Crystal Eastman

"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"--

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era--labor, feminism, free speech, peace--is unquestioned. A founder of the ACLU and Woman's Peace Party, Eastman was a key player in a constellation of high-stakes public battles from the very beginning of her career. She first found employment investigating labor conditions--an endeavor that would produce her iconic publication, Work Accidents and the Law, a catalyst for the first workers' compensation law. She would go on to fight for the rights of women, penning the Equal Rights Amendment with Alice Paul. As a pacifist in the First World War era, she helped to found the Civil Liberties Bureau, which evolved into the ACLU. With her brother, the writer Max Eastman, she frequented the radical, socialist circles of Greenwich Village. She was also a radical of the politics of private life, bringing attention to cutting-edge issues such as reproductive rights, wages for housework, and single motherhood by choice. As the first biography of Eastman, this book gives renewed voice to a woman who spoke freely and passionately in debates still raging today -- 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, and freedom.

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.

The definitive biography of a radical activist and intellectual Max Eastman (1883–1969) was a prolific writer, radical, and public intellectual who helped shape the twentieth century. While researching this masterful work, acclaimed biographer Christoph Irmscher was granted unprecedented access to the Eastman family archive, allowing him to document little-known aspects of the famously handsome and charismatic radical. Considered one of the “hottest radicals” of his time, Eastman edited two of the most important modernist magazines, The Masses and The Liberator, and campaigned for women’s suffrage and world peace. A fierce critic of Joseph Stalin, Eastman befriended and translated Leon Trotsky and remained unafraid to express unpopular views, drawing criticism from both conservatives and the Left. Set against the backdrop of several decades of political and ideological turmoil, and interweaving Eastman’s singular life with stories of the fascinating people he knew and loved, this book will have broad interdisciplinary appeal in twentieth-century history and politics, intellectual history, and literary studies.

B B B In 1926 and 1927, the Nation published 17 anonymous essays by "women active in professional and public life."The editor's objective was "to discover the origin of their modern point of view toward men, marriage, children, and jobs." In her introduction, Elaine Showalter discusses the issues raised -- from alcoholism to celibacy, from mother-daughter relationships to politics -- and identifies and examines the lives of the authors, among whom are Crystal Eastman, Mary Austin, and Genevieve Taggard.

Always A Sister offers the inspiring biography of Lillian D Wald (1867-1940), a pioneer in the early public health movement. After founding the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nursing Service in New York City, Wald went on to become a major player in the shaping of health care policies during the Progressive period. In the first biography to explore Wald's life and achievements as a public health nurse and social activist, Daniels maintains that Wald's belief in social reform was inseparable from her desire to improve the position of women. Always A Sister traces Wald's life from her early training as a nurse to her life-long lobbying for improvements on behalf of better housing, health care, and labour legislation, and her involvement in the peace movement in World War I.

The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.