Crystal Eastman

Abstract

Abstract Crystal Eastman was a central figure in many of the defining social movements of the twentieth century—labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. She drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Eastman worked side by side with national and international suffrage leaders, renowned Progressive reformers and legislators, birth control advocates, civil rights champions, and revolutionary writers and artists. She traveled with a transatlantic crowd of boundary breakers and innovators. And in virtually every arena she entered, she was one of the most memorable women known to her allies and adversaries alike. Yet today, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This first full-length biography recovers the revealing story of a woman who attained rare political influence and left a thought-provoking legacy in ongoing struggles. The social justice issues she cared about—gender equality and human rights, nationalism and globalization, political censorship and media control, worker benefits and family balance, and the monumental questions of war, sovereignty, force, and freedom—remain some of the most consequential questions of our own time.