Emily Greene Balch

Emily Greene Balch never married and dedicated her entire life to working for humanitarian causes.

She lived a long life and suffered from ill health during her later years. She entered Mr. Vernon Nursing Home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956 and died on January 9, 1961, at the age of 94.

Emily Greene Balch was born on January 8, 1867, in Boston, USA into a prosperous Unitarian family to Francis V. and Ellen (Noyes) Balch. Her father was a prominent lawyer, who had at one time served as secretary to United States Senator, Charles Sumner. She had five siblings.

Her parents instilled high moral standards in the children and ensured that they received good education. Emily attended Miss Catherine Ireland's School in Boston before joining the Bryn Mawr College to study economics, in 1886. She graduated with an A.B. degree, in 1889.

She won a European Fellowship awarded by Bryn Mawr and traveled to Paris to study economics under Émile Levasseur, in 1890–1891. She also did short courses at Harvard and the University of Chicago, and put in a full year of work in economics, in 1895–1896, in Berlin.

Emily Greene Balch joined Wellesley College as an assistant, teaching economics courses, in 1896. In no time she proved herself to be a very gifted and dedicated teacher and rose to the rank of professor of economics and sociology by 1913.

She had always been interested in social issues and during this period she also served as a member of two municipal boards (one on children and one on urban planning) and of two state commissions (one on industrial education, the other on immigration). In addition, she participated in movements pertaining to women’s suffrage, racial justice, and rights of immigrants. She published a major sociological study of ‘Our Slavic Fellow Citizens’ in 1910.

She had always been a pacifist at heart and when the World War I broke out in 1914, she ventured into political activism and became active in pacifism. She was a delegate to the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915 where she helped to found an organization called the Women's International Committee for Permanent Peace, later named the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Independent minded and outspoken, she collaborated with other like-minded women like Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton to write ‘Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results’ (1915).

Because of her activism and radical behavior, Wellesley College terminated her contract in 1919. The same year, she attended the second convention of the International Congress of Women held in Zurich where she was elected secretary-treasurer of the newly-formed Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

Emily Greene Balch is best remembered for her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a non-profit organization that aimed to unite women worldwide who oppose oppression and exploitation. She had once served as the organization’s secretary-treasurer and was later made its Honorary International President.