Crystal Eastman

Crystal Catherine Eastman (June 25, 1881 – July 28, 1928) was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She was a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Early life and education

Crystal Eastman was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on June 25, 1881, the third of four children. Her oldest brother, Morgan, was born in 1878 and died in 1884. The second brother, Anstice Ford Eastman, who became a general surgeon, was born in 1878 and died in 1937. Max was the youngest, born in 1883.

In 1883, their parents, Samuel Elijah Eastman and Annis Bertha Ford, moved the family to Canandaigua, New York. In 1889, their mother became one of the first women ordained as a Protestant minister in America when she became a minister of the Congregational church. Her father was also a Congregational minister, and the two served as pastors at the church of Thomas K. Beecher near Elmira. Mark Twain's family also attended the church and it was this shared association that young Crystal also became acquainted with him.

This humanitarian tradition influenced Crystal and her brother Max Eastman. He became a socialist activist early on, and Crystal had several common causes with him. They were close throughout her life, even after he had become more conservative.

The siblings lived together on 11th Street in New York City's Greenwich Village among other radical activists for several years. The group, including Ida Rauh, Inez Milholland, Floyd Dell, and Doris Stevens, also spent summers and weekends in Croton-on-Hudson, where Max bought a house in 1916.

Eastman graduated from Vassar College in 1903 and received a Master of Arts degree in sociology (then a relatively new field) from Columbia University in 1904. She then attended New York University Law School, graduating in 1907 as the second in her class. She advocated for "motherhood endowments" whereby mothers of young children would receive monetary benefits. She argued it would reduce forced dependence of mothers on men, as well as economically empower women.

Emancipation Wallace J. Benedict was an insurance agent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and so when Eastman married him in 1911, she moved there after the wedding. She served as president of the New York City branch. This group sought to remove profiteering from arms manufacturing and campaigned against conscription, imperial adventures, and military intervention. The NCLB grew into the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with Baldwin at the head and Eastman functioning as attorney-in-charge. Eastman is credited as a founding member of the ACLU, but her role as founder of the NCLB may have been largely ignored by posterity because of her personal differences with Baldwin.

Marriage and family In 1916, Eastman married the British editor and antiwar activist Walter Fuller, who had come to the United States to direct his sisters' singing of folksongs. They had two children, Jeffrey Fuller born in 1917 and Annis Fuller born in 1921.

After Max Eastman's periodical The Masses was forced to close by government censorship in 1917, he and Crystal co-founded a radical journal of politics, art, and literature: the Liberator, in early 1918.

Post-War After the war, Eastman organized the First Feminist Congress in 1919.

In 2018, The Socialist, the official publication of the Socialist Party USA, published the article "Remembering Socialist Feminist Crystal Eastman" by Lisa Petriello, which was written "on the 90th-year anniversary of her [Eastman's] death to bring her life and legacy once again to the public eye."

Works Papers Eastman's papers are housed at Harvard University.

Publications The Library of Congress has the following publications by Eastman in its collection, many of them published posthumously: 'Employers' Liability,' a Criticism Based on Facts (1909) Work-accidents and the Law (1910) Mexican-American Peace Committee (Mexican-American league) (1916) Work accidents and the Law (1969) Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution, edited by Blanche Wiesen Cook (1976) Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, edited by Blanche Wiesen Cook (1978) "Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life," by Amy Aronson (2020)