Emily Greene Balch

Emily Greene Balch
(1871-1955)


American sociologist, political scientist, economist, and pacifist, a leader of the women's movement for peace during and after World War I. She received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1946 jointly with John Raleigh Mott. She was also noted for her sympathetic and thorough study of Slavic immigrants in the United States.
A member of the first graduating class at Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania), Balch taught at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) from 1897. She founded a settlement house in Boston and served on the Massachusetts commissions on industrial relations (1908-09) and immigration (1913-14) and the Boston city planning board (1914-17). She researched Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910) by living in Slavic-American neighbourhoods in various cities and traveling to eastern Europe for firsthand knowledge of the Slavic homelands.

A member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), Balch was a delegate to the International Congress of Women, The Hague (1915), and she helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, of which she was secretary-treasurer (1919-22, 1934-35). For opposing the United States' entry into World War I, she was dismissed from her professorship at Wellesley in 1918. Realizing the intractability of Nazi Germany and Japan, she approved U.S. participation in World War II. Her writings on peace include Approaches to the Great Settlement (1918).