Posted on

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.

Posted on

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

158 Longwood Avenue, The Fenway

For five days in March 1981, seventy-three physicians from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union met in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., to launch International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). In the preceding year, a trio of physicians affiliated with Harvard Medical School had begun conversations with medical counterparts in the Soviet Union. Despite their professional credentials, they were acutely away of their relative marginality in the context of a growing U.S. military buildup, Cold War tensions, and the election to the U.S. presidency of Ronald Reagan, which promised even steeper military spending. In this context, Bernard Lown, a cardiologist, and his colleagues carefully crafted a message based on their competency as physicians: “we must stick unswervingly to the medical facts about nuclear war,” they stated.

Lown and his colleagues first met in Geneva with a group of Soviet medical practitioners in December 1980. After a difficult start, their deliberations concluded with a call for the 1981 meeting. Although intimidated by the prospects of organizing an international gathering in just three months, the doctors set up shop in the Longwood area of the Fenway, in a small, 2nd floor office above Sparr’s Drug, a provider of medical supplies and equipment and an old-style drugstore with soda fountains. There they turned to a volunteer corps of a dozen Harvard Medical School students and raised over $250,000 to pull off the Virginia conference. 

Sparr’s drug store, circa 1960-1969. Source: Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections.

The gathering ended with appeals to fellow physicians, leaders of the United Nations, and the Soviet and U.S. leaderships, each premised in the “abiding faith in the concept that what humanity creates, humanity can control.” Arguing against the Reagan Administration’s perspective, they stated the nuclear war was unwinnable and catastrophic, and further, that international cooperation was needed to reduce nuclear stockpiles. IPPNW’s influence continued to grow alongside that era’s burgeoning anti-nuclear movement. The organization won international recognition, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War remains active. Its offices are now located at 339 Pleasant Street in Malden. Sparr’s Drug closed down in 2002. The Harvard School of Public Health currently owns the building.

Building that housed IPPNW and Sparr’s, Longwood and Huntington Avenues. Photo by Eleni Macrakis, 2018.

Getting there:

Green Line “E” to Longwood Station.

To learn more:

Bernard Lown, Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey to End Nuclear Madness. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2008.