Emily greene balch biography channel

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Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961): Social Worker, Reformer, Peace Activist
and Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1946

By Catherine A.

Paul

2016

Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist, and pacifist. She was born January 8, 1867 in Boston, Massachusetts to a prominent family, and she attended Bryn Mawr College from 1886 until 1889, where she studied economics.

After spending a year independently studying sociology, she was awarded the European Fellowship through Bryn Mawr and moved to Paris. There, she studied economics under Émile Levasseur, a French economist and historian, and wrote Public Assistance of the Poor in France, published in 1893 (Nobel Prize, 2016).

Upon her return to the United States, Balch worked in Boston at the Children’s Aid Society with Charles W. Birtwell (“Emily Greene Balch,” 2014). Soon after, Balch attended a summer institute sponsored by the Ethical Culture Society where she met Katherine Coman, V