Emily Greene Balch was fired from Wellesley College for opposing World War I. She'd taught there for twenty years. The college let her go in 1919 because her pacifism embarrassed the administration during wartime. She was 52, with no income and no institutional home. Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on January 8, 1867, to a prosperous family, Balch was part of Bryn Mawr's first graduating class in 1889. She studied economics in Paris and Berlin, then joined the Wellesley faculty, where she specialized in immigration and labor conditions. Her 1910 book Our Slavic Fellow Citizens was a pioneering study of Eastern European immigrants in the United States, based on fieldwork she conducted in Austria-Hungary and among immigrant communities in American cities. She opposed World War I from the start and attended the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915 alongside Jane Addams. After the war, she helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), where she served as international secretary for two decades. She drafted proposals for international governance of disputed territories, including a plan for the internationalization of waterways and colonial mandates that influenced League of Nations policy. After her dismissal from Wellesley, she lived modestly, supported by friends and small grants, and devoted herself entirely to peace work. She traveled to Haiti in 1926 to investigate the American military occupation and published a report critical of U.S. imperialism there. She advocated for disarmament, mediation, and international cooperation at a time when those positions were considered naive at best and treasonous at worst. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, at 79, sharing it with John Mott. She donated the prize money to WILPF. She lived to 94, spending her final years in a nursing home, largely forgotten by the public but still corresponding with peace activists worldwide. She died in 1961.