Emily Greene Balch

Emily Greene Balch (January 8, 1867 – January 9, 1961) was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency. She moved into the peace movement at the start of World War I in 1914, and began collaborating with Jane Addams of Chicago. She became a central leader of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) based in Switzerland, for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. Life Balch was born to a prominent Yankee family in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, the daughter of Francis V. and Ellen (née Noyes) Balch. Her father was a successful lawyer and one time secretary to United States Senator Charles Sumner. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1889 after reading widely in the classics and languages and focusing on economics. She did graduate work in Paris and published her research as Public Assistance of the Poor in France (1893). She did settlement housework in Boston before deciding on an academic career. She then studied at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Berlin, and began teaching at Wellesley College in 1896. She focused on immigration, consumption, and the economic roles of women. In 1913, she was appointed to serve as Professor of Economics at Wellesley, following the resignation of political economist Katharine Coman, who had founded the Department. That same year, Balch was promoted from Associate Professor to Professor of Political Economy and of Political and Social Science.