EASTMAN, Crystal

Born 25 June 1881, Marlboro, Massachusetts; died 28 July 1928, Erie, Pennsylvania

Daughter of Samuel and Annis Ford Eastman; married Wallace Benedict, 1911; Walter Fuller, 1916

Crystal Eastman was the daughter of feminist parents. Her mother was a Congregationalist minister and a prominent suffragist. After graduation from Vassar College in 1903, Eastman received a master's degree in sociology from Columbia University and a law degree from New York University. In 1907 she was hired by the Russell Sage Foundation to investigate work accidents in Pittsburgh. This study, the first systematic analysis of industrial accidents, established her reputation as a social investigator. In 1909 she was appointed to be the sole woman member of the New York State Employers Liability Commission, which, between 1909 and 1911, wrote the New York Workman's Compensation Law.

In 1912 Eastman joined the Congressional Union (later the Women's Party) in advocating a federal suffrage amendment. When World War I began in 1914, she helped found the New York Women's Peace Party, becoming its president in 1915. She also became the executive secretary of the American Union against Militarism.

In 1917 Eastman's socialism and support of conscientious objectors caused a split in the AUAM. Eastman, with Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas, organized the Civil Liberties Bureau, which later became the American Civil Liberties Union. She also became coeditor, with her brother Max, of the Liberator, a literary magazine dedicated to revolutionary ideas.

In 1922 Eastman moved to London and devoted the next five years to writing about the feminist movement. Dissatisfied with the course of her writing career there, she returned to New York in 1927. After helping to organize the 10th anniversary celebration of the Nation, her health failed and she died at the age of forty-seven.

Eastman's first published works were reports of her investigations into work accidents in Pennsylvania. She demonstrated the frequency of industrial accidents and the insufficient compensation received by workers. Eastman proposed that workers be compensated for accidents according to a fixed rate regardless of responsibility. In these articles, she showed a familiarity with and respect for workers that reinforced her growing revolutionary consciousness.

The subject of most of Eastman's writing was feminism. She felt that the vote was only the first step toward women's liberation. True liberation also depended on birth control, nonsexist education for children, state support of mothers, and an Equal Rights Amendment. To Eastman, domestic labor was oppressive because the home was a symbol of resignation to male will. She advocated independence within marriage, urging wives to retain their own names and pointing out the advantages of separate residences. Eastman also opposed special industrial protection for women. In articles written between 1922 and 1927, she charted the increasing tension between equal rights advocates and protectionists, which eventually split the feminist movement.

Another major concern of Eastman's was the spread of militarism, which she felt was inimical to democracy. In her view, women could contribute much toward the abolition of war because of their greater respect for human life. This respect stemmed from the experience of childbirth and childrearing, which were the largest roles of a woman's life. Eastman's pacifism was an integral part of her feminism.

As a Marxist and a critic of the dilatory reformism of the American socialist movement, Eastman's report on communist Hungary showed, however, that she had few illusions about revolutionary governments. She described the bleakness and repression of Hungary in 1919, but was heartened by the abolition of class structure and private property and by the lack of crude nationalism in appeals for army recruits. At the same time, she noted sadly that war and starvation gave birth to revolution and revolutionary governments were conditioned by these factors as well as by idealism. Eastman also recognized that communist movements and states were not automatically feminist. Feminism, though not hostile to the workers' struggle, was different in its objects and methods. Eastman justified both feminist reforms and separate women's organizations on these grounds. She wanted the social revolution to be a woman's as well as a worker's victory.

Eastman's feminism conditioned both her Marxism and her pacifism. In her recognition of the inherent oppressiveness of home labor and the ideological causes of woman's position, and in her effort to raise the feminist consciousness of the socialist movement, Eastman foreshadowed the concerns of modern feminists. She found the weakness in both Marxist theory and in socialist politics when she pointed out the inadequacies of the purely materialist analysis of woman's oppression. Eastman intended to write a theoretical work on women but died before she could begin. This work could have been a significant contribution to the ongoing attempts to synthesize feminist and socialist theory.