A Different Burden: Race and the Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch

Abstract

Scientific racism bedeviled U.S. society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Challenges to scientific racism came from different corners of modern society. Emily Greene Balch, Wellesley economist and prominent leader of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, served as a persistent critic of early twentieth‐century racism. A study of her writing on immigration, U.S. democracy, and U.S. foreign policy on Haiti and Liberia complicates our understanding of the history of U.S. women's peace movements and of the challenges to U.S. racial discourse. Balch believed racism to be inimical to her efforts to move the world beyond nationalism and into an age of mutual humanity. Balch's three decades of work supports Peggy Pascoe's observation that the transition from scientific racism to modern ideas about race were not overnight occurrences or without contradictions. Balch's work also indicates that as historians continue to examine the dimensions of race that have so deeply defined the United States, the women's peace movement that developed in response to World War I deserves notice.