Zafar Shayan
Emily Greene Balch was an American sociologist, economist, pacifist, and the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was born in 1867 in Boston. She finished her college in 1889, then through a fellowship program, she studied economics in Paris, where she wrote Public Assistance of the Poor in France in 1893. She finished her formal studies at Harvard University, Chicago University and Berlin University.
In 1896, Balch started her academic career at Wellesley College as a lecturer of sociology and economy and attained professor rank in 1913. She was focused on various social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration. At the same time, she was a member of municipality boards of children and urban planning, and a member of state commissions of industrial education and immigration. She contributed the women and immigrants’ movements with her academic research.
At the time of the Frist World War, Balch decided to start working for peace. In 1915, she participated in the International Congress of Women at the Hague and played a significant role in founding Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace, which alter changed to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She also played a role in preparing peace proposals for different nations, and served on a delegation to the Scandinavian countries and Russia to ask their governments to lunch mediation offers. She helped Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton in writing Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and its Results.
Balch campaigned against the involvement of the US in conflicts. In 1919, she participated the second convention of the International Congress of Women in Zurich, where she was offered to become the secretary of The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Geneva until 1922. When the organization faced a financial problem in 1934, again she worked for one and a half years without any pay. Later, when she received the Nobel Peace Prize, she donated her share to this organization.
In the years after the First World War, Balch was active in helping government and international organizations in various projects such as disarmament, drug control, etc. She served as a member of committee to investigate situation in Haiti. During the Second World War, she defended the fundamental human rights against Nazis. She continued her peace-related activities and helping league of women for peace until the end of her life. She died in 1961 at the age of ninety-four.
The Nobel Prize: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1946/balch/biographical