Grounding Ourselves in Our Feminist Roots to Carry On for a Better World

Virginia Pratt, WILPF Boston branch member

WILPF Boston hosted a three-hour public event on March 29, 2025, in Jamaica Plain, MA, during which we dove into the herstory of WILPF’s founding mothers, Emily Greene Balch and Jane Addams. Professor and former international WILPF board member Catia Cecilia Confortini gave a spirited and insightful presentation on Emily Greene Balch. Ellen Mass, a WILPF Boston member, showed her 1995 commemorative film honoring Emily Greene Balch at Wellesley University. The event was well attended, and many participants read directly from former professor Emily Greene Balch’s written work.

Dr. Alexandria Russell, Executive Director of the Women’s Heritage Trail, gave a brief statement about her work and WILPF’s roots in Boston, MA. Professor Gloria MacMillan gave an inspiring presentation focused on Emily Greene Balch’s research of people in Slavic nations and included ties with Jane Addams (see below for a summary from Gloria). Eileen Kurkoski provided history on the development of the Nobel Peace Award. The event was hybrid, with video a recording available on YouTube. Eillen Kurkoski and Ellen Mass were the primary organizers. Michael Ippolito arranged for us to receive tech help from his friend Matt Gabrick.

What were some of the takeaway messages from the forum? Catia Confortini, an admirer of Emily Greene Balch, explained that while Ms. Balch was exemplary in many ways, she wasn’t perfect. Catia described Emily’s life as that of an activist, scholar, and teacher. Catia credited Ms. Balch with being ahead of her time, highly ethical to the point of maybe being too stubborn, and true to her ideals. Catia discussed Ms. Balch’s core beliefs and how they relate to WILPF’s values. For instance, she believed that we are all one and that there is no difference between people of different races. She challenged the notion of race, which in Emily’s day was not based on color but on class and country of origin. Ms. Balch wrote about the intersection of sexism, racism, and imperialism. She was anti-capitalist and drew connections between racism, imperialism, sexism, and war. Both she and Jane Addams founded settlement houses. Emily Greene Balch founded Denison House in Boston, and Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago.

Both Emily Greene Balch and Jane Addams valued the contribution of immigrants. They both explored the lives of immigrants and poor people and encouraged people of privilege to do the same. Emily Greene Balch traveled in “occupied” Haiti, met with people on the ground, and explored their conditions. She later co-authored a book called Occupied Haiti with the African American women she traveled with there. Balch concluded that there is no benevolent war or occupier. She modeled being an ally, insisting that people on the ground must be involved in the solution. She also traveled extensively in Slavic countries and wrote about her experiences there. Balch clearly denounced racism and occupation. Both Emily Greene Balch and Jane Addams used the power of the pen, as they were prolific writers. Each gave value to immigrants who were overlooked and viewed as inferior. They also both received Nobel Peace Prizes for their trailblazing social justice work.

Professor Gloria MacMillan provided an in-depth exploration of Emily Greene Balch’s book Our Fellow Slavic Citizens. She explained how the people and conditions in each country were similar and different. Slavic immigrants were very much discriminated against at the time. Emily Greene Balch provided a human face to these people and celebrated their culture, skills, and traditions. Balch and Addams promoted the League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations.

What are some of the correlations for today? We see immigrants being scapegoated and labeled as “criminals.” We see a move towards toxic nationalism with calls for “America first.” We see people with little wealth blamed for their poverty rather than a capitalist system that produces a few winners and a lot of losers. We see imperialism alive and well, with the US and Northern European countries considered superior. We see occupation alive and well in Israel/Palestine with US support. Racism, too, is alive and well as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are abolished. We know that there are stark disparities in health here in the US between people of color and upper-class white people. There is a clear backlash to women’s rights with the erosion of reproductive rights in much of the country. Repression on college and university campuses is abounding. We are seeing a rise in militarism with our ever-expanding military budget. 

What made the event work? We used a public place in a progressive neighborhood. Emily Greene Balch was originally from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston, where the event occurred. The event was free and open to the public. We sought out co-sponsors for the event and advertised it well in advance. We had several planning sessions beforehand. We had excellent speakers and a film, and we offered both in-person and virtual options.

The Past Is Not Gone—It’s Not Even Past—for Peacemakers

Gloria McMillan, WILPF Tucson branch and DISARM/End Wars Committee member 

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Travers

Wellesley College Economics professor Emily Greene Balch humanized the Slavs for the nativists in the US–because where exceptions might be made for Greeks or Italians because of their classical cultures, no such tolerance was available for Slavic immigrants, which Balch took as her task. Balch’s two-year sabbatical from Wellesley College in 1906 led to her 1910 book Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, a detailed ethnography that challenged the slurs against “the new immigrants”–particularly the Slavs.

Slavic speakers in the United States have no coherent history or cultural presence, even in 2025. The main Balkan cultural presence is Count Dracula’s annual appearance at Halloween.

Where people cannot self-represent, they are given a stock image, a caricature that sums them up. Balch analyzes several Austrian-ruled Slavic-speaking national groups, giving sensible reasons for immigration and articulating their manufacturing and farming traditions to show why these are not lesser-than-human, as immigration restriction advocates of the US “nativist” movement claimed. The “nativists” of the early 1900s’ goal was to keep the Slavic speakers out due to national low intelligence and inferior moral character. Balch and Addams didn’t believe in “national character” but researched the factors of linguistics, economic immigration drivers, and environmental influences in various regions.

“Orientalism,” coined by Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003), shows that this “othering” does not start in the Mideast but closer to home. In 1881, Jane Addams inherited the equivalent of ten million dollars and booked the “Grand Tour” of Western Europe. American travelers ignored the living (invisible) southern Italians or “orientalized” into picturesque ragamuffins to fixate upon bleached-out classical Roman statues and architectural ruins. Jane Addams mingled with Greeks on the streets in Athens and Italians in Rome. The Ivy League and Oxfordian ideals of a classical education were based upon this patronizing and inaccurate lens. Addams set out to challenge the bleaching of the classics at Hull-House in Chicago.

The Hull-House Little Theatre engaged Halsted Street Greeks to enact classical Greek plays rather than use faculty and students from Northwestern and the University of Chicago. Addams could have created a typical academic performance. Instead, she reconfigured away the wall of bias and used “new immigrant” neighborhood actors who were fluent in Greek and passionate about these dramatic works. Addams enticed her economically upscale friends from north Chicago suburbs to attend these performances at the Hull-House Little Theatre, unlike anything they had seen. The plays Ajax, The Trojan Women, and The Return of Odysseus successfully broke the bias against Greeks as “new immigrants” because they had a visible and seamless connection to what was considered high art, all for the sake of promoting peace.

We were also honored to have Wellesley Professor Catia Confortini’s slide presentation, “Race and Imperialism in the Work of Emily Green Balch.” The presentation showed how Balch’s fieldwork, which resulted in the text Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, informed her work in Haiti, which was colonized by an imperial power (the United States). By making similar notes on what imperial power does both to the occupying imperialist power and to those living under the power of that imperial reign, Balch shows that “race” is flexible enough to use wherever an imperial power needs a wedge to create hierarchies and divide subject populations. Just as the “invading Slav” was a trope to keep Slavic speakers out of the United States in the nativist period of the early 20th century, so too was the “predatory Black male,” a trope that was used to justify US occupation troops in Haiti–even though, as Confortini notes, Blacks and whites moved around in safety before the occupation but not later, after predatory white soldiers raped Haitian women. This example shows how Balch’s Slavic fieldwork led to her work in Haiti.

You can dive deeper into WILPF’s history in the following videos:

Slavic Field Studies: Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch (premiered at the Boston branch’s Balch Commemoration on March 29, 2025)

From Spoken-of to Speaker: Hull-House’s Invisible Co-founder Josefa Humpal-Zeman (premiered at WILPF’s 110th Anniversary with WILPF’s Chicago branch on March 22, 2025)

Emily Greene Balch and Our (Artistic) Slavic (and Eastern European) Fellow Citizens