Emily Greene Balch

From Philosopedia

Balch, Emily Greene (8 January 1867 - 9 January 1961)

An American economist and sociologist, Balch was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Francis V. and Ellen M. (Noyes) Balch. She had four sisters (Alice, Bessie, Annie, Maidie) and one brother (Francis).

After attending high school in Boston at Miss Ireland's, she received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College (1889), and she attended Sorbonne University (1890-1891), Harvard (1893), the University of Chicago (1895), and the University of Berlin (1895-1896). From 1896 to 1919 she was a professor at Wellesley College, having been one of the members of the first class to graduate.

In 1906 she declared herself a socialist and was an early advocate of better wages and safer working conditions for women. She served on the state commission that drafted the first minimum wage law in the U.S.

In 1915, Balch attended a conference between the Scandinavian and Russian governments in which peaceful resolutions to the Great War were discussed.

In 1918, after three years of working with a women's organization that wanted to stop the Great War, she was fired from her teaching job. She had joined with Jane Addams in the effort to stop the war. She and Addams worked for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), for which Greene Balch served as Secretary General in the Geneva headquarters. It was she who facilitated the U.S. withdrawal from Haiti in 1926, after 11 years of occupation.

Although she was a Quaker and an absolute pacifist, Balch finally decided to support the war against Hitler in 1941. She also supported the war against Japan after Pearl Harbor, although she opposed the U.S. government's demand for unconditional surrender by the Japanese.

The international secretary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1919—1922), she shared with John R. Mott the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize.

Although Balch was a member of the First Church, Unitarian Universalist, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, she became disillusioned by Unitarian support for the war and joined the London Quaker Meeting in 1920. According to the Rev. Terry Burke, minister of First Church, Balch continued to identify as a “unitarian” with a “small u.”

Balch, who retired in 1956, died of pneumonia in 1961.

{World, January-February. 1997}