[2] Cramer's maternal grandfather Louis Micheli (1836-1888), who was a rich agronomist and a gentleman farmer, became a member of the ICRC in 1869, just six years after its founding, and served as its vice-president from 1876 until his death.

[3] Cramer published a number of works on the principal of nationality, the prosecution of juveniles, and various aspects of Genevan history, for which she was awarded the prestigious Prix Ador in 1911 and 1913.

"[15] According to ICRC historian Daniel Palmieri, it was Cramer's idea to cope with the big data about individual fates by introducing a system of index cards linked to catalogues.

[16][clarification needed] Cramer also fundraised for the under-financed agency: in spring of 1916 she performed a play with a number of colleagues titled Le Château historique!

[3] In October of the same year, she went on another mission to Paris[7] and in December, she took part in the Franco-German conferences which the ICRC organised in Bern upon the request of the Swiss government in order to negotiate the repatriation of POWs.

When she eventually changed her mind, she insisted that the ICRC set up permanent delegations in the different belligerent countries and allowed the Agency's heads of departments to sit in the Committee's meetings.

"[7] In June 1918, the Egyptologist Edouard Naville - who was the ICRC President ad interim, since Gustave Ador was elected to the Swiss Federal Council in 1917[20] - recommended the appointment of Cramer as a member of the committee,[18] which at the time was made up exclusively of men.

[21] Naville, who hailed from Geneva's second-oldest family,[2] pointed to "her qualifications and service", but also emphasized that a woman's presence "would only serve to honor and strengthen" the committee.

[3] They revolved around the issue that the American Red Cross set up an agency for US-POWs in Bern, which made Cramer worry about crucial information becoming dispersed.

[23] Despite the hesitations some of its members felt in allowing a woman to join its ranks, the Committee understood that such change would be inevitable, largely because the war had deeply altered people's perception of gender equality.

[24] As a result, Cramer became the first woman to become a member of the governing body of any international organization,[4] more than fifty years before the introduction of women's suffrage in Switzerland.

[2] In 1920, Cramer married Edouard Auguste Frick, a Swiss citizen who was born in Saint Petersburg and served as the ICRC general delegate for Eastern Europe,[3] most notably during the Russian Revolution[25] and later as a deputy for Fridtjof Nansen when he became the High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations.

[27] She also played a key role in the "Tokyo-project" which aimed to provide protection for civilians of "enemy" nations caught up in the territory of an opposing war party.

[3][clarification needed] In October 1934, she, along with van Berchem and their colleague Lucie Odier, attended the 15th international conference of the Red Cross Movement in Tokyo on behalf of the ICRC.

[28] Due to the emerging system of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the ICRC decided in March 1935 to transform its working group for civilians into one for political prisoners.

[28] While on the committee she tried to convince the ICRC President Max Huber, who at the time was privately involved in the arms industry,[30] and his successor Burckhardt to intervene on behalf of civilians held by Nazi Germany, especially in the concentration camps, but to no avail.

By autumn of that year, the ICRC leadership – including Frick-Cramer – received reports about the systematic extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe, the so-called Final Solution.

According to Irène Herrmann, professor of the transnational history of Switzerland at the University of Geneva, she pointed in her resignation letter to the failures of the ICRC during the Second World War as well as to the growing competition from other organisations.

One possible reason is that she had a burn-out, was tired and looking forward to spend her well-deserved retirement at a familiar place.» And: «The irony of the story is this: when the ICRC had to find a strategy to account for its silence over the holocaust and to exonerate itself, it turned of all people to Frick-Cramer.

That is what the events at least indicate to and so her resignation appears in totally different light.»[27] Upon her retirement, Frick-Cramer was once again made an honorary member and kept that title for the rest of her life,[3] which she spent with her husband at her family estate, the Micheli domain of Landecy in Bardonnex.