Nations, which, unfortunately, the United States did not join. After that false start, a more enduring institution dedicated to peace between nations, the United Nations, was created at the end of World War II. Numerous arms limitations treaties and military conventions have been adopted by many nations to ameliorate the worst aspects of war.

References:

      Think Quest

      Waging Peace

      Baronne et Amie... Letters of Alfred Nobel and Bertha von Suttner

For More Information:

          GoetheNet Bertha Suttner (1843-1914)

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