Crystal Eastman
A Revolutionary LifeDigital Recovery Project
AN INTERSECTIONAL LEADER AND ACTIVIST
Eastman left her mark on many of the great social justice movements of the twentieth century – labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. She drafted the nation’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She co-founded the National Woman’s Party and has been credited as a co-authored of the Equal Rights Amendment. She co-founded the Woman’s Peace Party – today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) — and the trailblazing American Union Against Militarism. She co-published the radical Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding of the ACLU.
CREDIT: CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NEGATIVES COLLECTION, DN0055962, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
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.
FAMILY
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.
NETWORKS
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.
