In 1906 Balch declared herself a socialist. She was drawn to the trade union movement, “not as a struggle for material advantage,” but rather as “a part of a wide-spread and many-sided effort for juster and more humane social relations everywhere.” Specifically interested in women, she joined in the formation of a national Women’s Trade Union League, urging the solution to problems through legislative means rather than organizing which had a potential for violence. It was a controversial position, but one she would not compromise.

Gwinn argues that through her work with immigrants Balch, like Jane Addams, “developed deep convictions that all differences, even those based in class and racial tensions, could be resolved without resorting to violence.” This view informed Balch’s trade union work. When war broke out in the summer of 1914, this belief similarly influenced her position on war. She argued that the war must, and could, end, contending that war was “an imperialist conquest, a return to barbaric modes of conflict resolution.” Moreover, she, like Addams, also saw war as a distraction from the work of domestic social and economic reform.

In 1914 Balch put her intellectual ideas and moral ideals into the service of the peace movement. In Gwinn’s words, she began the transition from professor to international activist. In the spring of 1915 Jane Addams, a founder of the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP) invited Balch to join other American women reformers at an international conference of women at The Hague. The leave of absence Balch received from Wellesley gave her the time to launch herself as a leader of the international peace movement. At The Hague the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) was formed. In May Balch accepted her first advocacy assignment: joining with women from belligerent and neutral nations to present ICWPP resolutions favoring mediation in Russia and the Scandinavian countries. Shortly after, President Woodrow Wilson granted Balch several meetings where she made the case for an official mediation conference of neutral nations.

The work begun in 1914, and continued for forty years, earned Balch respect for her intellectual analyses of the impact of war, and for her effective organizational talents. The list of her contributions and achievements is long. Gwinn writes that her ideas on colonial administration anticipated the League of Nations’ mandate system. Balch concluded, after studying the question of reparations, that the use of this policy would be economically devastating. With others, she condemned the terms of peace established by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. In 1926, with an interracial committee, she traveled to Haiti for weeks of interviewing, and prepared a trenchant and prophetic report on the effects of United States military occupation of that country.

After the ICWPP changed its name in 1919 to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a delegation elected Balch as its first international secretary-treasurer. Working from WILPF’s new Geneva office Balch, now a paid staff member, was expected to give permanent shape to what had been an ad hoc wartime group. Her immediate attention was given over to monitoring the League of Nations, and drawing attention to the need for post-war famine relief. The organization’s larger mandate was to advocate for a new world order.

Balch stayed in Geneva until 1922 when exhaustion demanded that she take on part-time status, sometimes carrying out special assignments such as her investigation in Haiti,  lobbying support abroad for the Kellogg-Briand Pact (a treaty that would replace armed conflict among nations with international law) and, throughout the 1930s, lobbying against aggressors in Manchuria, Spain, and Germany. In this period Balch remained a staunch internationalist, committed to the League of Nations, despite its weaknesses, as the appropriate body for the peaceful settlement of disputes. She also promoted policies of total disarmament.

Balch commenced a “long and painful mental struggle” when the United States entered the Second World War. She tried to reconcile her pacifist convictions with the need to defeat Hilter’s racist and military ideology. She was a relativist, but continued to argue that the best approach to international conflict was through collaborative diplomatic approaches. When the United Nations was founded Balch raised concerns that it might be pressed into power politics or promote nationalism but she still believed that only through international organization and management (but not world government) could the world avoid conflicts. Her vision included internationalizing waterways, aviation, and polar regions.

In November 1946 Balch was notified of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, to be shared with Dr. John. R. Mott of the Young Men’s Christian Association. It was a fitting honor particularly for a woman who had lost her academic position at Wellesley in 1919 after the Board of Trustees, uncomfortable with her peace advocacy, voted not to renew her contract.

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