Emily Greene Balch

Sociologist

• Born: January 8, 1867
• Birthplace: Jamaica Plain (now Boston), Massachusetts
• Died: January 9, 1961
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

American social reformer and economist

Among the first generation of women to graduate from college in large numbers, Balch authored the frequently cited Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, cofounded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, and, as a reward for her peace activism, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.

Areas of achievement Social reform, peace advocacy, economics, education

Early Life

Emily Greene Balch (bawlch) was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Her parents were Unitarians of English descent who could trace their ancestors to the early seventeenth century American colonies. Her father, Francis Vergnies Balch, was a lawyer. Her mother, Ellen Maria (Noyes) Balch, was a housewife who had six children and died at the age of forty-seven, when Emily was seventeen.

Balch received an unusually good education for her time. While attending private schools, she lived with her family in suburban Boston. At a time when women college graduates were regarded as social oddities and were less likely to marry, her father encouraged her to go to college. She chose the new school of Bryn Mawr because that was where her best friend was going. Bryn Mawr was founded by members of the Quaker religion, a religion that Balch eventually adopted. She was graduated in three years with a major in classics and won Bryn Mawr’s European fellowship as the outstanding senior. After privately studying sociology with Franklin H. Giddings, she used the fellowship to spend a year in Paris researching the public relief system there. The result was her book, Public Assistance of the Poor in France, published by the American Economic Association in 1893.

Life’s Work

Balch’s career can be divided into several phases, the first of which centered on social work. She became an expert on agencies and laws dealing with juvenile delinquency, and, in 1895, published the seventy-two-page Manual for Use in Cases of Juvenile Offenders and Other Minors in Massachusetts. Four years later, concerned women in Chicago brought about the first juvenile court. Subsequently, Balch revised her manual twice, in 1903 and 1908. Meanwhile, she met Jane Addams and others involved in the settlement house movement. In 1892, Balch joined a group of female college graduates in founding Denison House in Boston and headed that settlement during its first year. Through her continued involvement in Denison House, Balch came into direct contact with the poor, learning at first hand about working conditions and obstacles to labor organizing. After several years of charitable volunteering, however, she decided that she would have more impact as a teacher of social and economic subjects, inspiring her students to work for reform and guiding them in the best ways to achieve it.

To prepare for teaching, the second phase of Balch’s career, she studied briefly at Radcliffe (then called Harvard Annex), the University of Chicago, and the University of Berlin. At the last institution, she became especially familiar with socialism. Attending with her was another woman from Boston, Mary Kingsbury, who was later married to a student from Russia, Vladimir Simkhovitch, and who founded Greenwich House, a settlement in New York City. Balch and Kingsbury became lifelong friends and were also part of a national network of settlement leaders and reformers, many of them women, that provided support for one another’s goals and causes. On Balch’s return to Boston in 1896, she accepted a half-time position teaching economics at Wellesley College. The following year, she became a full-time instructor, in 1903, an associate professor, and in 1913, a professor.

At Wellesley, she taught courses on socialism with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) as the text, as well as courses on the labor movement, urban problems, economic history, and immigration. Balch was the kind of teacher who was actively involved in what she taught and who sought to stimulate a similar involvement on the part of her students. After 1913, Balch headed Wellesley’s Department of Economics and Sociology. She also continued her social activism. At one point, the president of Wellesley told Balch that she was not given the normal promotion because she had loaned two hundred dollars to a union whose bitter strike she had supported. If such a warning had any effect on Balch, it was to deepen her commitment to social activism. Balch was among the founders, in 1903, of the Women’s Trade Union League, serving for a time as its president. She also served on a variety of boards and commissions, including Boston’s City Planning Board (1914-1917), two state commissions one on industrial education (1908-1909) and another on immigration (1913-1914) and the committee on immigration of the Progressive Party (1912).

Balch’s landmark accomplishment as a professor was her definitive study of Slavic immigration, published as Our Slavic Fellow Citizens in 1910. When Balch began this project on a sabbatical leave in 1904, the systematic study of a particular immigrant group was largely untried. Balch did her research on both sides of the Atlantic traveling to Austria-Hungary to investigate the conditions that caused immigrants to leave their homeland and then traveling around the United States to visit Slavic communities. To facilitate her research, she acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the Czech language. In addition to her sabbatical year, she took a second year off without pay and met all of her own research expenses. She described how the Slavs, by migrating, had gained in both self-respect and freedom, and she predicted that they would add richness and vitality to American culture. Our Slavic Fellow Citizens dispelled many misconceptions and prejudices directed against immigrants and provided ammunition for those fighting against a restrictive immigrant policy. The work is still frequently cited and excerpted in books about immigration.

When World War I broke out, Balch began her involvement in peace activities, which constituted the third and best-known phase of her career. A number of women connected with the settlement-house movement, Balch among them, followed Jane Addams’s lead and, in 1915, went to The Hague in the Netherlands for the International Women’s Congress for Peace and Freedom. The U.S. Congress moved to send representatives to meet with heads of state to urge them to back a plan for neutral mediation of the war. Out of more than eleven hundred voting members, Balch was chosen as one of the seven official representatives. She visited with top officials in half a dozen countries, including President Woodrow Wilson. The scheme came to nothing, but Balch helped edit the proceedings of the peace congress and also joined Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams in writing Women at The Hague (1915). The peace congress was significant in that it was the initial gathering of women from many countries to work for peace. As such, it laid the foundation for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed first as the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915.

Balch thought that Henry Ford’s ideas on how peace could be obtained were crude, but with no overtly positive government response to the mediation efforts of the Women’s Congress, Balch, in 1916, participated in the Ford-sponsored Neutral Conference for continuous mediation in Stockholm. Again, she met with President Wilson to push for a plan for mediation. During this period, the United States was moving toward war.

As peace work continued to occupy Balch, her ties to Wellesley loosened. She took a sabbatical leave during 1916-1917 to take courses at Columbia University and to work for various peace organizations. She was active in the Women’s Peace Party, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League, and the Committee Against Militarism. Once the United States declared war, pacifism became decidedly unpatriotic. Balch, however, did not swerve from her beliefs. At a time when faculty were not protected by tenure, she thought it prudent to extend her leave from Wellesley. In 1918, she published her thoughts on the impending peace settlement, Approaches to the Great Settlement. Also, about that time, her Wellesley appointment expired, and the college declined to reappoint her, the final decision coming in 1919. That decision ended Balch’s academic career of more than twenty years and left her professionally stranded without a pension at the age of fifty-two. Faculty protests were ineffective. While Balch’s pacifist activities were the main reason for Wellesley’s action, her liberal social views on other issues played a role. Balch refused to press her case further. As time passed, Wellesley’s position softened. The college invited her back to speak in 1935, and, in 1946, Wellesley’s president helped Balch secure the Nobel Peace Prize.

During this time, Balch found a job on the editorial staff of The Nation. Then, with the establishment of the League of Nations, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom decided to open an office in Geneva. Balch was the group’s secretary-treasurer and had the task of finding suitable quarters and developing the organization’s work with the League of Nations. She oversaw publication of a newsletter, entertained visitors from around the world, made the headquarters a quiet retreat from the bustle going on in the League of Nations, and organized the group’s Third International Congress in 1921. In 1922, she went to Varese, Italy, to organize a summer school, but at the last minute switched the location of the school to Lugano, Switzerland, because fascist bands had invaded Varese. Exhausted, she resigned from her official duties with the Women’s International League in the fall of 1922 but continued her involvement with that organization. A special league project in 1927 was an investigation of social, economic, and political conditions in Haiti, which the U.S. Marines had occupied since 1915. Balch accompanied five others to Haiti, then edited and wrote most of their report, which was published as Occupied Haiti (1927). Subsequently, Balch met with President Coolidge. Several years later, Herbert Hoover’s policy of restoring self-government was reminiscent of the recommendations made by the Women’s International League.

During the early 1930’s, Balch was president of the American section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She continued to maintain a lively interest in a variety of international issues, ranging from disarmament to the Spanish Civil War. In the mid-1930’s, she was once again elected secretary-treasurer of the Women’s International League, and then, later, honorary president.

Balch believed that pacifists needed to confront the moral issues that arose as a result of World War II. Two of Balch’s concerns were the treatment of Japanese Americans and refuge for Jews from Nazi Germany. Her international outlook was vindicated: In 1946, she was a corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with John R. Mott, the international Young Men’s Christian Association leader. She gave the seventeen-thousand-dollar award to the Women’s League.

Balch never married and refused the offers of women friends to live with them permanently, preferring to live her life in her own way. She eschewed fashionable dress, but she enjoyed sketching with pastels and, in 1941, published a book of poetry, The Miracle of Living. Her disciplined intelligence, varied interests, and public experiences were the expressions of a rich inner life. Active in League affairs into her nineties, she died in a nursing home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety-four.

Significance

Balch represents the best of the first generation of women to be graduated from college in significant numbers. These women believed themselves to be special, and they felt an obligation to do something useful with their college education. Initially, Balch was attracted to social work, a profession unique in that women not only dominated it numerically but also in terms of leadership. Balch became part of a lifelong network of women reformers, even though she soon left social work for college teaching. As a professor, her greatest accomplishment was the highly regarded Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. A woman of firm convictions, she persisted in pacifist activities even though they cost her her college career. Much of her peace efforts went into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization that is also part of her legacy as idealistic, determined, and with high intellectual standards.

Bibliography

Balch, Emily Greene. “Women for Peace and Freedom.” Survey Graphic 35 (October, 1946): 358-360. Balch’s World War II observations on Europe and on the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Bussey, Gertrude, and Margaret Tims. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1965: A Record of Fifty Years’ Work. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965. Balch is frequently mentioned in this historical account of the organization, which absorbed so much of her peace efforts.

Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. A biographical account of Jane Addams that is also a good source for her relationship to Balch.

“Plain People: ’A’ for Effort.” Time, November, 1946, 33. A brief account of the circumstances surrounding Balch’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Randall, John Herman, Jr. “Emily Greene Balch.” The Nation, January, 1947, 14-15. Recalls Balch’s work on the editorial staff of The Nation.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Emily Greene Balch of New England: Citizen of the World. Washington, D.C.: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1946. A twelve-page summary of Balch’s career.

Randall, Mercedes M. Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch. New York: Twayne, 1964. A charming, insightful, and carefully crafted biography. The author was an associate of Balch in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Whipps, Judy D. “The Feminist Pacifism of Emily Greene Balch.” NWSA Journal 18, no. 3 (Fall, 2006): 122-132. Discusses Balch’s pacifist activities within the context of contemporary politics, pointing out the similarities between the work of twentieth and twenty-first century peace activists.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: April 28-May 1, 1915: International Congress of Women.