The Disappearance of Emily G. Balch, Social Scientist

Emily Greene Balch is probably best known as the second American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize—a tireless pacifist and feminist who served as the first secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the early 1920s. But she was, before that, an innovative social scientist whose scholarly contributions were only later overshadowed by her activism and by formalist tendencies in sociology, which subsequently ignored her critical work on immigration. Balch started her career espousing the "objectivity" of science, but her experience as a researcher of immigration and as a pacifist in search of an understanding of the social psychology of war moved her closer toward a methodological hermeneutic that made formalist sociological principles anathema. Where she blended theory-development with social practice, her male colleagues attempted to conceal political purpose behind disinterested discipline. After 1918, women sociologists were transferred into other fields, namely, back into social work. In Balch's case, she turned to international organizations and the gritty practice of reconciliation, but her profile as a social scientist disappeared altogether. The fate of her intellectual work provides a glimpse of the affinities between gender and certain forms of disciplinary knowledge in the early social sciences.