She opposed the Second Boer War and supported the campaign against it led by the Nobel Prize winner Norman Angell.

On the day that WWI was declared, Sturge was travelling home from London to Birmingham when she saw queues of hundreds of Germans waiting to register as enemy aliens.

She wrote a letter to Stephen Hobhouse, a fellow Quaker and prominent peace campaigner, to suggest that the enemy aliens would need help.

Initially, the committee concentrated on finding people willing to provide employment to Germans who had suddenly been made unemployed; accommodation for those who had been evicted from their homes; and financial help.

[6] In December 1914, a group of suffragists and social reformers, including Emily Hobhouse, Isabella Ford, Helen Bright Clark, Margaret Clark Gillett, Sophia Sturge and her sister Lily, and Catherine Courtney, Baroness Courtney of Penwith, addressed a letter through the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, to the women of Germany and Austria urging them to join them in calling for a truce.

Dutch suffragists, led by Aletta Jacobs, proposed holding a Women’s International Congress at The Hague.