Universal peace—from a woman's standpoint

Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
BY BARONESS BERTHA VON SÜTTNER.
I have been requested to write a contribution to these pages with the above title. The subject of Universal Peace occupies my thoughts and actions so completely, and the opportunity of addressing myself to a circle of American readers is so welcome to me, that I was most willing to comply with the wish of the Editor, although I should certainly have chosen another title. For although it is self-evident that everything that a woman writes must be written from a woman’s standpoint, it does not agree with my principles to treat the problem of peace and war exclusively, or even principally, in its relations to the feelings and lives of women. Such relations certainly exist, and it will be of great service to the progress of the peace movement if women, as such, will oppose the institution hateful to mothers, and if women’s associations (as daily occurs more often) will place the questions of peace and arbitration on the order of the day at their meetings. But I believe that more and more women, who reflect upon this important subject, will leave the specifically feminine standpoint, to judge of this, so eminently the universal concern of humanity, from a more general point of view. It is only too natural that women should hate war, which robs them of the support and the joys of their existence, and for that very reason until to-day this hatred has done nothing towards the struggle against war; on the contrary, only such women as could triumph over their natural feelings of abhorrence, who, putting aside their own grief, could incite to war, or even themselves perform warlike deeds, only such women were brought into prominence by history; only these were praised, because, overcoming their egoism, they had performed their duty by performing brave deeds of sacrifice.
Women who cry, “War must cease because we suffer from it, because we may lose our dearest by it,” these, so long as war was looked upon as natural and serviceable to the fatherland, certainly stood morally lower than those who said: “What matters our misery, the common weal comes first;” or those who bade their sons: “Return home victorious or dead.”