The Nobel Peace Prizes at their best set before us an array of great human spirits. The nine women Prizewinners clearly belong in this list. They come from a variety of backgrounds and represent a variety of forms of peace making.
The earliest of these heroines of peace was the Austrian baroness who inspired the Prize, while the most recent was the Indian from Guatemala who rose to leadership overcoming poverty and oppression. They include the woman regarded as the greatest of her generation in the United States; the scholar and reformer who was the acknowledged intellectual leader of the American peace movement; two Northern Irish advocates of nonviolence who made a dramatic effort to resolve the longstanding violent conflict in their land; a saintly missionary working in the slums of Calcutta; a Swedish social reformer who became a cabinet minister and ambassador; and a Burmese intellectual who led the opposition to a brutal military dictatorship.
They were not only of different nationalities and different classes, but of different faiths; among them were Catholics and freethinkers, a Buddhist and a Quaker. They worked against war in peace societies and in political life, as humanitarians and defenders of human rights. This small group of nine Laureates represents the diverse paths to peace which the Norwegian Nobel committees have recognized over the years. But they are most interesting in themselves; each has a fascinating story to tell.
The purpose of this paper is to consider the lives and peace efforts of these nine laureates, picturing them as the members of the Nobel Committee described them in presenting them with their prizes at the award ceremonies. Thereafter we shall reflect on what, if anything they had in common. In the Appendix are some notes on the contributions of other women, the wives and mothers of the men who won the Prize. But first a few words about Alfred Nobel's intentions regarding women and the Prize and how the Norwegian committee have followed his wishes in this respect.
Nobel, The Norwegian Nobel Committee, and Women Prizewinners
The story has often been told of how Nobel had long been interested in peace but how it was his friend the peace activist Baroness Bertha von Suttner, who drew his attention to the international movement against war which was becoming organized in the 1890s and secured his financial support for her peace activities.
In January 1893 he wrote her that he planned to set up a prize to be awarded "to him or her who would have brought about the greatest step toward advancing the pacification of Europe." In the will he drafted a few months later Nobel included a generous bequest for Baroness von Suttner's Austrian Peace Society and provided for prizes to be awarded every three years for intellectual and scientific achievements. These included efforts to promote the establishment of a European tribunal and were to be granted to the most deserving, whether "a Swede or a foreigner, a man or a woman."
In the final draft of his will, Nobel omitted the last clause, as well as the bequest for the Austrian Peace Society, but he set up a prize for peace as one of his five prizes, and he clearly expected the Baroness to receive it. Four awards were made, however, before she finally received the prize in 1905.
In 1901 and 1902 she was not even on the Committee's short list. In 1903 the Committee put her on the short list, but despite the support of most of the other peace leaders, who called her their "commander-in-chief," she was again passed over. In 1904 she lost out to the Institute of International Law, which added insult to injury, since when Nobel's will was being implemented, the Baroness, with her special knowledge of her friend's intentions, had strongly protested to the executors that Nobel had wanted the Prize to go only to individuals.
In a speech earlier that year Nobel Committee Chairman Jörgen Lövland, in referring to the awards to the veterans of the peace movement, had spoken of "the men who had done this work." Small wonder that the Baroness just about gave up hope and was much surprised when the gold ring finally came around to her in 1905. This was due to the special effort of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the great writer, who was a member of the committee.
When the Baroness came to deliver her Nobel lecture in the spring of 1906, Chairman Lövland, now foreign minister, spoke at the banquet about the great influence of women in history and how they could change the ideas of war and give men higher aims. It was however, twenty-six years later before the second woman, Jane Addams, was honored with the Prize.
Addams had first been nominated in 1916 for her efforts to bring the First World War to an end and repeatedly thereafter. In 1923 the Committee's adviser recommended her in his report, and she had a distinguished list of supporters, including Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Felix Frankfurter, Robert LaFollette and Sidney Webb, but no Prize was awarded for that year. Four more times she was on the short list before she shared the divided Prize of 1931 with Nicholas Murray Butler.
In the presentation speech, made in her absence, Professor Halvdan Koht said, "In honoring Jane Addams, we also render homage to the work which women can do for peace and human brotherhood." Apparently that was enough homage for the next fifteen years until in 1946 Emily Green Balchshared the Prize with John Mott of the YMCA. This time it took years for the next women laureates, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, even though the committee had had its first woman member since 1948.
During the thirty years Mrs. Aase Lionaes served on the Committee, chairing it the last ten, the Williams-Corrigan award was the only one to women. Since then the committee has done better, honoring Mother Teresa in 1979, Alva Myrdal in 1982, Aung Sang Suu Kyi in 1991, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum in 1992.
In the first 45 years of the Prizes, only three went to women, and of the 96 awards since 1901, only nine women have been Prizewinners. The committee's archives are open for research up to the Second World War, so we know that a number of women made the short list: The Quaker Priscilla Peckover and Annie Besant, theosophist and social reformer, both from England; from the United States, the peace activist Lucia Ames Mead, Belva Lockwood and Carrie Chapman Call and Elsa Brändström, the Swedish humanitarian.
Others who might have been considered in the period included Dr. Aletta Jacobs of the Netherlands, feminist and activist; the activist Helene Stöcker and the artist Käthe Kollwitz of Germany; Christian socialist Muriel Lester and author Vera Brittain of England; and feminist and writer Oliver Schreiner of South Africa.
In the years following the Second World War, there were several well qualified women candidates who were not named. In 1947 there was a proposal with the Cold War in mind, to share the prize between Eleanor Roosevelt who had done distinguished work on human rights in the United States and Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet diplomat who had contributed to ending the Soviet-Finnish War. In 1948 Rosika Schwimmer of Hungary, who began her peace campaigning during the First World War, was nominated by a number of European parliamentarians.
While it is true that during all these years it was difficult for a woman to rise to prominence in a male world, the Norwegian Nobel committees were apparently not without prejudice.
Reference
- http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/peace/heroines/index.html
Emily Greene Balch was a colleague of Jane Addams' in the effort to stop the First World War, her partner in the work of WILPF, and successor as its leader. In 1946 she herself shared a prize with the YMCA leader, John Mott. It came to her as the result of a successful campaign organized at the request of WILPF by its member, Mercedes Randall, who did a remarkable job of bringing Balch's indisputable qualifications before the Nobel committee and securing a large number of prominent supporters.
