Crystal eastman biography
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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 journalist 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 Law School, where she graduated second in her class in 1907.
By the time Eastman moved from New York to London and began to write for Time and Tide in the early 1920s, her reputation preceded her. A labour lawyer, she had drafted the first workers’ compensation law in the United States in 1910. An international peace campaigner, she found
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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 Fordham University, in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and the American Studies Program. Academically trained at Princeton and Columbia, she was also a magazine editor for several years and is an editor of the international quarterly Media History.
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Crystal Artificer, the ACLU’s Underappreciated Origination Mother