Lucie Odier (7 September 1886, Geneva – 6 December 1984, Geneva) was a Swiss nurse from a Patrician family background. She became a leading expert at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for relief actions to civilians. As only the fourth female member of the ICRC's governing body Odier helped to pave the way towards gender equality in the organisation which itself has historically been a pioneer of international humanitarian law.
During the Second World War she became an outspoken advocate inside the ICRC leadership to publicly denounce Nazi Germany's system of extermination and concentration camps.
After her resignation as a member for age reasons in 1961 she was appointed as the first female honorary vice-president of the ICRC.
Life
Family background and education
On the paternal side, Odier hailed from a family of Huguenot background from Pont-en-Royans in the Dauphiné region of southeastern France, which was a center of Protestantism in the 16th century. When the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had restored some civil rights to the Huguenots, was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, some 20,000 Protestants fled from Dauphiné in the following years, amongst them Antoine Odier, Lucie's great-great-great-grandfather. As a teenager, he acquired the citizenship of the Republic of Geneva in 1714 where he started working as a merchant. Some of his descendants became politicians, amongst them Lucie's uncle Édouard Odier (1844-1919), who was elected a member of the Council of States and of the National Council.
Lucie's father was Albert Octave Odier (1845-1928), a civil engineer working first at the Western Switzerland railways and then in a leading position at the municipality of Geneva. There he was responsible for the reconstruction of a number of bridges linking the Île de Genève and the Île Rousseau in the middle of the Rhone, which are still landmarks today. Lucie's mother Camille Jeanne Louise Chaponnière (1856-1927) came from Marseille, where Lucie's Genevan grandfather was a trader and judge at the commercial court. Lucie was the fifth of the seven children that Albert and Camille had. She was part of Geneva's patrician class which «turned to banking and philanthropic activities at the end of the 19th century, after losing control of the major public offices».The Odier family played a particularly important role in Geneva's financial sector thanks to marriages with other Patrician families and especially since Charles Odier (1804–81) became associated with the bank Lombard, Bonna & Cie in 1830, which later became Lombard, Odier & Cie. However, numerous other members of the family became medical doctors and nurses. While Lucie Odier attended Geneva's Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1911, she subsequently followed in that medical tradition and obtained her nursing diploma in 1914 from the School of the Samaritans.
World War I
Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914, Lucie Odier upon the recommendation of the Genevan orthopedist Alfred Machard (not to be confused with the namesake French writer and actor) started working in a leading position as a nurse in the military hospital Grand Cercle at Aix-les-Bains, a commune in the French department of Savoie, some 70 km south of Geneva. The auxiliary hospitals in the town not only provided care to French soldiers, but also to members of the U.S. Army.
In December 1914, she went back to Geneva to treat those who returned there with war injuries, since thousands of Swiss volunteers had joined the French army. In addition, she tended to Prisoners of War, who were interned in Switzerland because they were either seriously ill or wounded or relatively old. She also took up tasks concerning the care for civilian refugees. After the outbreak of the Spanish Flu, she dedicated herself to the care of its victims as well.
Between the World Wars
In 1920, Odier was assigned to lead the social hygiene dispensary of Geneva's Red Cross section. It aimed to contain the spread of sexually transmissible diseases through sex education and the regulation of prostitution. Odier also engaged in child welfare for the poorest groups of Geneva's population. In addition, she led the visiting nurses service.
From these activities she was obviously drawn to the ICRC to follow in the footsteps of her uncle Édouard Odier. The jurist was one of its founding members, since he joined the organisation in 1874 barely a decade after its founding, eventually became vice-president of the ICRC and was also a personal friend of its president Gustave Ador: