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Stone-Davis Hall, Wellesley College

106 Central Street, Wellesley

Emily Greene Balch in Hungary, circa 1900.

Wellesley College is a liberal arts college for women in the affluent town of Wellesley, about 19 miles west of downtown Boston. An elite institution, it has about 2,400 students and an endowment of almost $2 billion. Its alumnae association has been characterized as the world’s most powerful women’s network.  Two out of the three women who have served as U.S. secretary of state (Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton), for example, are graduates. Less well known is a Wellesley professor who worked to challenge war and militarism, at a high cost to her academic career, and who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize: Emily Greene Balch.

Balch helped to found Denison House (part of the settlement house movement, and a site in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston) in Boston’s Chinatown in 1892, serving as its first headworker. After graduate studies, she became a professor at Wellesley and the chair of its Department of Economics and Sociology, teaching courses (from 1869 to 1918) on a variety of topics including the history of socialism, labor issues, immigration, and the economic role of women.

Balch was a strong supporter of worker rights and helped to found the Women’s Trade Union League. She self-identified as a socialist, while rejecting the notion of class struggle. An internationalist, feminist, Christian (first Unitarian and later Quaker), and pacifist, Balch attended the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, as a U.S. delegate and helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (which still exists today). Balch worked to end World War I through international mediation, while publicly opposing U.S. entry into the conflict and the military draft and supporting the rights of conscientious objectors and non-citizens. Her activism and the positions she took ultimately led Wellesley’s board of trustees to refuse to reappoint Balch, at 52, when her contract expired in 1918—despite her having the support of departmental colleagues and the College’s president.

After her firing from Wellesley, Balch continued her activism, particularly with the WILPF, and worked to oppose war as well as racism and imperialism—the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) a key concern. In 1946, Balch received the Nobel Peace Prize “for her lifelong work for disarmament and peace.”

From 1898 to 1900, Emily Greene Balch lived on the Wellesley College campus at Stone Hall, a building destroyed by fire in 1927. On the same site now stands Stone-Davis Hall.

Balch died in Cambridge in 1961, at the age of 94. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, two miles away from where she was raised (130 Prince Street) in Jamaica Plain.

Stone Hall, Wellesley College, date unknown. Source: Wellesley College Archives Image Gallery,

Getting there:

Commuter rail (Worcester Line) from South Station to Wellesley Square. 1.0 mile (20-minute) walk.

To learn more:

Robert W. Dimand, “Emily Greene Balch, Political Economist,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2, 2011: 464-479.

Melinda Plastas, “A Different Burden: Race and the Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch,” Peace and Change, Vol. 33, No. 4, October 2008: 469-508.

Judy D. Whipps, “The Feminist Pacifism of Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Peace Laureate,” NWSA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3, 2006: 122-132.

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Lucy Stone House

45 Boutwell Street, Dorchester

Lucy Stone, circa 1840-1860, public domain

The first woman from Massachusetts to receive a college degree, Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was a leading abolitionist and a pioneer in the struggle for gender equality. She played a key role in the first National Women’s Rights Convention (which took place in 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts), and helped to set up the anti-slavery Woman’s National Loyal League. Along with her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, she also founded the Women’s Journal, a national weekly newspaper based in Boston, in 1870.

It was that same year when the couple, along with their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (who would become a prominent feminist, suffragist, and humanitarian), moved to the 17-room house on Boutwell Street. Although the house was demolished in 1971, two pillars at the end of the driveway remain from Lucy Stone’s home, one of them adorned with a plaque honoring her.

Lucy Stone’s ashes are interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. There is a statue of her (along with ones of Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams) at the Boston Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue. The first U.S. woman to retain her name after marriage, she once famously said that “A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost.”

Getting there:

Red Line to Ashmont Station. Exit to Dorchester Avenue and go right (north) until Ashmont Street (about 200 feet). Take a right and continue on Ashmont past Adams Street. Take a left on Train Street, and take the third right onto Boutwell. Number 45 is on the left. (0.9 miles, about an 18-minute walk.) A bus from Fields Corner Station also passes nearby.

To learn more:

“Lucy Stone, 1818-1893,” Dorchester Atheneum website.

Sally G. McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.