Illustrating Paths Toward Peace in Times of War

Jamie Stiehm on Mar 13, 2024

Like Murad, the 2023 laureate, Narges Mohammadi, is a human rights leader. That is treacherous terrain in Iran. As I write, she is in prison, possibly on a hunger strike, for speaking out on women's social station. "Defamation of authorities" is one charge against her.

The first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize was a Viennese baroness, Bertha von Suttner, who cut a swath in high society. In the late 19th century, Von Suttner wrote a bestselling anti-war novel, "Die Waffen Nieder!" (Lay Down Your Arms!) Among its admirers were Leo Tolstoy and Alfred Nobel, the wealthy inventor of dynamite.

Von Suttner won the Nobel Prize in 1905. Ironically, she died days before World War I broke out in 1914. Known as the Great War, its tragic trenches claimed a generation of British, French and German young men.

In sharp contrast, Rigoberta Menchu Tum was born to poverty in a Mayan Indian mountain village in Guatemala. Her family worked as peasants on a plantation. She began this backbreaking work at 10, sustained by a sense of belonging, with village rituals and her mother's healing arts.

Civil war and military death squads tore her family apart. Three were murdered. In exile, Menchu told her life story of oppression to a Paris anthropologist.

A memoir, "I, Rigoberta Menchu," reached thousands. She became a Nobel Prize Winner in 1992. Four years later, she played a part in establishing Peace Accords with human rights resolutions.

A staunch pacifist even during World War I, Jane Addams came under fire for her philosophy. She won the Peace Prize late in life, in 1931, too frail to travel.

Acting on social democracy ideas, Addams set up Hull House as a free city lighthouse for classes, art, a library, a band, a gym. In that year, 1889, when she was only 29, Chicago was a teeming mosaic of immigrants.

Benny Goodman, "king of swing" music, learned to play the clarinet at Hull House.

My mother's profound message speaks clearly. We all share "the responsibility and a capacity" to help bring social change. It's not an impossible dream.

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