In This Issue: Biographer Gwinn writes in Emily Greene Balch that  Balch “had been fundamental to the life and work of Jane Addams and other settlement and peace workers; she had been an influential teacher, revered friend, a respected scholar and visionary thinker."  Dr. Mukherjee, author of  Emperor of All Maladies, explains with great clarity just exactly what cancer is, how much we know about it at this point, and possible new directions in which the world of science might proceed to deal with it.

Books:

Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism

By Kristen E. Gwinn

Published by University of Illinois Press; Hardback, c.2010, 217pp.

Reviewed by Jill Norgren

Jane Addams once referred to Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961) as the “goodest person” she had ever known.” Addams was in an excellent position to judge as the two women worked closely on social reform and international peace policies much of their adult lives. In 1931 Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as the International President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).* Fifteen years later Balch was honored with the Peace Prize, also for her work on behalf of peace as a leader of WILPF. They were the second and third women to receive the prize.

Historian Kristen Gwinn writes that Emily Balch “had been fundamental to the life and work of Jane Addams and other settlement and peace workers; she had been an influential teacher, revered friend, a respected scholar and visionary thinker. She left a powerful legacy.” In our current age of wars, we could do well to draw upon Balch’s legacy. Gwinn prepares us to do this with a concise, clearly written, well-researched biography of Balch’s life, a narrative that explores various aspects of her activism and her belief in the power of internationalism. Balch understood global community long before any of us used that term.

Balch’s life began in the post- Civil War Gilded Age and ended in the Cold War. In these ninety-four years she witnessed rapid urbanization, immigration, industrialization, the rise of the Progressive movement meant to transform social and economic ills, two major world wars, and two efforts at new and improved world order through the League of Nations and the United Nations. 

Emily Greene Balch grew up in Jamaica Plain, outside of Boston. Her early years provided important influences: “a foundation of family, religion, and education,” according to Gwinn, grounded Balch in her “commitment to a love of learning and a life of service.” Her father was the “constant test and standard” by which she measured her own qualities. She described him as “a combination of Abraham Lincoln, Santa Claus and Jesus.”  His rule was “Do unto others ‘better than ye’ would that they should do unto you.” This moral structure was reinforced by membership in the Unitarian Church whose leaders, in the 1870s, preached a social gospel. In particular, Balch came under the influence of minister Charles Fletcher Dole. At the age of ten, Balch answered Dole that she was ready to commit herself “without limitations” to a life in “the service of goodness.” He challenged her to make her life one of service to causes larger than herself, and was a lasting influence on Balch’s moral development and, by extension, her choice of careers and reform activism.

Bryn Mawr College welcomed Balch into its second class. Here she began to form relationships with women outside of her family, and to experience the ideas of professional women like M. Carey Thomas, the first dean of the faculty. She graduated in 1889 with a major in economics, and the college’s first European Fellowship for graduate study. Balch went to Paris where she experienced sex discrimination when trying to matriculate in graduate programs. Through her own grit, and some contact with French faculty, Balch studied the impact of public government programs on the poor and in 1893 published Public Assistance of the Poor in France.

Despite having studied the poor, Balch had yet to spend time in slums or speak at length with workers. To correct this, in the early 1890s, once more living near Boston, she began service to the underprivileged and took up settlement house work.  She helped to shape the new Denison House in Boston’s South End. After only three years, however, Balch moved away from social work, surely stinging her colleagues by saying that she had “become impatient with the powerlessness of such work.” Missing intellectual stimulation, she returned to academic study, first at Radcliffe, then the University of Chicago and, finally, the University of Berlin. At each institution she sought to integrate the two strands of her scholarship, economics and sociology.

In 1896 Katharine Coman, head of the economics department at Wellesley College, offered Balch a position as her assistant. For personal reasons, Balch accepted rather than enrolling in a PhD program. She wrote constantly, rose through the academic ranks and, in 1912, became full professor of political economy and political and social science. Balch found considerable satisfaction in teaching but also used her position to encourage her women students to participate in solving social problems. By doing this, Gwinn writes, Balch “fulfilled a central yearning: to live a life of service to her community.”

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