Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balch was born on January 8, 1867 in Boston Massachusetts.
She was an author, educator and an activist. Although she had always
been concerned with the problem of peace and had followed carefully
the work of the two peace conferences of 1899 and 1907 at The Hague,
she became convinced after the outbreak of World War I in 1914
that her lifework lay in furthering humanity's effort to rid the
world of war. As a delegate to the International Congress of Women
at The Hague in 1915, she played a prominent role in several important
projects: in founding an organization called the Women's International
Committee for Permanent Peace, later named the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom; in preparing peace proposals for
consideration by the warring nations; in serving on a delegation,
sponsored by the Congress, to the Scandinavian countries and Russia
to urge their governments to initiate mediation offers; and in
writing, in collaboration with Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton,
Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its
Results (1915). She was a member of Henry Ford’s Neutral
Conference for Continuous Mediation, based at Stockholm, for which
she drew up a position paper called “International Colonial
Administration”, proposing a system of administration not
unlike that of the mandate system later accepted by the League
of Nations.
Balch campaigned actively against America's entry into the war.
She accepted a position on the editorial staff of the liberal weekly,
the Nation; wrote Approaches to the Great Settlement, with an introduction
by Norman Angell, a future Nobel Peace Prize winner; attended the
second convention of the International Congress of Women held in
Zurich in 1919 and accepted its invitation to become secretary
of its operating organization WILPF, The Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom, with headquarters in Geneva. This
post she relinquished in 1922, but when the League was hard pressed
financially in 1934, she again acted, without salary, as international
secretary for a year and a half. It was to this League that she
donated her share of the Nobel Peace Prize money.
During the period between the wars, she put her talents at the
disposal of governments, international organizations, and commissions
of various types. She helped in one way or another with many projects
of the League of Nations, among them, disarmament, the internationalization
of aviation, drug control and the participation of the United States
in the affairs of the League. In 1926 she served as a member of
a WILPF committee appointed to investigate conditions in Haiti,
garrisoned then by American marines, and edited, as well as wrote,
most of Occupied Haiti, the committee's report. In the thirties
she sought ways and means to help the victims of Nazi persecution.
She continued to concentrate on peaceful resolutions to conflicts.
Even after receiving the Peace Prize in 1946 at the age of seventy-nine,
she continued, despite frail health, to participate in the cause
to which she had given her life. Her life’s work was based
on the philosophy of nonviolence in which she made a significant
impact in paving the way for a more just social order.
Next >>
|
