Crystal Eastman

• Crystal Eastman
• Born: June 25, 1881
• Died: July 8, 1928

Labor lawyer, suffragist, equal rights feminist, journalist, and socialist, was the third child and only daughter in a family of four children. Her parents were both Congregational ministers. Her mother, Annis Bertha (Ford) Eastman, was a notable preacher who lectured in behalf of social change and women’s rights. Her father, Samuel Elijah Eastman, consistently supported his daughter’s educational and political ambitions. After an illness, he turned over his parish in Elmira, New York, to his wife; toward the end of her life Crystal Eastman wrote that “the story of my background is the story of my mother.” Annis Eastman encouraged her daughter and and her two sons, Max and Anstice, to be independent in thought and vigorous in action. (A third brother, the oldest son, Morgan, died of scarlet fever in 1884. Crystal had scarlet fever at the same time, and it is now believed that it contributed to the nephritis that shortened her life.)

Crystal Eastman was graduated from Vassar College in 1903, received an M.A. in sociology from Columbia University in 1904, and was graduated second in her class from New York University Law School in 1907. Her personal world was as wide as her political vision. Striking and almost six feet tall, with a deep and musical voice, she was known as an eloquent and inspiring orator—and an athlete. A militant suffragist, she sought to extend the contours of women’s strength and women’s sphere far beyond suffrage. To promote her vision of women’s power she spoke before large audiences on “women’s right to physical equality with men,” and the physical “regeneration of the female sex.” Journalist Freda Kirchwey recalled that Eastman pictured a Utopia of athletes, with women “unhampered by preconceived ideas of what was fit or proper or possible.” Eastman believed that “when women were expected to be agile, they became agile; when they were expected to be brave, they developed courage when they had to endure, their endurance broke all records.” According to Kirchwey, as Eastman “stood there, herself an embodiment of tall easy strength and valor, her words took on amazing life.”

While pursuing her graduate studies, Eastman worked at night as a recreation leader in Mary Kingsbury Simhovitch’s Greenwich House settlement. There her friends included such social workers as Lillian Wald (founder of the Henry Street settlement) and Paul U. Kellogg (then editor of the social work journal Charities and the Commons). Kellogg gave Eastman her first job, as a legal investigator for the famed Russell Sage Foundation’s Pittsburgh Survey, and she spent a year in Pittsburgh interviewing working families affected by industrial accidents. Her report, Work Accidents and the Law (1910), combined careful statistical analyses with a journalist’s outrage against appalling working conditions.

Work Accidents and the Law became a basic weapon in the battle for workers’ benefits and occupational safety. Appointed by Governor Charles Evans Hughes first woman commissioner of New York State’s Commission on Employers’ Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor (1909-11), Eastman drafted the state’s first workers’ compensation law, which was used as a model throughout the nation. Subsequently she worked as a social agent and investigator for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations; in that post she influenced federal policy on issues relating to labor conditions and the law. Her investigations confirmed her radical vision and clarified her understanding of economics. She began to identify herself as a socialist. In 1911 she wrote “Three Essentials for Accident Prevention.” Referring to the Triangle Shirt Waist Company fire in New York City in which 140 women died, she wrote that when healthy women and men die because of preventable disasters, we do not want to hear about relief funds: “What we want is to start a revolution.”

Also in 1911 Eastman married Wallace Benedict, an insurance salesman, and moved to Milwaukee. There were no children from this marriage. In Wisconsin she became the campaign manager of the 1912 suffrage campaign, which failed. As a result Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Crystal Eastman founded the Congregational Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913 to intensify the pace of suffrage activities. This organization became the National Woman’s party, which introduced the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1923. Eastman considered the ERA battle worth fighting, she announced in 1923, “even if it takes ten years.”

In 1913 Eastman was a delegate to the International Woman Suffrage Congress in Budapest, a meeting at which she met the women who were to become leaders of the international peace movement Rosika Schwimmer; Holland’s first woman physician, Dr. Aletta Jacobs; and the British suffragist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Pethick-Lawrence visited the United States in an effort to keep America neutral and to initiate a campaign for neutral mediation, and in November 1914 Eastman organized and became president of the New York Woman’s Peace party. She introduced Pethick-Lawrence to Jane Addams in Chicago, and together they founded the national Woman’s Peace party, soon to have branches in every state. Renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1921, this is the oldest extant women’s peace organization.

At the same time Eastman became executive director of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), founded by Lillian Wald, Oswald Garrison Villard, Norman Thomas, and other reformers. The AUAM published antimilitarist analyses, lobbied in Washington against military preparedness and conscription, and campaigned against American imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. During World War I Eastman wrote many articles, lectured widely, supervised the publication of Four Lights—the high-spirited newspaper of the Woman’s Peace party of New York—and coordinated the work of the AUAM. With Roger Baldwin as her assistant and Norman Thomas, she founded the Civil Liberties Bureau to defend basic American liberties against the encroaching demands of militarism. A unit of the AUAM, this bureau was renamed the American Civil Liberties Union when the AUAM disbanded.

In November 1915 Eastman launched a dramatic Truth About Preparedness Campaign. She emphasized that economic profiteering was behind the industrialists’ propaganda for military increases and advocated the nationalization of defense industries to insure that the call for more and more capital for defense was “a disinterested clamor.” As the United States entered the war in April 1917, she wrote an article, “War and Peace,” to explain that the radical peace movement had three major emphases: to stop the war in Europe, to organize the world for peace at the close of the war, and to defend democracy against the dangers of militarism. On July 2, 1917 she issued a press release to introduce the new Civil Liberties Bureau intended to protect “free speech, free press, freedom of assembly and freedom of conscience—the essentials of liberty and the heritage of all past wars worth fighting. ... To maintain something over here that will be worth coming back to when the weary war is over.”

During the war she divorced Benedict, married British poet and pacifist Walter Fuller, and bore their first child, Jeffrey Eastman Fuller, in March 1917. After the war she organized the first feminist congress in the United States, held on March 1, 1919. In her opening statement to the congress she called for “the birth of a new spirit of humane and intelligent self-interest ... which will lead women to declare: We will not wait for the social revolution to bring us the freedom we should have won in the 19th Century.’” For Eastman feminism and socialism were coequal and entirely distinct demands. To pursue both those interests she and her brother Max founded a radical journal, The Liberator, which they coedited and coowned.

During this period Crystal Eastman became convinced that the only way to restore liberty was to achieve socialism. Among her articles for The Liberator were reports sent back from her visit to Communist Hungary in March 1919. The first American journalist to go there, Eastman faced directly the dilemma of pacifist intellectuals during a time of revolution and the armed counterrevolution spearheaded by the Allied intervention of American, French, British, and Japanese troops.

In 1922 Eastman resigned from The Liberator and moved to London, where her husband had become the first music producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Unhappy and unemployed in England, during the next eight years she traveled back and forth between London and New York City with her two children (her daughter, Annis Fuller, was born in December 1921), seeking full-time work. But it was the era of the Red scare and the anti-Communist Palmer raids, and Eastman’s wartime journal Four Lights had hailed the Russian Revolution “with mad, glad joy.” She was blacklisted and poor, earning a modest living writing articles for Alice Paul’s Equal Rights journal and the British feminist weekly Time & Tide.

Undaunted and robust even though in dangerously declining health, Eastman traveled extensively with her friends and children, campaigning for change in education, child care, working conditions. She continued her work for world peace and for feminist principles, firm in her belief that feminism, socialism, and sexual freedom went together in the worldwide battle for human rights, personal dignity, and optimum security. “Life is a big battle for the complete feminist,” she wrote in 1918, entirely convinced that the complete feminist would ultimately achieve total victory. She died in New York City of nephritis a decade later on at the age of forty-seven, several months after Walter Fuller had died of a stroke.

For fifty years Eastman practically disappeared from history. Her vision demanded radical, profound, and absolute changes in society, and her life by its very example embodied a threat to customary order. “Freedom is a large word,” she wrote in 1920, having committed herself to the large struggle and long battle that the cause demanded.

Crystal Eastman’s letters from the World War I era are in the papers of the Woman’s Peace party, the American Union Against Militarism, the People’s Council, and the Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch collections at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection; in the Lillian Wald Papers at the New York Public Library; and at Columbia University. Other writings are to be found in B. W. Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (1978). Eastman’s Work Accidents and the Law, originally published in 1910, was reprinted in 1970. For biographical information see M. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (1948) and Love and Revolution (1964); B. W. Cook, ed., Toward the Great Change (1976); R. Baldwin, “Recollections of a Life in Civil Liberties,” The Civil Liberties Review, Spring 1976; and J. Sochen, Movers and Shakers (1973) and The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (1972). See also K. W. Fisher, “Crystal Eastman,” Equal Rights, August 18, 1928; and Notable American Women (1971). Other works of relevance include C. McKay, A Long Way From Home (1935); C. Sheridan, My American Diary (1922); and B. W. Cook, “Woodrow Wilson and the Antimilitarists, 1914-1918,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (1970) and Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman, Jane Addams (1979). A memorial by F. Kirchwey appeared in The Nation, August 8, 1928 and an obituary in The Manchester Guardian, August 15, 1928.