When it really happened
The first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian writer and pacifist, and she received it in 1905. That was the fifth year the prizes were awarded, since the first Nobel Prizes were given in 1901. It was not a 1967 event. In fact no Peace Prize was awarded in either 1966 or 1967, because the Nobel Committee chose not to award it in those two years.
Von Suttner was the first woman to win the Peace Prize, though she was not the first woman to win any Nobel Prize: Marie Curie had received the physics prize in 1903, two years earlier. Von Suttner was the second woman to be honoured by the Nobel system, and the Peace Prize has since been among the prizes with the most women laureates.
Who Bertha von Suttner was
Bertha von Suttner was born in Prague in 1843 into an aristocratic family, and she was known before her marriage under the name Kinsky. She worked for a time as a governess in Vienna, where she fell in love with a younger member of the von Suttner family, and the relationship was opposed by his parents. The couple married secretly and spent years in the Caucasus region, earning a living by teaching and writing.
She later returned to Austria and became one of the leading voices of the peace movement in Europe. She died in June 1914, only weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, which she had spent much of her life trying to prevent.
The novel and the movement
Her best-known work is the novel Die Waffen nieder!, usually translated as Lay Down Your Arms, published in 1889. It tells the story of a woman whose life is shaped by a series of wars, and it was written to show the human cost of conflict in a way that reached ordinary readers. The book was widely read and translated, and it made her an international figure.
She did not stop at writing. She helped found the Austrian peace society, took part in international peace congresses, and wrote and edited peace publications. She supported the idea of arbitration between states, the principle that disputes should be settled by law and negotiation rather than by war.
The connection with Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and inventor who established the prizes in his will, knew von Suttner personally. She is reported to have worked briefly as his secretary in Paris in the 1870s before returning to Austria, and the two kept up a correspondence for many years. Their letters dealt with the peace movement, and she is often credited with being one of the people who influenced his thinking about it.
Nobel died in December 1896, and his will provided for a prize to the person who had done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding of peace congresses. Historians commonly note that she was among the people who shaped his views, though how much weight to give her influence is a matter of interpretation. She was an obvious candidate when the prizes began, and she received hers in 1905.
The women who followed
The list of women Peace laureates is a useful way to see how the Nobel record changed, though it is only a selection here. A few examples:
- Jane Addams (1931), an American social reformer and peace campaigner, who shared the prize.
- Emily Greene Balch (1946), an American economist and pacifist, who also shared the prize.
- Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, the Northern Irish peace campaigners, honoured for the 1976 prize.
- Mother Teresa (1979), recognised for her humanitarian work.
- Alva Myrdal (1982), a Swedish diplomat and disarmament campaigner, who shared the prize.
- Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), the Burmese opposition leader.
- Rigoberta Menchú (1992), a Guatemalan Indigenous rights activist.
- Wangari Maathai (2004), a Kenyan environmental and political campaigner.
- Malala Yousafzai (2014), who shared the prize and is often noted as the youngest laureate.
Later years brought further women to the list, among them campaigners and journalists. The prize has often been shared, so many of these women received it with other laureates.
The setting around 1967
It is worth putting the date in context. In the mid-1960s the Peace Prize had gone to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, a reminder of how closely the prize was tied to the civil rights movement. In 1966 and 1967 no prize was given at all, while the Vietnam War escalation and the arms race dominated the news. The absence of a laureate in those years is a plain fact of the record, and the Nobel Committee did not tie it to any one cause.
The prize returned in 1968, when it went to René Cassin, the French jurist who had been involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Why the Peace Prize is different
The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, while the other original prizes are awarded in Stockholm. Its criteria are broader and more political than those of the scientific prizes, and so the list of laureates is open to debate in a way that the sciences are not. Women have appeared on it from early on, and the pattern since then has been steady if uneven: some decades saw several women honoured, while others saw none.
Summary
Bertha von Suttner’s 1905 prize was the first awarded to a woman for peace, and it came from a combination of her novel, her organising and her personal link to the man who created the prize. The women who followed her worked in very different settings, from social reform to humanitarian work to human rights, and the broadening of the list reflects a wider change in how the committee understood the work of peace.