A twenty-eight-year-old freelance journalist was trying to get a serious assignment. She wanted to write about politics. She wanted to write about the growing civil rights movement.
But the male editors at the major magazines just laughed at her. They told her she was too pretty to be a serious reporter. They handed her assignments about nylon stockings, dating tips, and how to cook for a husband.
She realized that the media establishment was never going to give her a seat at the table. So, she decided to blow up the table.
She shoved her feet into three-inch stiletto heels. She strapped herself into a suffocatingly tight satin bodice. She pinned a fluffy white tail to her back and put on a pair of fake ears.
Her name was Gloria Steinem.
She went undercover as a "Bunny" at Hugh Hefner's wildly popular Playboy Club in Manhattan.
The media had spent years selling the Playboy Club as the ultimate symbol of glamorous, liberated, modern sexuality. Gloria didn't buy it. She suspected it was just the same old exploitation wrapped in a shiny new bow.
She was right.
She spent weeks working inside the club, taking meticulous notes. She documented the grueling physical demands, the rampant, normalized sexual harassment from customers, and the mathematically rigged wage system that kept the women broke and dependent on the club.
But exposing the Playboy Club wasn't her endgame. It was just her opening act.
Gloria realized that as long as she was writing for magazines owned and edited by men, she would always be playing by their rules. The stories that actually mattered to women domestic violence, workplace discrimination, the fight for reproductive rights were considered "unprintable" by the mainstream press.
So, in 1971, she joined forces with a group of fierce, radical women to do something unprecedented.
They launched their own magazine.
They called it Ms. The title itself was a rebellion. At the time, women were defined entirely by their marital status Miss if you were single, Mrs. if you belonged to a man. Ms. was a declaration of independence.
The male publishing executives predicted the magazine would be a catastrophic failure. They gave it a month.
The preview issue sold out of its 300,000-copy run in just eight days.
Ms. magazine gave an entire generation of women the vocabulary to articulate their oppression. It became the beating heart of the second-wave feminist movement.
Gloria became the most famous feminist in the world. With her signature aviator glasses and streaked hair, she weaponized the very same conventional attractiveness that the media had tried to use to dismiss her. She forced the television cameras to pay attention, and when they rolled, she hit them with razor-sharp, unapologetic political demands.
She spent decades traveling the globe, organizing strikes, marching for the Equal Rights Amendment, and building a movement that spanned class and racial lines.
She is now in her nineties, and she has never stopped fighting.
As she famously warned: "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
She taught us that if the establishment refuses to let you tell your story, you don't lower your voice. You build your own printing press.
She was the brilliant political journalist who went undercover in a bunny suit to expose an exploitative empire, and then forged a publishing revolution that fundamentally changed what it meant to be a woman in America."
SOURCE: Giggle Grid FB page
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"As a woman I am extremely aware that the reason I have my rights is because a woman somewhere got up, got MOUTHY, organised, raged, made herself INCREDIBLY inconvenient until things changed for the better for all of us. Which is precisely why I see women who uphold the patriarchy as traitors to all women. It's wild how some women are so quick to benefit from the sacrifices of others, yet they won't lift a finger to challenge the system.
These women are complicit in their own oppression, and it's heartbreaking. They're perpetuating the same toxic ideologies that have held us back for centuries. Newsflash: if you're not actively working to dismantle the patriarchy, you're contributing to it.
We need to call out these women, not celebrate them. We need to recognize the harm they're causing and encourage them to do better. The women who fought for our rights didn't do it so we could be silent accomplices to the system.
How do you think we can hold women accountable for upholding the patriarchy?
SOURCE: FB page Real Point
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Portland, Oregon! Showing up for multiracial democracy! For Renee Good and the people of Minneapolis! Out against the nightmare of violent authoritarian rule.
"The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.
In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.
To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.
Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.
Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.
But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.
When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.
When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.
Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”
This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed." Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.
A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.
In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.
“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.
For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.
For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.
February 6th is the birthdayof British paleoanthropologistMary Douglas Leakey, born Mary Douglas Nicol in London (1913). Her father was an artist, and she spent her childhood traveling with her parents as he searched for new landscapes to paint. Nicol also took on his daughter’s education — reading, math, and natural science — and encouraged her interest in archaeology. Mary demonstrated a precocious gift for drawing, even at a very young age. Rather than following her father’s career path, however, she used her talent to break into the field of archaeology — literally. She was hired as an illustrator on a dig site in England when she was 17.
Her drawing skills eventually led to a job illustrating a book called Adam’s Ancestors (1934). The book’s author was an archaeologist and anthropologist named Louis Leakey. The two married in 1937, forming a personal — as well as professional — partnership. Soon after their marriage, they moved to Tanzania, where Louis was scheduled to begin work on the Olduvai Gorge. Mary Leakey worked in East Africa for most of the rest of her life. She was particularly interested in primitive art and artifacts, but she had a real knack for finding fossils. She led the digs that resulted in two of the most important hominid discoveries in Africa: Australopithecus boisei and homo habilis.
Louis Leakey died in 1972, but Mary continued their work without him for over two more decades: excavating and cataloging, but also lecturing and fundraising. She published two books after her husband’s death: Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man (1979); and her autobiography, Disclosing the Past (1984). She retired to Nairobi in 1983, and died in 1996.
In March 1933, the Red Room of the White House overflowed with women—reporters sitting cross‑legged on the carpet, leaning against walls, balancing notebooks on their knees. The manager of the Associated Press scoffed at the sight, predicting the whole experiment wouldn’t last six months. He was wrong by about twelve years. Eleanor Roosevelt’s strategy was deceptively simple: if news organizations wanted access to the First Lady—if they wanted to know what was happening inside the White House—they would have to hire women. No exceptions. No men allowed.
At first, she played along with the expectations of the male establishment, discussing White House social events, household decisions, and the entertaining of foreign dignitaries—topics deemed appropriate for the “women’s pages.” But everything changed when Prohibition ended. When reporters asked President Franklin Roosevelt whether beer would be served at the White House, he simply smiled and said, “Ask Eleanor.” She delivered the answer at her next women‑only press conference, forcing male reporters to beg their female colleagues for details. And she didn’t stop with beer. Week after week, she made real news—defending equal pay for equal work, advocating for low‑cost housing, speaking boldly about civil rights, and championing the idea of a minimum wage before it existed.
The press conferences quickly became essential. The Associated Press hired Bess Furman. United Press brought on Ruby Black. The New York Herald Tribune sent Emma Bugbee for “a few days,” and she stayed for months, her stories landing on the front page. Newsrooms across the country suddenly discovered that women could do the job—and that if they didn’t hire them, they couldn’t cover the First Lady. Over twelve years, Eleanor Roosevelt held 348 women‑only press conferences. Ruby Black called it “a New Deal for newswomen.”
But Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence didn’t end there. After FDR’s death in 1945, President Harry Truman appointed her as a delegate to the newly formed United Nations. Her male colleagues, assuming she posed little threat, assigned her to Committee III, which handled humanitarian and cultural issues—“soft” topics they believed would keep her out of the way. They were disastrously mistaken. She was unanimously elected chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
For three years, she navigated the treacherous landscape of early Cold War politics, uniting eighteen nations with clashing ideologies, competing interests, and deep mistrust. Communist states faced off against Western democracies. Colonial powers negotiated alongside newly independent nations. Delegates brought different religions, cultures, and definitions of “human rights.” Through it all, she listened, negotiated, compromised when possible, and stood firm when necessary.
On December 10, 1948, she presented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN General Assembly. The vote was overwhelming: forty‑eight nations in favor, none opposed. As the results were announced, every delegate rose in a standing ovation. Eleanor Roosevelt called the document “an international Magna Carta for all mankind.” Seventy‑six years later, it remains the foundation of international human rights law, translated into more than 500 languages and defining the fundamental rights belonging to every person on Earth.
Eleanor Roosevelt considered it (The Declaration of Human Rights) her greatest achievement—and she was right. Her journey is astonishing: from a woman holding press conferences in a crowded White House parlor because there weren’t enough chairs, to the architect of the document that defines human dignity for the world. From male reporters smirking in doorways, to male diplomats rising to applaud. From being dismissed as a housewife dabbling in politics, to drafting the moral framework of the modern era.
Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t just break glass ceilings. She built ladders so others could climb after her. And when those ladders reached high enough, she used them to lift the entire world.
A foundational text in thehistory of human and civil rights, the Declaration consists of 30 articles detailing an individual's "basicrightsand fundamental freedoms" and affirming their universal character as inherent, inalienable, and applicable to all human beings.Adopted as a "common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations", the UDHR commits nations to recognize all humans as being "born free and equal in dignity and rights" regardless of "nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status".
The Declaration is generally considered to be a milestone document for its universalist language, which makes no reference to a particular culture, political system, or religion. It directly inspired the development of international human rights law, and was the first step in the formulation of the International Bill of Human Rights, which was completed in 1966 and came into force in 1976. Although not legally binding, the contents of the UDHR have been elaborated and incorporated into subsequent international treaties, regional human rights instruments, and national constitutions and legal codes
All 193 member states of the UN have ratified at least one of the nine binding treaties influenced by the Declaration, with the vast majority ratifying four or more. While there is a wide consensus that the declaration itself is non-binding and not part of customary international law, there is also a consensus in most countries that many of its provisions are part of customary law, although courts in some nations have been more restrictive in interpreting its legal effect. Nevertheless, the UDHR has influenced legal, political, and social developments on both the global and national levels, with its significance partly evidenced by its 530 translations.
At time of ratification in 1948, a map of countries how they voted.
Voting in the plenary season: Green countries voted in favor. Orange countries abstained. Black Countries failed to abstain or vote. Grey countries were not a part of the UN at time of voting.
Photograph of Countess Bertha Sophie Felicitas Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau in her youth (1873)
Bertha Kinský was the daughter of minor nobility, and her father (who was more than 45 years older than her mother) died before her birth.
In 1855, Bertha's maternal aunt Charlotte (also a widow), and her daughter Elvira joined the household.She was of a similar age as Bertha and interested in intellectual pursuits, introducing her cousin to literature and philosophy. In addition to such studies, Bertha gained proficiency in French, Italian and English as an adolescent under the supervision of a succession of private tutors. She also became an accomplished amateur pianist and singer.
Bertha's mother and aunt, regarding themselves as clairvoyant, went to gamble at Wiesbaden in the summer of 1856, hoping to return with a fortune. Their losses proved so heavy that they were forced to move to Vienna, then they had to relocate to a small property in Klosterneuburg.
In 1864, the family spent the summer at Bad Homburg, a fashionable gambling destination among the aristocracy of the era.
In 1866 both Landgrave Fürstenberg (Bertha's guardian) and Elvira died, and Bertha (now at age 23, above the typical age of marriage) felt increasingly constrained by her mother's eccentricity and the family's poor financial circumstances.
In 1873, she found employment as a tutor at the house of Karl von Suttner (1819–1898). They had seven children, including four girls. Bertha became companion to the four girls and had an affectionate relationship with her four young students, who nicknamed her "Boulotte" (fatty) due to her size, a name she would later adopt as a literary pseudonym in the form "B. Oulot".
She soon fell in love with the youngest son of Karl, seven years her junior, BaronArthur Gundaccar von Suttner(1850–1902). They were engaged but unable to marry due to his parents' disapproval.
In 1876, with the encouragement of her employers, she answered a newspaper advertisement which led to her briefly becoming secretary and housekeeper to Alfred Nobel in Paris.
In the few weeks of her employment, she and Nobel developed a friendship, and Nobel may have made romantic overtures.
However, she remained committed to Arthur and returned shortly to Vienna to marry him in secrecy, in the church of St. Aegyd in Gumpendorf.As a consequence Arthur von Suttner was desinherited by his family and lost the title of Freiherr.
The newlywed couple eloped to Mingrelia in western Georgia, Russian Empire, near the Black Sea....where they found work teaching languages and music to the children of the local aristocracy. However, they experienced considerable hardship despite their social connections, living in a simple three-roomed wooden house.
Arthur and Bertha von Suttner
Arthur and Bertha von Suttner were largely socially isolated in Georgia; their poverty restricted their engagement with high society, and neither ever became fluent speakers of Mingrelian or Georgian.
Her first significant political work, Inventarium einer Seele ("Inventory of the Soul"), was published in Leipzig in 1883. In this work, Suttner takes a pro-disarmament, progressive stance, arguing for the inevitability of world peace due to technological advancement; a possibility also considered by her friend Nobel due to the increasingly deterrent effect of more powerful weapons. (Note, no Nobel prizes had been yet devised by him!)
In 1884, Suttner's mother died, leaving the couple with further debts...after the Bulgarian Crisis began in 1885 the couple felt increasingly unsafe in Georgian society, which was becoming more hostile to Austrians due to Russian influence. They finally reconciled with Arthur's family and in May 1885 could return to Austria, where the couple lived at Harmannsdorf Castle in Lower Austria.
Bertha found refuge in her marriage with Arthur, of which she remarked that "the third field of my feelings and moods lay within our married happiness... We had each other – that was everything."
In 1889, Suttner became a leading figure in the peace movement with the publication of her pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), which made her one of the leading figures of the Austrian peace movement. The book was published in 37 editions and translated into 15 languages. She witnessed the foundation of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and called for the establishment of the Austrian Gesellschaft der Friedensfreunde pacifist organisation in an 1891 Neue Freie Presse editorial. Suttner became chairwoman and also founded the German Peace Society the next year. She became known internationally as the editor of the international pacifist journal Die Waffen nieder!, named after her book, from 1892 to 1899. In 1897, she presented Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria with a list of signatures urging the establishment of an International Court of Justice and took part in the First Hague Convention in 1899 with the help of Theodor Herzl, who paid for her trip as a correspondent of the Zionist newspaper, Die Welt.[32]
Upon her husband's death in 1902, Suttner had to sell Harmannsdorf Castle and moved back to Vienna. In 1904 she addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin and for seven months travelled around the United States, attending a universal peace congress in Boston and meeting President Theodore Roosevelt.
Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief, she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed that Von Suttner was a major influence on his decision to include a peace prize among those prizes provided in his will. Bertha von Suttner was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 1905. The presentation took place on 18 April 1906 in Kristiania, what is now Oslo, Norway.
In 1907, Von Suttner was the only woman to attend the Second Hague Peace Conference, which mainly pertained to the law of war. Von Suttner was actually highly critical of the 1907 conference and warned of a war to come. When she accepted her Nobel Peace prize a year earlier, she had said: "(…) whether our Europe will become a showpiece of ruins and failure, or whether we can avoid this danger and so enter sooner the coming era of secure peace and law in which a civilisation of unimagined glory will develop. The many aspects of this question are what the second Hague Conference should be discussing rather than the proposed topics concerning the laws and practices of war at sea, the bombardment of ports, towns, and villages, the laying of mines, and so on. The contents of this agenda demonstrate that, although the supporters of the existing structure of society, which accepts war, come to a peace conference prepared to modify the nature of war, they are basically trying to keep the present system intact".
Around this time, she also crossed paths with Anna Bernhardine Eckstein, another German champion of world peace, who influenced the agenda of the Second Hague Peace Conference. A year later she attended the International Peace Congress in London, where she first met Caroline Playne, an English anti-war activist who would later write the first biography of Suttner.
In the run-up to World War I, Suttner continued to campaign against international armament. In 1911 she became a member of the advisory council of the Carnegie Peace Foundation. In the last months of her life, while suffering from cancer, she helped organise the next Peace Conference, intended to take place in September 1914. However, the conference never took place, as she died of cancer on 21 June 1914, and seven days later the heir to her nation's throne, Franz Ferdinand was killed, triggering World War I.
Suttner's pacifism was influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Henry Thomas Buckle, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy praised Die Waffen nieder!) conceiving peace as a natural state impaired by the human aberrances of war and militarism. As a result, she argued that a right to peace could be demanded under international law and was necessary in the context of an evolutionary Darwinist conception of history. Suttner was a respected journalist, with one historian describing her as "a most perceptive and adept political commentator".
Writing
To promote her writing career and ideals, she used her connections in aristocracy and friendships with wealthy individuals, such as Alfred Nobel, to gain access to international heads of state, and also to gain popularity for her writing. To increase the financial success of her writing, she used a male pseudonym early in her career. In addition, Suttner often worked as a journalist to publicise her message or promote her own books, events, and causes.
As Tolstoy noted and others have since agreed, there is a strong similarity between Suttner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both Beecher Stowe and Suttner "were neither simply writers of popular entertainment nor authors of tendentious propaganda.... [They] used entertainment for idealistic purposes."[39] For Suttner, peace and acceptance of all individuals and all peoples was the greatest ideal and theme.
Suttner also wrote about other issues and ideals. Two common issues in her work, apart from pacifism, are religion and gender equality.
Religion
There are two main issues with religion that Suttner often wrote about. She had a disdain for the spectacle and pomp of some religious practices. In a scene in Lay Down Your Arms she highlighted the odd theatricality of some religious practices. In the scene, the emperor and empress are washing the feet of normal citizens to show they are as humble as Jesus, but they invite everyone to witness their show of humility and enter the hall in a dramatic fashion. The protagonist Martha remarks that it was "indeed a sham washing."
Another issue prominent in much of her writing is the idea that war is righteously for God, and leaders often use religion as a pretext for war. Suttner criticised this reasoning on the grounds that it placed the state as the important entity to God rather than the individual, thereby making dying in battle more glorious than other forms of death or surviving a war. Much of Lay Down Your Arms discusses this topic.
This type of religious thinking also leads to segregation and fighting based on religious differences, which Bertha and Arthur von Suttner refused to accept. As a devout Christian, Arthur founded the League Against Anti-Semitism in response to the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the growing antisemitism across Europe. The Suttner family called for acceptance of all people and all faiths, with Suttner writing in her memoirs that "religion was neighbourly love, not neighbourly hatred. Any kind of hatred, against other nations or against other creeds, detracted from the humaneness of humanity."
Gender equality
Suttner is often considered a leader in the women's liberation movement.[42]
Von Suttner broke through sex barriers by her work as a writer and activist. She was an outspoken leader in a society in which women were to be seen, not be heard. But she did not actively participate in the movements for women's suffrage, for instance, which she explained due to a lack of time. She instead focused on reaching out to other women in the international peace movement, though she kept close contact to the women's suffrage movement. As a sign of joint solidarity, for instance, Von Suttner was a prominent participant of the 1904 "International Women's Conference" ("Internationale Frauen-Kongress") in Berlin. Von Suttner knew, though, that conflict can only be avoided if both men and women together struggle for peace, which required an absolute belief in sex equality. "The tasks involved in mankind's continuing ennoblement are such that they can only be fulfilled through fair and equal cooperation between the sexes", she wrote.
In Lay Down Your Arms, the protagonist Martha often clashes with her father on this issue. Martha does not want her son to play with toy soldiers and be indoctrinated to the masculine ideas of war. Martha's father attempts to put Martha back in the female sexed box by suggesting that the son will not need to ask for approval from a woman, and also states that Martha should marry again because women her age should not be alone.
This was not simply because she insisted that women are equal to men, but that she was able to tease out how sexism affects both men and women. Like Martha being placed in a female structured sex box, the character of Tilling is also placed in the male stereotyped box and affected by that. The character even discusses it, saying, "we men have to repress the instinct of self-preservation. Soldiers have also to repress the compassion, the sympathy for the gigantic trouble which invades both friend and foe; for next to cowardice, what is most disgraceful to us is all sentimentality, all that is emotional."
Legacy
Suttner's work proved very influential for those involved in the peace movement.
She has also been commemorated on several coins and stamps:
She was selected as a main motif for a high value collectors' coin: the 2008 Europe Taler, which featured important people in the history of Europe. Also depicted in the coin are Martin Luther, Antonio Vivaldi, and James Watt.
A commemorative silver 10 euro coin was issued in Germany in honor of the centennial of her Nobel Prize.[43]
She is depicted on the Austrian 2 euro coin, and was pictured on the old Austrian 1,000 schilling bank note.
She was commemorated on a 1965 Austrian postage stamp, a 2005 German postage stamp and a 2013 Czech postage stamp.
There is a statue in her honor in Vienna and one in Graz.
In 2025, the European Central Bank announced two themes for a future redesign of Euro banknotes: "European culture" and "Rivers and birds". They also announced that von Suttner had been selected to appear on the obverse of 200 euro banknotes if the "European culture" theme is selected.[45]
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