Crystal Eastman On Women And Revolution

A collection of essay, addresses, and magazine articles by the early-twentieth-century attorney and activist illuminate her militant views on feminism, suffrage, pacifism, and socialism.

"Crystal Eastman was a central figure in many of the defining social movements of the twentieth century -- labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. She drafted America's first serious workers' compensation law. She helped found the National Woman's Party and is credited as co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman's Peace Party -- today, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) -- and the American Union Against Militarism. She co-published the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Eastman worked side-by-side with national and international suffrage leaders, renowned progressive reformers and legislators, birth control advocates, civil rights champions, revolutionary writers and artists. She traveled with a transatlantic crowd of boundary-breakers and innovators. And in virtually every arena she entered, she was one of the most memorable women known to her allies and adversaries alike. Yet today, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This first full-length biography recovers the revealing story of a woman who attained rare political influence and left a thought-provoking legacy in ongoing struggles. The social justice issues she cared about -- gender equality and human rights, nationalism and globalization, political censorship and media control, worker benefits and family balance, and the monumental questions of war, sovereignty, force, and freedom -- remain some of the most consequential questions of our own time"--

A collection of essay, addresses, and magazine articles by the early-twentieth-century attorney and activist illuminate her militant views on feminism, suffrage, pacifism, and socialism

A collection of essay, addresses, and magazine articles by the early-twentieth-century attorney and activist illuminate her militant views on feminism, suffrage, pacifism, and socialism.

At the end of the 1960s, the women's liberation movement proc laimed the emergence of a new American feminism which would make the leap from feminism to liberation. In the second decade of the feminist revival in America, the women's movement feels a collective responsibility to make an interim report, to record the history of the movement for those who come after its ecstatic beginnings. Moreover, a decade seems a natural interval to evaluate the errors and the lasting triumphs of this developing movement.

From the New York Times–bestselling author: “A rare find: a page-turning, can’t-put-it-down history text.” —Library Journal Writing about what she calls the “most cheering period in female history,” Marilyn French recounts how nineteenth-century women living under imperialism, industrialization, and capitalism nonetheless organized for their own education, a more equitable wage, and the vote. Focusing on the United States, Great Britain, and countries in Africa, French argues that capitalism’s success depended on the exploitation and enslavement of huge numbers, including women, but the act of working outside the home alongside other women, rather than in isolation, provided women with the possibility of organizing for emancipation. “The third volume of her remarkable four-volume survey . . . fascinating insight and detail.” —Publishers Weekly