Emily Greene Balch

by
College Directory Columnist

May 11, 2010

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Emily Greene Balch was born in 1867 in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston into a prosperous family of liberal Unitarian persuasion. She was raised up with a belief in hard work, dynamic good will and hope as a discipline.

In 1889 Emily was amongst the first graduates of the liberal arts college Bryn Mawr College when she received her A.B. in Greek and Latin.

Emily was a member of the first generation of American women to attend colleges or universities in significant numbers. Almost all colleges and universities before that time were exclusively for men

She pursued further studies in Paris and Berlin and at the University of Chicago and received training in social work from followers of Jacob Riis in New York City and at Denison House, a settlement house in Boston, where she was associated with Vida Scudder.

She embraced three ground-breaking careers: social reform, the teaching of economics at Wellesley College in 1896, (becoming in 1913 professor of political economy and political and social science), and international political activity.

She was an active dreamer. We may understand this out of her words: "an age in which the unlikeness of other races will be conceived as much of an asset as the unlikeness of wind and string instruments in a symphony." Her constructive statesmanship, her intellectual leadership, her work for the League of Nations and the United Nations Organizations have spanned the continents of the world.

In 1946, because of her "contribution to the benefit of mankind", she became the third woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

As she was receiving the Nobel, in her acceptance speech, she said, "We are not asked to subscribe to any utopia or to believe in a perfect world. We are asked to equip ourselves with courage, hope, readiness for hard work and to cherish large and generous ideals."

She never got married, she never had children. She deeply regretted missing these experiences, at her words "the most human and deepest experiences...the most simply primitive human gift, the deepest reach of life" Wealth was not a goal in her life, she had donated her share of the Nobel Peace Prize money to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and in her old age, lack of money forced her to live in a nursing home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She died in Cambridge in 1961 at the age of 94 still intellectually active, and surrounded by a loving extended family and a supportive network of friends

Let me share with you her words.

"If all the good people were clever

And all clever people were good,

The world would be nicer than ever

We thought it possibly could"

-Emily Greene Balch