CREDIT: CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NEGATIVES COLLECTION, DN0055962, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Today Eastman would be called an intersectional activist: she perceived the interlocking systems of inequality and strived to create a coalition identity and public actions to combat them in concert.
Eastman’s politics of private life included reproductive rights, paid family leave, wages for wives, feminist masculinity, single motherhood by choice, shared housework and childcare, work-family balance, and so much more.
Eastman’s institutional legacy, her letters, and her surviving phone book document the range of her involvement with many social justice giants and icons of her time.