Crystal eastman biography
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Crystal Eastman, the ACLU’s Underappreciated Founding Mother
The year the American Civil Liberties Union was founded — 1920 — was also the year American women finally got the right to vote. This wasn’t mere coincidence. From the very beginning, the ACLU counted among its founders, organizers, and supporters an impressive roster of women, many of whom were veterans of the fight for suffrage.
One of these women, Crystal Eastman, is aptly credited as the ACLU’s founding mother: She co-founded and served as the director of the American Union Against Militarism and then generated the idea for that organization’s National Civil Liberties Bureau, which became the ACLU. Yet few people know her as a preeminent champion of most of the major movements for social change in the early 20th century — not just civil liberties but women’s suffrage and rights, pacifism, internationalism, and socialism — who frequently created and led multiple organizations simultaneously.
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Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life
A century ago, Crystal Eastman was among the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. Suffragist, labor lawyer, anti-militarist, feminist, internationalist and free-speech advocate, she was a multi-movement activist once called “the most dangerous woman in America.” Eastman was a founder of the ACLU, the National Woman’s Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; she drafted America’s first serious Workers’ Compensation Law and is credited with co-authoring the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet today, she is almost entirely lost to historical memory. In this first biography of a woman at the center of the social justice movements that defined the twentieth century, Aronson argues that Eastman’s legacy became obscure because she attempted to bridge multiple movements as well as link them to the politics of private life, to home, family, and motherhood.
Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor at Ford
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Crystal Eastman was an American activist and initiator, a leader and champion who left her mark on many of the great social justice movements of the twentieth century – labour, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. As a feminist reporter and working mother in the 1920s, her writing in Time and Tide examined a range of issues pertinent to gender equality between women and men – not only in the public arenas of politics and the economic workplace but also in private life, in love, sex, marriage, and the family.
Eastman was reared in Elmira, New York, the only daughter in an unconventional, dual-breadwinner family. Her mother, Annis Ford Eastman, was an ordained Congregational Minister and the driving force in a feminist household where all chores were rotated regardless of gender. In 1903, Crystal graduated from Vassar College, then earned an MA in Sociology from Columbia University in 1904, and a J.D. from New York University lag School, where she graduated second in h