As only the third female member of the governing body of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), she helped to pave the way towards gender equality in the organisation.

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.

[2][3] The Ferrière family reportedly originated from the Normandy and moved to Besançon in Eastern France, close to the Jura Mountains and the border with Switzerland, around 1700.

Since they were a family of Protestant pastors, it seems plausible that they escaped repressions which arose after Louis XIV in 1685 revoked the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had restored some civil rights to the Huguenots.

[1] His wife Hedwig Marie Therese, née Faber (1859–1928), hailed from Vienna,[5] and her older sister Adolphine was married to his younger brother Frederic.

[13] She immediately started teaching[14] and developed in her class her own variant of eurhythmics, which was inspired by dancing elements and became known as exercices de plastique animée.

[15][16] In May 1914, Ferrière co-directed a eurythmic performance in the great vestibule of Geneva's Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) to celebrate the cenentiary of the city's and canton's admission to the Swiss Confederation at the Vienna Congress.

Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the ICRC under its president Gustave Ador established the International Prisoners-of-War Agency (IPWA) to trace POWs and to re-establish communications with their respective families.

The Austrian writer and pacifist Stefan Zweig described the situation in 1914 at the Geneva headquarters of the ICRC as follows:«Hardly had the first blows been struck when cries of anguish from all lands began to be heard in Switzerland.

The Red Cross had no space, no organization, no system, and above all no helpers.»[18]By the end of the same year, the Agency had some 1,200 volunteers who worked in the Musée Rath of Geneva, amongst them the French writer and pacifist Romain Rolland.

Jebb, a British social reformer, had founded the Save the Children Fund (SCF) organisation at the end of the war to relieve the effects of famine in Austria-Hungary and Germany.

[21] In September 1919, Ferrière arranged a meeting between her uncle Frederic and Jebb, who explained her goal to create a neutral international institution for the administration of child welfare: «In November with Ferriere's support the ICRC took three unusual steps.

[28] Starting from December 1923, Ferrière toured Latin America for ten months as a delegate of the ICRC to visit the newly founded national red ross societies, crossing over the Andes on donkey-back.

[30] In May 1929, Ferrière visited the French colonies of Lebanon and Syria to evaluate the situation with regard to the many Armenian genocide survivors who newly arrived from Turkey.

When Frick-Cramer had moved to Germany after her marriage and therefore stepped down in late 1922, the nurse, feminist and suffragette Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (1850-1934) succeeded her as the second ever female ICRC member.

In February 1939, she visited Czechoslovakia in her capacity as secretary-general of the IMS and upon her return doubled down on her pledges to support refugees in their quest for safe havens.

[21] In autumn 1941, Ferrière in her capacity as vice-president of the IMS informed the British Red Cross that Jewish emigration from Nazi-occupied Europe had been halted.

When she died in March 1970 at the age of 83 years, the obituary in the International Review of the Red Cross honoured her as a«a warmhearted woman who had devoted her life to her fellow men with calm courage and exemplary modesty.»[21]