Google Doodle is celebrating Austrian Baroness Bertha von Suttner, who first female Nobel Peace Prize winner

Google Doodle is celebrating Austrian author and activist Baroness Bertha von Suttner on 10th December 2019. Bertha von Suttner became the first female Nobel Peace Prize winner on this day in 1905.

Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner was an Austrian-Bohemian pacifist and novelist. In 1905 she became the second female Nobel laureate (after Marie Curie in 1903), the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian laureate.

Bertha von Suttner was born as Countess Bertha Kinsky in Prague on June 9, 1843, she studied music and languages in her young years. At age 30, she moved to Vienna to work as a tutor in the von Suttner family home, where she met her future husband, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. As the family didn’t support the couple, she left for Paris to work as Alfred Nobel’s secretary, and however it was just a brief stay, she stayed in contact with the philanthropist for a long time.

Bertha von Suttner became a leading figure in peace activism at the turn of the 20th century with the publication of her anti-war novel, Lay Down Your Arms. She proceeded with her endeavors as a public speaker and played a key role in the formation of the first Hague Peace Conference and the Nobel Peace Prize. For her endeavors in the peace movement, she got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.

Furtively getting married in 1876, the Baron and Baroness von Suttner read evolutionist literature together, prompting the Baroness to begin writing novels, short stories, and essays concentrated on social complaints and pacifism. In her 1889 book Die Waffen Nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), which is viewed as her most well-known work, portrays the brutal realities of war from a woman’s point of view.

Unafraid by the restriction that discredited pacifism as a woman’s issue, Baroness Bertha von Suttner kept on pushing for peace by establishing the Austrian Peace Society and attending the 1891 Peace Congress. Her work put her at the front line of the peace movement, and Nobel later acknowledged her devotion as part of the explanation he made the Nobel Peace Prize, which was first awarded in 1901.

Bertha von Suttner died of stomach cancer on June 21, 1914. Just weeks after her passing, the death of the beneficiary to the Austrian domain propelled World War I, an occasion that no uncertainty would have carried incredible distress to the advocate of peace. Notwithstanding such an unforeseen development, Suttner’s contributions to the peace movement were not futile. Her writings and organizational endeavors prompted various achievements in the battle for peace, especially by picking up help for peaceful goals among the overall population as well as political and intellectual figures. The Hague Peace Conferences and the Nobel Peace Prize have become yearly conventions that support the expectation of peace to which Suttner devoted her life.

Today, the Bertha von Suttner Peace Institute in The Hague proceeds with the work she began such a significant number of years prior.