Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961): Social Worker, Reformer, Peace Activist and Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1946
Introduction: Emily Greene Balch was born into a prosperous family in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on January 8, 1867. Her father and mother, Ellen Noyes and Francis V. Balch, were educated Unitarians who raised their six children to cherish high moral and religious standards. After attending Miss Catherine Ireland’s School in Boston, Balch chose to attend Bryn Mawr. Entering in 1886, she studied economics and graduated with an A.B. degree in 1889. The initial recipient of the European Fellowship at Bryn Mawr, she went first to New York City to work under social reformer Jacob Riis, then attended the Sorbonne. Upon her return to the United States she worked in Boston with Charles W. Birtwell at the Children’s Aid Society from 1890 to 1891. In 1892, Balch became acquainted with three other reform-minded women: Jane Addams, Katherine Coman, and Vida Scudder. That same year she helped found and directed for a short time Denison House, the city’s first settlement house, based on the example of Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago.
Following her social work experience, Balch turned to college teaching as a way to further advance the cause of reform. She prepared for this by studying at the University of Chicago, at Harvard University, and at the University of Berlin. In 1896 Balch joined Coman at Wellesley College as an assistant, teaching economics courses. She illustrated her lectures with her social work experiences and was highly regarded as an imaginative and dedicated teacher. She was promoted the next year to instructor, and became an associate professor in 1903. In 1913 she was appointed professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley.
In addition to being an outstanding teacher, Balch was an active participant in a myriad of social justice movements. In 1903, she helped to found the ((Women’s Trade Union League)). She was on several city and state boards, and was very active in working for woman suffrage, against child labor, for labor reform in general, for racial justice, and for peace. On one sabbatical, she studied immigration, resulting in a book on Our Slavic Fellow Citizens.
Experience as a Peace Activist: The outbreak of World War I was a turning point for Emily Balch as she realized that ridding the world of war was going to occupy a major portion of her life’s work. In 1915, Ms. Balch was a delegate to the International Congress of Women (ICW) at The Hague from which later evolved the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She served as secretary for the WILPF from 1919 to 1922 and from 1934 to 1935. She was an outspoken pacifist during the years of the First World War and was a strong proponent of continuous mediation as an alternative to battle. Along with her good friend, Jane Addams, and other women delegates, she traveled to many European nations and met with President Woodrow Wilson, in an unsuccessful attempt to make mediation, not war, the preferred choice for solving international differences.
In 1918, Emily Balch was dismissed from her teaching position at Wellesley College purportedly due to her many absences while doing work for the ICW but, perhaps more for her opposition to the war and the participation of the United States in the conflict. Seemingly undaunted, she continued to work for peace, through the WILPF and individually, for the rest of her life. Indeed, she always found a suitable outlet for her energies.
Between the two world wars, Ms. Balch kept busy as an advocate for peace and for social and economic justice though her writing, speaking, and organizing. In 1919, speaking as a WILPF member, she criticized the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles and, in the same year, she found another forum for her ideas as a writer for the journal,
Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, 1946
. She was sought out for several projects of the new League of Nations including strategies for international disarmament, drug control, and the encouragement of the United States’ participation in League activities.
By 1922, due to poor health, Balch resigned as secretary-treasurer of the WILPF, although she continued to work for the group on a voluntary basis. She travelled to Haiti with a commission established by Herbert Hoover in 1930 to investigate conditions in that occupied nation. Hoover subsequently removed U.S. troops from Haiti on the basis of the commission’s report.
In 1935 Wellesley College invited Balch to speak at an Armistice Day program, ending its public disapproval of the former faculty member. In 1946, she was nominated for the peace prize, which she shared with Dr. John R. Mott a leader of the YMCA. Ms. Balch was recommended for this honor by Mildred McAfee Horton, Wellesley’s president. Miss Balch donated her $17,000 share of the prize to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
The evils she perceived in the Nazi regime, led Emily Balch to push the United States’ government to accept more refugees into the country and, later, caused her to override her inherent pacifism and encourage American participation in World War II. She was appalled by the mass murder of Jews in Europe and lamented the moral depravity that could lead to such activity.
In the United States, during the war years, she helped to re- locate Japanese-Americans who had been removed from their homes and interned in concentration camps against their will. By the end of the war, Ms. Balch was in her late seventies but that did not keep her from remaining active in the causes she had served for so long.
The Nobel Peace Prize Emily Balch received in 1946 was a fitting recognition of her role as a major leader of the peace movement in the United States. In all endeavors, individual and collective, she believed humans needed to combine action with a sense of higher purpose, practical reality with an idealist’s vision. Overarching values are essential guides to human interaction.
Although in failing health in her later years, Miss Balch was still able to serve as honorary chairman of the Women’s International League and, in 1959, and as co-chairman of a committee of sixty notables to mark the 100th anniversary of Jane Addams’ birth.
Balch entered a nursing home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956 and died there of pneumonia at age 94 on January 10, 1961.
For more information: Nobel Peace Laureate Project www.nobelpeacelaureates.org/pdf/Emily_Green_Balch.pdf
