Emily Greene Balch

Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist whose life spanned the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. She combined a long academic career with sustained attention to social problems and with work for peace. In 1946 she received the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with John Raleigh Mott, which made her one of the best known figures of organized pacifism in her era.

Born in 1867 in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood now part of Boston, she came from a prominent Yankee family. Her father was a successful lawyer who served as secretary to Senator Charles Sumner. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1889, reading widely in the classics and languages before focusing on economics. She pursued graduate work in Paris, where she studied public assistance to the poor in France, and did settlement house work in Boston before choosing an academic career. She then studied at Harvard, the University of Chicago and the University of Berlin.

She began teaching at Wellesley College in 1896, focusing on immigration, consumption and the economic role of women. In 1913 she became Professor of Economics, succeeding Katharine Coman, who had founded the department. She served on several state commissions, including the first one on minimum wages for women, and led the Women's Trade Union League, which supported women in labor unions. In 1910 she published a major sociological study of Slavic immigrants to the United States.

Her pacifism grew sharper when the First World War began. Working with Jane Addams in the Woman's Peace Party, she opposed American entry into the war and defended the civil liberties of conscientious objectors. Wellesley ended her contract in 1919 because of her activism. She then became an editor of The Nation, a respected magazine of political commentary. Around 1920 she left Unitarianism for Quakerism, and she never married.

In 1919 she played a central part in the International Congress of Women, which led to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, based in Geneva. She served as its first international Secretary-Treasurer, ran summer schools on peace education and helped set up branches in more than fifty countries. She also worked with the League of Nations on drug control, aviation, refugees and disarmament. During the Second World War she backed the Allies without criticizing the war effort, though she defended conscientious objectors.

The Nobel Committee recognized her work with the League in 1946. She shared the prize with Mott and gave her share to the organization. She died in January 1961, the day after her 94th birthday. Her legacy lies in linking peace to social justice, to concern for workers and immigrants, and to the patient building of international institutions she sustained for decades.