11 - Race, Gender, Empire, and War in the International Thought of Emily Greene Balch

Summary

Emily Balch is a familiar figure to historians of the early twentieth-century transnational women’s movement, not least because of her central role in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Yet, there is no doubt that Balch was also a thinker engaged in conversations now recognized as squarely belonging to the history of international thought. These include debates on race and immigration, economic interdependence, the reform of colonialism, and visions for a world society. There were contradictions within Balch’s thought but her empirical research nonetheless challenged some of the racist stereotypes within American International Relations in the 1910s and 20s. Balch was never interested in separating the domestic from the international. Her starting point remained her ‘fellow citizens’ and the contexts that shaped their lives, whether these were the ethnographic realities of East-Central Europe or the impact of the United States’ occupation of Haiti.