Crystal Eastman was born in Massachusetts in 1881; both her parents were protestant ministers. She graduated from Vassar College in 1903, received a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University in 1904, and finished second in her class at New York University Law School in 1907. She died in 1928 at the age of 47; although her professional life lasted barely two decades, she was an astonishingly influential force in the progressive movement of her time. Her brother and fellow activist, Max Eastman, was hardly exaggerating when he later wrote that Crystal had “played perhaps a critical role in shaping the course of North American history.”
Occupational Safety and Health
Eastman’s first job after obtaining her law degree was to investigate labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation’s Pittsburgh Survey. Her report, Work-Accidents and the Law, was published in 1910 and is still in print. In the same year, as the first woman member of New York State’s Employer’s Liability Commission, Eastman drafted the first worker’s compensation law. Three years later, she became investigating attorney for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. In all these activities, she campaigned constantly for safe working conditions.
Suffrage and Equal Rights for Women
Eastman was anything but a single-issue activist, however. In 1913 she helped form the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage, which three years later became the National Woman’s Party. Like their British counterparts at the same time, these American suffragists organized protests, picketed government offices, were often arrested, and went on hunger strikes in prison. After women won the vote in 1920, Eastman and others went on to write an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment was first introduced in congress in 1923, and after numerous attempts, was finally passed by both houses in 1972. It was then submitted to the state legislatures, but failed to obtain ratification by the necessary three-fourths of the states within the seven-year period specified in the congressional legislation.
Pacifism and Anti-Militarism
Soon after the 1914 outbreak of war in Europe, Eastman, Jane Addams, and others who opposed United States entry into the war formed the American Union Against Militarism, which campaigned against conscription, the arms trade, and the recent U.S. imperial ventures in Latin America and the Philippines. The next year Eastman, Addams, and others organized the Woman’s Peace Party, which by 1917 had reached a membership of 40,000. Now known as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, it continues to exist, and is the oldest women's peace organization. Since both these peace movements (and others) were composed mainly of women, it was easy for the men in power at the time to dismiss them as (in Theodore Roosevelt’s words) “hysterical pacifists” whose ideas were “both silly and base.”
Civil Liberties
The domestic opposition to United States participation in the war, along with the communist revolution in Russia, stirred fears among many Americans of a communist takeover of the country. These fears were directed at all “left-wing” or “radical” organizations. Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918; and the Wilson administration’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, used the new laws to round up anyone who might be considered a threat to the security of the nation. Thousands of people were arrested and held without trial, and hundreds were deported to Russia. In response to these actions, Crystal Eastman and many of her fellow activists formed the National Civil Liberties Bureau (later called the American Civil Liberties Union) to protect the rights guaranteed to Americans by the Constitution.
Crystal Eastman died of a brain hemorrhage in 1928, just two weeks after her 47th birthday. Her obituary in The Nation read in part: “In her short life Crystal Eastman brushed against many other lives, and wherever she moved she carried with her the breath of courage and a contagious belief in the coming triumph of freedom and decent human relations. These were her religion. She preached it in many places and in many forms. In the struggle for woman's suffrage and for equality between men and women; in her work for peace and the rule of reason among peoples; in the fight for social justice and human liberty – as feminist, pacifist, socialist – she fought for her faith. Her strength, her beauty, her vitality and enthusiasm, her rich and compelling personality – these she threw with reckless vigor into every cause that promised a finer life to the world.”
Further Reading
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “Eastman, Crystal” in Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, eds. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.
“ Crystal Eastman ” on the Spartacus Educational website (accessed 7 March 2010).
Darryl Hamson - Ever since I've been old enough to think about it, I've been happy to be a generalist in a world of specialties. My interests have always ...
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