THE LIFE, WORKS, and political engagement of Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) offer an impressive example of female leadership, but also a drastic illustration of its failure. In a twist of tragic irony, Suttner's impassioned plea for peace, her much acclaimed novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms, 1889), was published not after but before the First World War. Unlike most famous pacifist novels, including Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1928) and Henri Barbusse's Le feu (Under Fire, 1916), Suttner's novel was not the result of the bitter experience of the Great War but rather a sign of great prescience. And yet it so clearly lacked the power to prevent the cataclysm it warned against.

In the following, I draw on theories of life writing, sovereignty, and leadership to ask how Bertha von Suttner justified her claim to moral and political authority in her activism for peace. I am interested in factors that helped Suttner become a successful political leader, such as her grounding in traditional forms of sovereignty through her aristocratic birth, her ability to define herself as a servant of a larger cause, her fantastic talent for networking and public relations, her unshakable conviction that change is possible, her profound respect for the importance of public opinion, her strategic optimism, her sense of humor, and, last but not least, her skillful navigation of gender codes. However, I am also interested in parsing the reasons for her failure to gain a wider platform, including her refusal to take seriously and engage with discourses of nationality and with the realities of capitalism, but also, and importantly, the barrage of sexism with which she was confronted on a daily basis. By parsing the theories of authors such as Paul Julius Möbius and Otto Weininger, I want to highlight a paradox at the heart of female activism for peace: although women are assumed to be innately inclined toward peace, they are not credited with the intellectual capabilities necessary to understand society nor granted the power and authority to transform it in accordance with a pacifist vision.