Crystal Eastman
ACLU Co-Founder and Civil Rights Crusader
“History tends to bury what it seeks to reject, and it was no accident that male-dominated history excised the leadership of women who made essential connections between sexism, racism, poverty and war.” — Blanche Wiesen Cook on why Crystal Eastman was lost to history for several decades
Crystal Eastman would be 140 years old if she were still alive, but her words and ideas are very much of the moment. She’s so relevant, I am appalled I only just learned her name.
Crystal was a cofounder of many things. With her brother, she founded and edited the radical socialist publication The Liberator. She co-founded the Women’s National Congress with Alice Paul — one of the main suffrage organizations in the early 20th century. In the lead up to World War I she founded the International Women’s Peace Party to try to stop the war and later to protect free speech. And she co-founded the ACLU.
Along the way she wrote the first workers compensation law in America.
Raised by Feminists… in the 1880s
Crystal Eastman was born in 1881. Her mother, Annis Ford Eastman, was a suffragist and the first woman ordained Congregationalist minister in the U.S. back in 1890.
Annis raised Crystal to believe in women’s rights. The minister used to hold twice-weekly “Supposiums” for her community, and it was at one of these that 15-year old Crystal presented her first paper on feminism, entitled “Women,” in which she proclaimed:
“…the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster.”
Crystal got a very good education after leaving home, too. She went to Vassar for undergrad, where she was a member of many clubs, including the German club, civics club, and two choirs (she sang second soprano, like yours truly). The Vassar professors she studied under had a lasting influence on her political and economic views (which were far left).
She went on to get a Masters in sociology from Columbia, then, because Columbia Law didn’t admit women yet, her law degree from NYU, where she graduated second in her class.
Crystal lived with her brother Max on 11th street, where they mixed with the Bohemian crowd of Greenwich Village on the regular. Both staunch proponents of socialism and free love as well as suffrage, they were in good company there in the Village. Crystal inspired Max to take an active role in the suffrage movement, convincing him to head the Men’s Support for Women Suffrage League that Fanny Garrison Villard had just founded.
Crystal knew that she was a product of her upbringing. But how to spread the gospel of equality of the sexes when so many were opposed?
“We must bring up feminist sons,” she declared.
Labor Rights are Human Rights
As a socialist, Crystal was also drawn to the labor rights movement. She was asked by a friend to serve as a researcher into workplace hazards and her resulting paper — Work Accidents and the Law — served as the basis for the first workers compensation law in the country. She drafted that law herself, as secretary for a New York State commission on which she was the only woman (and only paid employee).
A year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took the lives of 146 victims — mostly young women. Their families got no compensation to speak of, and the resulting outcry spurred several states to adopt laws similar to the one Crystal had written for New York.
Free Love, Not Alimony
Crystal and her brother were adherents to the doctrine of “free love”. This idea, enthusiastically embraced by the Bohemians of the Village, was exactly what it sounds like.
Crystal believed that marriage was “a link and not a handcuff.” When she married a fellow activist and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1912 (where she ran the — sadly unsuccessful — state suffrage campaign), she did so with an open mind. The marriage ended in divorce not long after, but she refused alimony, decrying it as an admission of financial dependency on men. A woman of independent means, she was able make that symbolic gesture at no real cost to her well-being.
Not Your Average Suffragist
Crystal Eastman was distinct in the way that she fought for the causes she believed in. A self-described “militant idealist,” she had a brilliant mind that understood the interplay between systems of power and oppression, and because of that she refused to compromise or to let one cause take over at the expense of others.
She did not help working class women in their labor rights activism as a means to organize them for suffrage. Rather, as a socialist, she believed inherently in the rights of the workers.
Crystal also knew that voting wouldn’t solve all women’s problems, and advocated for other reforms which were far more controversial, including birth control and the legalization of sex work.
A staunch pacifist, she was not pleased when many of her fellow suffragists begrudgingly supported World War I to buy themselves political capital. In fact, she did just the opposite.
Jingo the Dinosaur Says No to War
Crystal was opposed to war, conscription, and imperialism. So when World War I broke out in Europe, she poured her energy into keeping the US out of the fight.
In 1915, she, Fanny Garrison Villard, and suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt founded the Women’s Peace Party. Its first goal was to stay out of the war, and to that end the women put on all kinds of anti-war stunts and propaganda. Some of these strike me as very Greenpeace-esque tactics.
In one, they introduced the public to “Jingo the Dinosaur — all plate armor, no brains.” It honestly takes a little unpacking to understand the satire here, but essentially the dinosaur was meant to represent the warring forces. And who wants to be a dinosaur, right?
Once Congress declared war in 1917, the WPP’s primary goal became to defend free speech during wartime. This turned out to be critical.
Blacklisted
With the passage of the Selective Service Act, there was a lot of work to be done. Crystal joined forces with Robert Baldwin to defend conscientious objectors to the war. Their organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau, focused on the civil liberties of dissenters, including conscientious objectors and people who spoke out against World War I or conscription.
That organization turned into the ACLU.
At the same time, the passage of the Espionage Act made prosecution of political speech dangerously easy for the government. Her own publication — The Liberator — came under fire, and was shut down. Her brother and several others were tried under the Espionage Act, but both trials ended in hung juries.
Because of her activism and her part in the publication, Crystal was blacklisted during the first Red Scare of 1919–1920. She was unable to find paid work for years, though that certainly didn’t stop her from writing and agitating.
Now We Can Begin
Crystal Eastman distinguished herself among suffragists by the belief that suffrage was just the start of the struggle for equality. She called that struggle “A big battle for the complete feminist.”
She’d been working to get the 19th amendment passed for over a decade, but when it happened, she rolled up her sleeves and got back to work. In a 1920 speech titled “Now We Can Begin,” she laid out a plan.
First, she said, we must break down all barriers — actual and legal — to women being in any professions they want and to earning equal pay.
Second, we must institute a revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls. It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies of life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle.
She advocated for mothers to be paid for their contributions to society. And that still would not be the end of the struggle.
“…with a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation… with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing.
It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”
What did she do next? She went and wrote the ERA.
Lost Legacy, Reclaimed
Now that I know about her, it boggles my mind that Crystal Eastman was lost to history for about 50 years.
Luckily, she’s being rediscovered, and belatedly celebrated. Blanche Wiesen Cook, celebrated biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, edited a compilation of Crystal’s papers in the 70s. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Now We Can Begin is listed as #83 on the American Rhetoric Society’s list of 100 most influential speeches in US History (right after speeches by Margaret Sanger and Ursula K. Le Guin). And the first full-length biography of her (which I’ve just ordered!) was published in 2019.
Before she died, Crystal had been planning to write a book on women. Upon her death, Jamaican-American poet and novelist Claude McKay wrote,
“Crystal Eastman was a great-hearted woman whose life was big with primitive and exceptional gestures. She never wrote that Book of Woman which was imprinted on her mind. …And so life was cheated of one contribution about women that no other woman could write.”
In Crystal’s obituary in The Nation, editor Freda Kirchwey wrote:
“Crystal Eastman was a great leader... When she spoke to people — whether it was to a small committee or a swarming crowd — hearts beat faster… She was [for] thousands a symbol of what the free woman might be.”
Sources:
Neuman, J. (2019). Gilded suffragists: The New York socialites who fought for women’s right to vote. New York: Washington Mews Books, and imprint of New York University Press.
Crystal Eastman, Vassar Encyclopedia.
Herman, S. N. (2019, July 12). Crystal Eastman, The ACLU’s Underappreciated Founding Mother.
Text of “Now We Can Begin”, Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication
Crystal Eastman, Encyclopedia Britannica
Black, R. (2009, November 16). Jingo the Dinosaur — a World War I Mascot. Smithsonian Magazine.
