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8 January 1867—9 January 1961

Global Peace Is Ultimately Personal

The second woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (awarded to her in 1946), Emily Greene Balch was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a prosperous and educated family dedicated to abolitionism in the years leading up to the Civil War. Taking advantage of the opportunities in higher education available to women of her generation, Balch was a member of Bryn Mawr’s first graduating class in 1889.

Balch’s commitment to social justice and peace began in her youth under the influence of the Reverend Charles Dole, whom she described as a preacher of “good will, not in the sense of mere kindliness, but of unceasing ‘all out’ willing the good.” Along with Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley, Balch founded Denison House in Boston, named in honor of the British socialist theologian Frederick Denison Maurice and inspired by the burgeoning Christian Socialist movement in America.

Balch’s religious views—founded on the liberal Unitarianism of her youth, which valued rational discourse over polemics—led her to view coercive force as “self-defeating” and to assert that “new methods, free from violence, must be worked out for ending abuses and for undoing wrongs, as well as for achieving positive ends.” She became a Quaker in 1921.

After graduate studies in economics and social justice in Paris and Berlin, Balch joined the faculty of Wellesley College in 1896. When the United States entered World War I, she participated in anti-war movements because she believed that the violence of this and all other wars reflected “our whole economic and social system [and] our scale of value.” Her socialist and pacifist views led to her termination from Wellesley after a twenty-two-year teaching career.

In 1919, Balch became the Secretary-Treasurer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In that position, she worked diligently for global peace, believing that nationalism was antithetical to real or enduring peace. Social change, Balch argued, came only through understanding that “the most precious thing we know of is personality.” Personal relationships are the key to peace.

In 1939, Balch was again at the forefront of the anti-war movement. Soon, however, she reluctantly modified her pacifist stance toward Nazism, believing that military opposition to Hitler was a necessary although unspeakably tragic evil.

Balch’s enduring work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Justice helped shape policy decisions of the League of Nations and eventually influenced the principles promoted by the United Nations.