Nobel Peace Laureates Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch

Abstract Nobel Peace Prize recipients Jane Addams (1931) and Emily Greene Balch (1946) were friends and colleagues whose peace activism grew out of their Progressive Era reform agendas. Addams, the co-founder of the Hull House settlement house, was already famous when she entered the peace movement of the early twentieth century. Balch was a professor at Wellesley before working full time in international peace activism. They helped establish the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom with Addams as its first president. Balch, as the first international secretary-treasurer, was responsible for establishing the first WILPF office in Geneva. After a brief historical overview of their peace activism, this chapter examines three foundations of their philosophical and methodological pacifism that are still pertinent today: 1) women’s participation as a necessary part of peace work, 2) internationalism that can act as a corrective to economic/cultural nationalism, and 3) relational community-building methods that acknowledge the particularities of people, place, and context.