Emily Greene Balch died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 94, one day after her 94th birthday.
Emily Greene Balch died on January 9, 1961, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just one day after celebrating her 94th birthday. She had lived a long life dedicated to scholarship, social reform, and international peace advocacy, remaining intellectually active and engaged with peace organizations well into her later years.
In the years following her 1946 Nobel Peace Prize, Balch continued to write and correspond on issues of international law, disarmament, and human rights, and she maintained her connection to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the organization she had helped build into a lasting international institution. Her death marked the end of an era for the first generation of American women who had built professional careers in the social sciences before turning to full-time activism.
Balch's passing was noted by peace organizations and academic institutions alike as the loss of one of the twentieth century's most significant female internationalists. Her papers, correspondence, and legacy are preserved at institutions such as Bryn Mawr College and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, and her life continues to be studied as a model of the intersection between rigorous scholarship and committed activism. She is remembered alongside Jane Addams as one of the founding mothers of the modern women's peace movement.