Emily Greene Balch (1867–1961)

Emily Greene Balch was born to a prominent old Yankee family in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful lawyer and one-time secretary to U.S. Senator Charles Sumner. In 1889, she was a member of the first class to graduate from Bryn Mawr College, after reading widely in the classics and languages but finally focusing on economics. She did graduate work in Paris and published her research as Public Assistance of the Poor in France (1893). She received training in social work in New York City and Boston before deciding on an academic career.

She joined the faculty of Wellesley College in 1896, with interests focused on immigration, workers, minorities, and the economic roles of women. In 1913, she was appointed professor of Economics and professor of Political Economy and of Political and Social Science. Prof. Balch served on numerous state commissions, such as the first one on minimum wages for women. She worked with the Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago and promoted various child welfare reforms. She was a leader of the Women's Trade Union League. Prof. Bache researched a sociological study of Slavic immigrants by living in Slavic-American neighborhoods in various cities in the USA and traveling to Slavic homelands in Europe. The result was her book Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, published in 1910.

Prof. Bache was a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and a longtime pacifist. When the USA entered World War I, she actively opposed conscription and espionage legislation, and supported the civil liberties of conscientious objectors. For these activities, she was dismissed from Wellesley in 1919.
She was hired by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Zurich, Switzerland, as its first international secretary-treasurer. She cooperated with the newly-established League of Nations on drug control, aviation, refugees, and disarmament. She warned against fascism, and criticized the western democracies for not attempting to stop Hitler and Mussolini's aggressive policies. Prof. Bache won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 and donated her share of the prize money to the WILPF. Among her other writings were A Study of Conditions of City Life (1903), Approaches to the Great Settlement (1918), Refugees as Assets (1939), One Europe (1947), Vignettes in Prose (1952), and Toward Human Unity, or Beyond Nationalism (1952).