Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a prosperous and educated family dedicated to abolitionism in the years leading up to the Civil War. Taking advantage of the opportunities in higher education available to women of her generation, Balch was a member of Bryn Mawr’s first graduating class in 1889.
Balch’s commitment to social justice and peace began in her youth under the influence of the Reverend Charles Dole, whom she described as a preacher of “good will, not in the sense of mere kindliness, but of unceasing ‘all out’ willing the good.” Along with Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley, Balch founded Denison House in Boston, named in honor of the British socialist theologian Frederick Denison Maurice and inspired by the burgeoning Christian Socialist movement in America.
Balch’s religious views—founded on the liberal Unitarianism of her youth, which valued rational discourse over polemics—led her to view coercive force as “self-defeating” and to assert that “new methods, free from violence, must be worked out for ending abuses and for undoing wrongs, as well as for achieving positive ends.” She became a Quaker in 1921.
After graduate studies in economics and social justice in Paris and Berlin, Balch joined the faculty of Wellesley College in 1896. When the United States entered World War I, she participated in anti-war movements because she believed that the violence of this and all other wars reflected “our whole economic and social system [and] our scale of value.” Her socialist and pacifist views led to her termination from Wellesley after a twenty-two-year teaching career.
In 1919, Balch became the Secretary-Treasurer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In that position, she worked diligently for global peace, believing that nationalism was antithetical to real or enduring peace. Social change, Balch argued, came only through understanding that “the most precious thing we know of is personality.” Personal relationships are the key to peace.
In 1939, Balch was again at the forefront of the anti-war movement. Soon, however, she reluctantly modified her pacifist stance toward Nazism, believing that military opposition to Hitler was a necessary although unspeakably tragic evil.
Balch’s enduring work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Justice helped shape policy decisions of the League of Nations and eventually influenced the principles promoted by the United Nations.
9 January
Rigoberta Menchú Tum
9 January 1959—
Respecting the Dignity of the Indigenous
Although her struggle for justice was famous throughout the rest of the world, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the K’iche’ Mayan peacemaker from Guatemala, was acknowledged by her own government as a force to be reckoned with only after she won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee honored Menchú for her advocacy for the rights of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples.
Menchú inherited the struggle for economic equality from her Mayan ancestors. By 1679, the Spanish conquistadores had conquered all of the Mayan kingdoms and established colonial rule throughout Central America. For the next five hundred years, indigenous peoples were peasant slaves to wealthy European settlers, despite several violent attempts to throw off the yoke.
Menchú’s father, Vicente, fell afoul of the law when he tried to cultivate land in the mountains of Guatemala that belonged to wealthy landowners. While he spent time in prison, his family was forced to work on the plantation or finca to earn enough money for his release. His later involvement in the Peasants’ Unity Committee or Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC), an organization that demanded the overthrow of the repressive Guatemalan government, eventually led to his murder by the Guatemalan army in January 1980. Two of Menchú’s brothers died from malnutrition and the poisonous effects of pesticides used on the fincas, and a third was murdered. Their grieving mother was abducted by Guatemalan soldiers who raped, tortured, and killed her.
Inspired by her father’s example, Menchú began working for the CUC. Her activism forced her into hiding soon after the deaths of her parents. Fleeing to Mexico, she returned to Guatemala in 1981 to continue the work her father started by joining with several groups (among them the Vicente Menchú Revolutionary Christians) as an educator. She traveled to Europe in 1982 as part of a coalition to raise awareness about the plight of indigenous Guatemalans. While there, she met the anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos. Burgos’ interview with Menchú eventually became the book I, Rigoberta, which gained Rigoberta and the indigenous movement of Guatemala international attention when it was published in 1983.
Shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize, Menchú founded the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation, which continues to advocate tirelessly for the rights of the poor and indigenous Mayan people of Guatemala. Its “Code of Ethics for an Era of Peace” states: “There is no Peace without Justice; No Justice without Equality; No Equality without Development; No Development without Democracy; No Democracy without Respect to the Identity and Dignity of Cultures and Peoples.”
10 January
Henry Scott Holland
27 January 1847—17 March 1918
Society’s Christianization
If Henry Scott Holland’s name is recognized today, it’s most likely because of a one-liner of his, often repeated at funerals, that “death is nothing to us.” The work that he considered his true calling—awakening his fellow Christians to the truth that “duty to God and duty to man are the same thing”—is nearly forgotten. And that’s a shame.
Holland was an intellectual who enjoyed the scholarly life. But he was also an Anglican priest, and he believed it his duty to coax Christians out of their pews and into the unpleasant world of poverty, violence, and despair to which they often closed their eyes. Genuine Christianity, he believed, was much more than a set of creeds. It was the living experience of helping the poor, sick, homeless, imprisoned, and needy, just as Jesus did and just as he commanded his disciples to do. So in 1884, Holland left a comfortable lectureship at Oxford to become a member of the clerical staff at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. He wanted a better understanding of England’s social problems.
His experiences in the streets of London, which he described as “reeking with human misery,” led to the publication in 1889 of his most famous book, Lux Mundi. In it, he alarmed the ecclesiastical and political establishment of the day by calling for the “Christianization of the social structure whereby all men live in accordance with the principles of divine justice and human brotherhood.” This was disturbing enough, but Holland’s denunciation of capitalism as the primary obstacle to society’s Christianization, and his recommendation that the state take over and supervise commercial transactions and industrial production in order to protect workers, absolutely scandalized the upper and middle classes.
On the heels of Lux Mundi’s appearance, Holland formed the Christian Social Union to “investigate areas in which moral truth and Christian principles could bring relief to the social and economic disorder of society.” For years the Union published a magazine, Commonwealth, in which the plight of the poor—substandard housing, inadequate medical care, low wages, and so on—was regularly reported. Commonwealth also led the way on several campaigns for social and economic reform, especially in calling for a state-guaranteed minimum wage and unemployment benefits to workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own.
Holland returned to Oxford in 1910 as the Regius Professor of Divinity to educate a rising generation of clergy in his vision of a Christian’s social duty. The shock of World War I seriously undermined his already fragile health, and his final years were painful. But to the end, he cautioned his students
