Among the women attracted to the work of the Woman's Peace Party was Emily Greene Balch. Balch's early years held much in common with Jane Addams's. She was born on January 8, 1867, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and her father had a Union connection with the Civil War, as did Addams's. As a result, racial justice was also a topic for discussion in the environment in which she grew up. After attending private schools in Massachusetts, where she lived, Balch attended college at Bryn Mawr, graduating in 1889 with a degree emphasizing economics. She also studied political economy at the Surbonne. The results of her research were published in 1893 by the American Economic Association as Public Assistance of the Poor in France. Once at home, Balch became entrenched in the work of Progressive reform, especially with women interested in working among the poor. In 1892, while attending Felix Adler's Summer School of Applied Ethics, she became friendly with Jane Addams and Vida Scudder. The latter, along with Balch and others, the next year founded Denison House, a settlement house in Boston.

Unlike Addams, however, settlement house work itself did not stimulate Balch, whose primary interest was in the academic world. After some soul-searching and further studies, in 1896 she accepted a position on the faculty of Wellesley College, where commitment to social reform influenced her work and teaching on issues of the poor, immigrants, Women, and racial minorities. In 1906 Balch openly declared herself to be a socialist, a position that made her vulnerable to criticism by the college and local and national authorities. By 1910, however, with the publication of Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, a comprehensive analysis of an immigrant community, Bach had established herself as a sound scholar. She received a new five-year appointment as professor and chair of Wellesley's Department of Economics and Sociology.

After August 1914, Balch's and Addams's paths intertwined frequently. A pacifist since 1898, Balch, too, was deeply disturbed by the outbreak of war in Europe. As she recalled, "When the World War broke out in 1914, my reaction to it was largely a sense of tragic interruption of what seemed to me the real business of our times the realization of a more satisfactory economic order. ... Now all the world was at war, one hardly knew for what for reasons of ambition, prestige, mutual fear, of frontiers and colonies. None of the war aims seemed very relevant to progress, in any important sense." (Emily Balch, Working for Peace, May 1933). At first Balch took the sarne path as Jane Addams. She was active in founding the American Union against Militarism and establishing the Wonlan's Peace Party, especially the Boston and Wellesley branches. In the spring of 1915 she even took a leave of absence from Wellesley in order to attend the congress of women in The Hague. That event led to her full-time professional commitment to peace activism.

I am bringing my days to a close in a world still hag-ridden by the thought of war, and it is not given to us in this new atomic world to know how things will turn out. But when I reflect on the enormous changes that I have seen myself and the amazing resiliency and resourcefulness of mankind, how can I fail to be of good courage.