Eastman, Crystal

EASTMAN, CRYSTAL (1881-1928). Crystal Eastman committed her life to the left, leaving an institutional legacy in many defining social justice movements –labor, feminism, internationalism, civil liberties, peace. Little known today, she drafted the country’s first serious Workers’ Compensation Law; co-founded the National Woman’s Party and the Woman’s Peace Party (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom); co-published the revolutionary Liberator magazine; and is credited as a co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment. She also engineered the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Eastman advocated a politics of private life as radical as her public agenda. Nearly half a century before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), she advanced debates still pressing a century later, including reproductive rights, paid parental leave, wages for housework, single motherhood by choice, and the approbation of married mothers working outside the home. . Born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and raised in Canandaigua, New York, Eastman graduated from Vassar College in 1903. She declared herself “wavering on the brink of socialism” while earning an Master’s degree in sociology at Columbia University in 1904. She graduated from New York University Law School – second in her class – in 1907, and then assumed leadership positions in several Progressive social movements. She moved successively further to the left across her career.

Eastman’s first job advanced the cause of labor. In 1907-1908, she studied industrial accidents with the innovative Pittsburgh Survey. Her research resulted in Work Accidents and the Law (1910), a blend of statistical social science, legal analysis, and humanistic thinking so compelling that Governor Charles Evans Hughes appointed her to chair New York’s new Commission on Employer Liability in 1909. Eastman drafted New York’s compensation law, which became a model for other states. However, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously struck it down, characterizing it as “plainly revolutionary” and “antagonistic” to American jurisprudence.

Eastman responded to the court’s decision by moving to the left. The day after it was handed down, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in lower Manhattan, killing more than 140 workers. After a preventable tragedy of this magnitude, she proclaimed, “who wants to hear about a great relief fund? What we want is to start a revolution.”

Eastman then started three different organizations in two world-changing movements: women’s suffrage and international peace. In 1913-1914, she joined with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to found what would become the National Woman’s Party (NWP). When World War I broke out in Europe in August 1914, she also founded the Woman’s Peace Party of New York City (WPP), thus launching the first formal feminist peace organization in American history. By January 1915, she helped convince a reluctant Jane Addams to head the national organization while she remained head of the more audacious New York branch. At the same time, she became the Executive Secretary of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), a more avowedly leftist organization dedicated to domestic and international demilitarization and anti-imperialism.

All these groups highlighted mass direct actions and media activism to press their case. But when the United States entered the war in April 1917, a climate of censorship and compulsory patriotism took hold of the country. Congress quickly passed the Espionage Act, suspending free speech and assembly in the name of national security, and soon the Sedition Act, which set prison terms for anyone convicted of obstructing the war effort. Despite these restrictions, the NWP maintained White House pickets, and both the New York WPP and AUAM continued to protest for an immediate treaty for peace. The AUAM organized free press events, developed and legally supported conscientious objectors, a new category of war exemption, and persistently asserted the right of protest and peaceful assembly in a democratic society.

Eastman was uncompromising in her protest politics. She mounted a campaign to form a separate legal bureau to protect fundamental democratic rights in war time – free press, free speech, freedom of assembly, and liberty of conscience. The new bureau became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Such arguments for civil liberties and peace moved Eastman to embrace the revolutionary left. By November 1917, the Bolshevik faction rose to power in the Russian Revolution and soon began to negotiate peace with Germany. In the wake of failed efforts to keep the United States out of the war, she wrote to Addams, “The only great movement against war must be the radical movement.”

On Lincoln’s birthday 1918, Crystal and her brother Max Eastman published the Liberator: The Journal of Revolutionary Progress. The next summer, she traveled to Hungary to report from inside the new Hungarian Soviet Republic. Her two articles were the first on-the-ground reporting of the Hungarian revolution by any American journalist. Eastman celebrated the possibility that revolution would soon extend around the world. When she addressed the Central Council of the new Hungarian Soviet Republic –the first American to do so – she called it “the most beautiful moment of my life.” Yet, she soon concluded that she could not celebrate the revolution unequivocally. She had by then traveled the country and observed conditions on the ground. Although she praised the abolition of private property, Eastman also recognized the hypocrisy and human suffering in violence and repression under the revolutionary government. As a pacifist and feminist as well as a leftist, she found no simple answers to the problems of force. She had reached an impasse and left active peace work, never to return to it again.

Eastman returned to feminism, advocating a broad-based feminist revolution after the vote was won. She mapped a remarkably prescient agenda for transformation not just in public life, in politics and economics, but also on the home front, in sex, marriage, and family life. On the eve of the ratification the women’s suffrage amendment, she flatly told her NWP colleagues, “If the feminist program goes to pieces at the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless.” She proceeded to outline a four-point program for the feminist restructuring of society: the eradication of gender distinctions under law, which was the essential logic of the Equal Rights Amendment; sexual agency and reproductive freedom beginning with unfettered access to legalized birth control; an educational overhaul to abrogate separate spheres; and a Motherhood Endowment – essentially, state-funded paid family leave.

In the last years of her too-short life, Eastman was a working mother mainly employed as a feminist journalist for English and American publications. Living in London, separately from her second husband, the British antiwar activist Walter Fuller, but still married to him and mutually engaged in the support of their two children, she tried various experiments to integrate feminist principles into family life. She died at age forty-seven, still striving to build the world that would allow every woman to live life on her own terms.

Amy Aronson. Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed. Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Michael Kazin. War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

John Fabian Witt. Patriots & Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories in American Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

"Eastman, Crystal, 1881–1928. Papers, 1889–1931: A Finding Aid". Harvard University Library.

Vassar 1903 First Annual Class Bulletin, May 1904, Vassar College Archives.