CRYSTAL EASTMAN AND THE DIVORCE OF SOCIALISM AND FEMINISM
The career of Crystal Eastman illustrates the demise of socialist-feminism and feminist-socialism after the silencing of Conger-Kaneko, the throttling of The Socialist Woman, and the destruction of the WNC. Eastman, who never published a word in Conger-Kaneko's publications, assumed the mantle of America's most influential female socialist and feminist when she became managing editor of The Liberator, successor to the suppressed The Masses, in early 1918. (Later that year, after the end of the war and a hung jury in the second Masses trial, she became co-editor with her brother Max.) Yet although Eastman was both a Socialist and a feminist, she was not a socialist-feminist--not, in other words, a person who combined the two philosophies in a coherent and meaningful way.
The bifurcation of Socialism and feminism in Eastman's thought partly reflected the social environment of the 1920s: Eastman wrote for two distinct constituencies which seldom overlapped. Indeed, she complained that she was usually the only feminist at Socialist meetings, and the only Socialist at feminist ones. Her articles, therefore, usually addressed either Socialists or feminists, but not both. Further, a bitter controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) sharply divided Socialists from feminists, women who identified primarily with the labor movement from those who considered themselves women (and, implicitly, professional women) before or instead of identifying themselves as workers. Finally, Eastman's career demonstrates the impossibility of fusing socialism and feminism without an independent publication and organizational base specifically dedicated to that cause. Eastman was marginalized even geographically in the last decade of her life: denied suitable employment in the United States, she migrated between her native country and England, but found a home and solace in neither. Eastman's separation of Socialism and feminism, however, also represented a conscious choice: she insisted that the two causes had little or no connection. All in all, her life illustrates the difficulties of meaningfully advancing either socialism or feminism in the climate of the 1920s, much less fusing the two.
Crystal Eastman shared the remarkable upbringing of her more famous brother Max. Her parents were practicing feminists who demonstrated in life the feasibility of an egalitarian family. Her mother, like her father an ordained Congregational minister, was the more celebrated of her parents; but her father supported Crystal's insistence that "there was no such thing in our family as boys' work and girls' work." In the Eastman household, everyone made beds, washed dishes, and chopped wood. He also upheld Eastman's short skirt, which allowed free movement, against a delegation of church ladies, and (facing yet another delegation, this time of neighborhood men) defended her wearing of a man's bathing suit (which lacked a skirt and stockings, but included a top). Eastman later said that "He was, I know, startled and embarrassed to see his only daughter in a man's bathing suit with bare brown legs for all the world to see. I think it shocked him to his dying day. But he himself had been a swimmer; he knew he would not want to swim in a skirt and stockings. Why then should I?"[1]
In such a household, Eastman was a born feminist, writing, at the age of fifteen, an essay which, she said in 1927, showed her "as wise in feminism then as I am now":
The trouble with women is that they have no impersonal interests. They must have work of their own, first because no one who has to depend on another person for his living is really grown up; and second, because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. Children can die or grow up, husbands can leave you. No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster.
Eastman matured "confidently expecting to have a profession and earn my own living, and also confidently expecting to be married and have children... And my mother was the triumphant answer to all doubts as to the success of this double role."[2]
Eastman's education was world-class in both academics and in the harsh realities of America's economic life. After graduating from Vassar, she moved into a settlement house, earned an M.A. in sociology at Columbia, and (in 1907) received a law degree from New York University. Living with like-minded friends in Greenwich Village, she became an expert in labor law and working conditions. She studied industrial accidents for the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) and burst into the world of print with her Work Accidents and the Law (1910), a tome bristling with tables, charts, pictures, and cold, hard facts. (Her work was one of the six volumes resulting from the RSF's acclaimed Pittsburgh Survey.) New York's Governor Hughes then appointed her as the only woman among New York's fourteen Employer Liability Commission members, where she drafted New York State's celebrated workman's compensation law.
Although Blanche Wisen Cook, the scholar most familiar with Eastman's life and writings, asserts that Eastman "began to identify herself as a socialist in this period," Eastman's writings, in mainstream liberal rather than radical venues, epitomized the elitist, step-by-step reformism of affluent "social feminists." Meticulous research by sympathetic experts, Eastman believed, would generate practical, specific reforms without the need of class struggle. Her extraordinarily sensitive "The Temper of the Workers Under Trial," an appendix to Work Accidents and the Law, movingly described the plight of the working class and its heroic, yet matter-of-fact, response to calamity. Yet her description of "these people" correctly recognized the chasm that separated her from the subjects of her study and solicitude; her entire book addressed an urbane, liberal audience on behalf of reform, rather than fomenting workers' self-activity. Indeed, Eastman felt it necessary to refute "the opinion held by many, that working people do not feel their sorrows as keenly as others do."[3]
Eastman also published two essays summarizing her work, findings, and recommendations--"Work Accidents and Employers' Liability," published in the liberal bastion The Survey, and "Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," which appeared in the American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals. Both were models of patient investigation, careful analysis, and moderate, ameliorative proposals, more devastating in their effect for their severe understatement. Her choice of words indicated her cautious approach; she used the word "employer" rather than "capitalist," and "competition" instead of "capitalism." Although she chronicled the devastating effects of current law, which left most workers and their families totally unprotected against disaster at work, she exonerated the capitalists from deliberate cruelty and murder, even as she implicitly criticized the capitalist system. Accidents, she said, were "an ordinary outcome of competition" and "happen more or less inevitably in the course of industry. If it were carried on slowly and carefully with safety as the first concern of all, there would be few accidents, but carried on as it is today in America, there are many accidents." On the other hand, her demand for a workman's compensation law was avowedly based upon the assumption that only monetary savings would evoke employer concern with safety; such compensation "makes every serious accident a considerable cost to an employer and thus insures his invaluable cooperation with the labor department in promoting safety."[4]
Eastman realistically confronted the two main obstacles impeding workman's compensation laws (already enacted "in nearly every European country".) First, interstate competition encouraged capitalist whining that competition from states lacking such laws would produce ruin, and, Eastman acknowledged, "whether we sympathize with his plight or not, we must recognize the effectiveness of his argument before our state legislatures." Second, constitutional provisions "originally intended no doubt to safeguard the rights of the people, serve often, so it seems to some of us today, to deny the rights of the people." Eastman therefore proposed a law with three significant limitations: it exempted industries engaged in interstate competition, applied only where especially dangerous conditions invited state regulation, and covered only certain categories of accidents. Such a law, she felt, would render the principle of workman's compensation acceptable, and show employers that they also reaped significant benefits. Later, the law could be expanded.[5]
In her second article, written after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Eastman focused on preventing accidents more than on compensating victims. Contemplating the mangled bodies of workers killed when employers, saving pennies, violated a safety law, Eastman exclaimed that in such cases she and her allies did not want compensation for the family, "we want to put somebody in jail." When considering the piles of charred girls' bodies left by the Triangle fire, she exclaimed, "who wants to hear about a relief fund? What we want is to start a revolution." However, she quickly qualified her seemingly incendiary remark:
The first thing we need is information, complete and accurate information about the accidents that are happening. It seems a tame thing to drop so suddenly from talk of revolutions to talk of statistics. But I believe in statistics just as firmly as I believe in revolutions. And what is more, I believe statistics are good stuff to start a revolution with.... We must try to get every fact that will enable us to analyze accidents with a view to prevention.[6]
Once again her specific proposals were concrete and practical. Stating that "the administration of labor law is rapidly coming to be the most important function of government," she recommended a system of complete accident reporting, a strong workplace safety commissioner with powers of enforcement (including the closing of violating plants), and workman's compensation.[7] Such recommendations, while certainly worthy, assumed a paternalistic and benevolent state, ignored capitalism as the root cause of industrial mass murder, and neglected any mention of a self-conscious, organized working class which enforced its own law at the point of production. Eastman's analysis and program was worlds away from those of the SP and the IWW, which she would later embrace.
Eastman's discussion of the unexpected defeat of the Wisconsin suffrage amendment in 1912 evinced a similar analytical sophistication, lack of dogmatism, and partial focus on issues of class. She blamed the defeat largely on the brewery interests. "The brewers didn't fight us openly," she said. "They didn't need to. The important thing was that everybody who did business with them from the farmer who sold them barley to the big city newspapers who sold them advertising space, knew how they stood.... Have you ever thought how many industries there would be in a brewing state dependent upon the brewing industry for their success?" She claimed that there were entire cities where no businessmen allowed his wife to endorse suffrage. "They put their business, as, alas, most big corporations do, ahead of democracy, justice and simple human right." Yet she also admitted that the breweries did not control the majority of the votes, and won only in alliance with ignorance and prejudice. Although she believed that outright Socialist Party members supported suffrage, she noted that many SP sympathizers did not; Milwaukee wards which victorious SP Congressional candidate Victor Berger easily carried rejected suffrage by huge margins. "I sometimes think the last thing a man becomes progressive about is the activities of his own wife," she said. Eastman became a charter member of Alice Paul's ultra-militant (and distinctly un-Socialist) Congressional Committee (soon renamed the National Woman's Party).[8]
When Europe plunged into its latest bloodbath, Eastman dropped all other activities in favor of anti-war agitation. Like her brother Max, she feared that U.S. involvement would annihilate the fragile structure of recently-enacted social legislation, destroy civil liberties, and render further progress impossible. (Many other social reformers and Socialists concluded that war, by inevitably increasing government regulation of the economy, would hasten the advent of Socialism.) Eastman actively helped form four major peace organizations: the Woman's Peace Party of New York (WPPNY, November 1914); the national Woman's Peace Party (WPP, January 1915), the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM, November 1915), and the People's Council (PC, late May, 1917). She was virtual head of the WPPNY, a very important official of the AUAM, and one of the driving forces behind the PC.[9]
Eastman's political stance in these organizations was suitably nuanced. Acutely aware of the delicate balance between "the revolutionary and the non-resistant motives that make up our combination," she advocated militant, mass action against war but also placated the more influential and conservative members of her organizations. She often mediated between quarreling factions. Although she closely associated with Socialists and other radicals, her own writings evince a pacifist rather than a social-revolutionary opposition to war. (She described herself as a pacifist, but not as a Socialist--a characterization that her later article about the Hungarian revolution would validate.) Discussion of the class nature of the war found its way into WPPNY and AUAM pronouncements as demands for the nationalization of armaments industries and a progressive income tax, rather than as an analysis of capitalism as the cause of the conflagration. Eastman perceived conscription as "a demand stimulated by the self-interest of capitalists, imperialists and war traders," but also supported by sincere democrats enthralled by the idea of national service and equality of sacrifice. She called for thinking lovers of liberty who recognized that "military training is bad for the bodies and minds and souls of boys; that free minds, and souls undrilled to obedience are vital to the life of democracy." Freedom, she said, was different from equality; universal military service was no more democratic than prison life. The WPPNY, echoing the SP's 1916 Presidential candidate Allan Benson, demanded a national referendum before a declaration of war--a demand which implicitly denied that Congress legitimately represented the American people.[10]
Eastman insisted that pacifists aimed "to establish new values, to create an overpowering sense of the sacredness of life, so that war will be unthinkable" even when grave disputes arose. She sympathetically entertained the feminist notion (which implicitly critiqued Socialist doctrine) that women cared more about people than profit, and would inaugurate world peace when enfranchised. In addition to urging the nationalization of war industries and taxes on the rich, she also demanded the end of U.S. imperialism in South America and Asia, the end of the Asian exclusion policy, and a general fostering of inter-racial harmony.[11]
Eastman was the driving force behind the peace movement's most spectacular success, the grass-roots averting of war with Mexico in the summer of 1916. When war threatened, the AUAM organized a massive publicity barrage that resulted in unofficial meetings between three Mexican and three American anti-militarists. In a press conference in Washington D.C., Eastman highlighted U.S. ownership of vast portions of Mexico and attacked U.S. imperialism. Largely as a result of this popular mobilization and peoples' diplomacy, Wilson steered clear of war. Confident that this victory demonstrated that an aroused populace could prevent its government from embarking on war, Eastman exulted that
we must make the most of our Mexican experience. We must make it known to everybody that the people acting directly--not through their governments or diplomats or armies--stopped that war, and can stop all wars if enough of them will act together and act quickly..... Then let us seriously and patiently construct the machinery for instant mobilization of the people for the prevention of any future war that might threaten this country.... There never could be a war if our peace forces could mobilize like that in 48 hours.... What succeeded with Mexico will succeed with Japan, but we must be ready. We must be able to mobilize--hands and hearts and minds across the sea,--in forty-eight hours.[12]
In her capacities as high officer of both the WPPNY and the AUAM, Eastman pursued a dual strategy of mobilizing prominent, influential reformers with direct access to the nomenklatura, while also organizing mass demonstrations against the war. She noted that the AUAM had "a certain standing and influence, both at Washington and in many liberal circles throughout the country" and "an unusual combination of influential people in our Committee. These are assets." Until at least mid-1917 she retained the illusion, widespread among social reformers and pacifists, that Woodrow Wilson was a decent person who was at heart on their side. Indeed, the AUAM actually supported Wilson in 1916, despite his rejection of the suffrage amendment, over progressive reformer Charles Hughes, a former ally of Eastman's who endorsed suffrage. (Eastman's own position in this split between militant suffragists and militant pacifists was ambivalent; although she was a moving spirit behind the AUAM, she gave a rousing "suffrage first" speech at the NWP's Convention in June 1916.)[13] In her opinion, elite pressure and mass action were complementary rather than incompatible strategies; massive public demonstrations empowered the informal diplomacy of the liberal elites. Indeed, both Roger Baldwin and Eastman, convinced that Wilson's terrorist minions meant no harm, provided the secret police with potentially compromising information about pacifist supporters of the AUAM's Civil Liberties Bureau.[14] Yet as Wilson edged towards war, and violent thugs (sometimes in uniform) broke up peace meetings (the press, predictably, blamed the women for the violence), Eastman's militant, mass-mobilizing, confrontational tactics increasingly alienated her prominent associates. When the United States entered the war, and the Wilson administration criminalized dissent, important AUAM officials became more alarmed at Eastman's militance.
In particular, the AUAM's fostering of a Conscientious Objectors' Bureau (COB)--spearheaded by Baldwin and Eastman--frightened many of the AUAM's more prominent and respectable members, who felt that such activity obstructed the war effort, alienated the Wilson administration, invited repression, and sabotaged the organization's work for a liberal post-war settlement. However, Eastman maintained that Wilson was still "obviously bidding for liberal support," genuinely opposed conscription of the unwilling, and would welcome a Conscientious Objectors' Bureau as helping rather than hindering administration policy. "Our plan for maintaining free speech, free press, free assembly, should logically command the support of those liberal democrats whose avowed leader the President until recently has been," she claimed. The AUAM's policy was not one of "obstruction," but was rather a "'democracy first'" movement of which the COB was "only a part." Conciliating those who felt that the COB advocated conscientious objection rather than merely defending its practitioners, she negotiated a compromise: the COB was re-christened the Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), and correspondingly broadened its program to include the defense of free speech, free assembly, and other constitutional rights. She rhetorically asked, "Will there be a hundred liberals whom we can count on our side in working for a liberal negotiated peace, whom we can not also count on our side in working to save this country from the disgrace of forcing young men to kill and be killed in a cause which their reason and conscience do not support?" Surprised by the answer--the resignation of most prominent AUAM backers and the disintegration of the organization--she funnelled the defunct AUAM's funds to the Civil Liberties Bureau, whose activities, she said as early as September 1917, "has come to be our chief war-work. A Union Against Militarism, becomes, during war time, inevitably a Union for the Defense of Civil Liberty."[15] The CLB emerged after the war as the American Civil Liberties Union.
As the mainstream peace movement disintegrated after U.S. entry into the war and the onset of Wilson's reign of terror, peace activists (beginning in late May 1917) formed the People's Council, a broadly-based coalition which welcomed liberals, dissident farmers, anti-AFL unions, and radicals of most stripes. (Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, however, were dissuaded from seeking leadership roles on the grounds that their presence would taint the new organization.) In practice, however, the Peoples' Council attracted mostly radicals unaffiliated with powerful organizations which had links to the government and mainstream society. Indeed, proposed affiliation with the Peoples' Council was one of the issues which destroyed the AUAM, despite Eastman's attempt at compromise. Eastman was one of the moving forces behind the Council which, as Roland Marchand has stated, "drew its major inspiration from the Russian Revolution and its major model from the Petrograd Soviet," and used the word "Council" as a direct translation of the Russian word "Soviet." Important leaders of the Peoples' Council in effect denied the legitimacy of the United States government, and implied that Peoples' Councils, representing an alliance of the progressive workers, farmers, and social activists of America, would supersede the old, discredited capitalist regime. The Peoples' Council demanded a total reconstruction and democratization of all aspects of American life and supported the peace terms promulgated by the revolutionary Russian government. The Peoples Council, however, was destroyed by terrorism and violence before it could fully organize; in early September 1917 the Council was denied permission to meet in Minneapolis, North Dakota, and Wisconsin before it formed "a permanent organization during a hurried session in Chicago before troops arrived to break up the meeting."[16]
As the AUAM disintegrated and the Peoples' Council was repressed, Eastman threw herself into the New York City mayoralty campaign of SP leader Morris Hillquit, main author of the SP's stridently anti-war St. Louis Manifesto. Such electioneering (itself possible mainly in selected, radical urban enclaves where the SP still survived) was one of the few avenues for legal anti-war protest by late 1917. The WPP split and disintegrated but its radical New York branch, its publication Four Lights suppressed, struggled on. (In 1919 it became part of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.) By the end of 1917, however, Eastman was reduced to protesting the WPPNY's essential loyalty and begging for official tolerance. Although the WPPNY had opposed war and conscription, she said, once they "became the law of this land, our agitation against them ceased. Common sense as well as loyalty and the habit of obedience to law counseled this course. We have never in the slightest degree urged or suggested resistance to the selective service law nor followed any other policy of obstruction." Instead, the WPPNY had applauded the peace terms promulgated by revolutionary Russia--"no forcible annexations, no punitive indemnities, free development for all nations"--and urged that the U.S. endorse these goals. The WPPNY demanded "Free Markets [which for Eastman implied the abolition of capitalism and colonialism] and Free Seas, Universal Disarmament, and a League of Nations.... And since we are wise enough to know that these ends cannot be achieved at a gathering of military personages and appointed diplomats, we are demanding direct democratic representation of the peoples of all countries at the peace conference."[17] As late as March 1918 she optimistically predicted that "by next fall our support will be something to be reckoned with. There are thousands of radical women in this state, whose energies, whose passion for humanity, have been released by the suffrage victory of last November."[18]
During the war Eastman had somewhat muted her feminism (although she helped ensure that the WPPNY included women suffrage in its platform) and had not directly and publicly expressed Socialist sentiments. The WPPNY, she said, would electorally support whichever candidates backed its international program. (SP candidates were most likely to support the WPPNY's agenda.) Indeed, as a feminist "who believes in breaking down sex barriers so that women and men can work and play and build the world together," Eastman had felt compelled to justify the separate existence of a woman's peace organization.[19] But in 1918, Eastman emerged as the most important female advocate of socialism and feminism in the United States.
Because Max Eastman's widow has sequestered Eastman's letters and private papers, we cannot be sure of the reasons for her new stance. Her published writings provide some clues, but all of her articles were deeply influenced by the forum in which they appeared. Before the war, she argued for labor reform in respectable, mainstream journals; during the war she fought for peace in various organizations, all of which were coalitions representing divergent views on important social issues. Although a militant pacifist, Crystal was also a coalition-builder and a conciliator who always sought the widest possible support for her organizations, especially among respectable liberals who wielded some clout in the corridors of power. This may have tempered public expression of her views on socialism.
However, the war radicalized many persons who were not clubbed into submission, and Eastman may well have been one of the liberals driven leftward by events. The entry of the United States into the war very shortly after the people had re-elected Wilson on a platform of peace, the ferocious campaign of terrorism and violence which Wilson unleashed upon dissenters of all varieties, and the flagrant profiteering by the very capitalists who had supported Preparedness radicalized those whom terror did not intimidate. Wilson's private, undeclared war against Bolshevik Russia and the disgraceful shenanigans at Versailles only deepened the disillusionment and radicalism of many former liberals, while the suffrage victory in New York in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, and the post-war labor upsurge all promoted optimism about the possibilities of radical transformation.
Eastman had more personal reasons for what was, in all probability, partly a deepening radicalism and partly a new-found opportunity for free expression. Her famous brother Max had seen his publication The Masses suppressed, and he and his co-editors were indicted for opposing the war. Yet even before standing trial Max had launched The Liberator, one of the best and most influential left publications of its era. Eastman was part owner and co-editor. The Liberator carried on the tradition of The Masses in almost every regard but one: it did not oppose the war. This was in part mere caution and common sense: Max and his fellow Masses editors did not relish serving twenty years in jail and having their new publication suppressed. (Max openly stated that The Liberator did not say everything its contributors would have said in a free society.) The Liberator also avoided anti-war agitation out of political calculation: Max believed that the United States was in the war for its duration, and that progressives could possibly influence only the eventual peace, not the fact of U.S. participation. Further, the Bolshevik Revolution had enormously heartened radicals, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which Lenin, in The Liberator, dubbed "a brigand's peace")[20] made Germany's threat to the Soviet Union glaringly apparent. Defeat of Germany, many radicals believed, would not only preserve the threatened Soviet Union, but unleash a tide of socialist revolution in Germany and throughout Europe.
In early 1918, therefore, a newly radicalized Crystal Eastman emerged, for the first and last time in her life, into a position where she could express her actual views on every subject (except pacifism) without fear of undermining her support, alienating key supporters, or fragmenting an important organization.
Eastman's radical feminism was, in a sense, liberated by the 1917 suffrage victory in New York, and even more by the ratification of the 19th amendment. Eastman believed that the winning of suffrage was the beginning of true feminism because "In fighting for the right to vote most women have tried to be either non-committal or thoroughly respectable on every other subject. Now they can say what they are really after; and what they are really after, in common with all the rest of the struggling world, is freedom."[21] Freedom, like feminism, was an expansive concept with many meanings. Women's freedom entailed, first of all, "economic freedom," defined as equal opportunity and pay for every kind of work, and
definite economic rewards for one's work when it happens to be "home-making".... Until women learn to want economic independence, i.e., the ability to earn their own living independently of husbands, fathers, brothers, or lovers,--and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me that feminism has no roots. Its manifestations are often delightful and stimulating but they are sporadic, they effect no lasting change in the attitudes of men to women, or women to themselves.[22]
Much as Walter Lenfersiek in his controversial Progressive Woman article, therefore, Eastman proposed the endowment of motherhood, saying that "If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless." Most women wanted children, and to raise their children themselves, or at least so closely superintend their raising "as to make any other full-time occupation impossible for at least ten or fifteen years." This rendered her economic independence for those years difficult or impossible unless the American people acknowledged "that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle is accepted."[23]
Birth control constituted the second, and related, "elementary essential in all aspects of feminism." Whether feminists followed Alice Paul, Ellen Key, or Olive Schreiner,
we must all be followers of Margaret Sanger. Feminists are not nuns.... We want to love and to be loved, and most of us want children, one or two at least. But we want our love to be joyous and free--not clouded with ignorance and fear. And we want our children to be deliberately, eagerly called into being, when we are at our best, not crowded upon us in times of poverty and weakness. We want this precious sex knowledge not just for ourselves, the conscious feminists; we want it for all the millions of unconscious feminists that swarm the earth,--we want it for all women.[24]
Eastman said that "Life is a big battle for the complete feminist even when she can regulate the size or her family." Women who combined a professional career with motherhood must have "a more determined ambition than men of equal gifts, in order to make up for the time and energy and thought and devotion that child-bearing and rearing, even in the most 'advanced' families, seems inexorably to demand of the mother. But if we add to this handicap complete uncertainty as to when children may come, how often they come or how many there shall be, the thing becomes impossible. I would almost say that the whole structure of the feminist's dream of society rests upon the rapid extension of scientific knowledge about birth control." Birth control "ensures some freedom of occupational choice; those who do not wish to be mothers will not have an undesired occupation thrust upon them by accident, and those who do wish to be mothers may choose in a general way how many years of their lives they will devote to the occupation of child-raising."[25]
Eastman also demanded a cultural revolution in the home,
a revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls. It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies in life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle. The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters... a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him better than the reputation for having a violent temper. In was his mother's fault in the beginning, but even as a boy he was quick to see how a general reputation for being "no good around the house" would serve him throughout life, and half-consciously he began to cultivate that helplessness until to-day it is the despair of feminist wives.[26]
Eastman asserted that many men admired professional women, and, at a time when achieving a middle-class lifestyle was increasingly difficult, valued the income they brought to the household. "But these breadwinning wives have not yet developed home-making husbands. When the two come home from the factory the man sits down while his wife gets supper, and he does so with exactly the same sense of fore-ordained right as if he were 'supporting' her." Although two women could make a home together as "a pleasant partnership, more fun than work," the wife "simply adds running the home to her regular outside job. Unless she is very strong, it is too much for her, she gets tired and bitter over it, and finally perhaps gives up her outside work and condemns herself to the tiresome half-job of housekeeping for two." Eastman recognized that "laws or revolutionary decrees" could not address this problem; perhaps women "must cultivate or simulate a little of that highly prized helplessness ourselves. But fundamentally it is a problem of education, of early training--we must bring up feminist sons."[27]
Obliquely responding to Emma Goldman's "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," Eastman agreed that an inner, spiritual freedom was necessary, but argued that legislation could not create such liberty. Law could, however, generate its material preconditions. "I can agree that women will never be great until they achieve a certain emotional freedom, a strong healthy egoism, and some un-personal sources of joy--that in this inner sense we cannot make woman free by changing her economic status. What we can do, however, is to create conditions of outward freedom in which a free woman's soul can be born and grow. It is these outward conditions with which an organized feminist movement must concern itself."[28] Towards this end, Eastman endorsed affirmative action. When the Labor Party (1920) placed one man and one woman from each state on its National Executive Committee, she enthused that such an act had "never been heard of in the history of the world, not in trades-unions, not in co-operatives, not in Socialist parties, not in Utopias." This action "means more for feminism than a million resolutions. For after all these centuries of retirement women need more than an 'equal opportunity' to show what's in them. They need a generous shove into positions of responsibility."[29]
Eastman did more than define and advocate feminism; she worked for it. Under the auspices of the WPPNY she convoked the First Feminist Congress in the United States in March 1919. Her statement, printed in The Liberator, demanded full political rights, economic equality on the job and in the unions, the education of girls for economic independence, maternal endowment or a wife's "legal recognition to a share of her husband's earnings in recognition of her service as houseworker and nurse," and birth control, without which "marriage can become virtual slavery for women."[30] She expressed disappointment that Alice Paul and the NWP, after their suffrage victory, vaguely agitated for the removal of "all the remaining forms of the subjection of women" (a demand that was soon watered down even further in the Equal Rights Amendment), rather than specifying the evils which must be eliminated. Eastman might well have written, and certainly endorsed, a minority resolution that called for the rewriting of laws of marriage, "of divorce, of inheritance, of the guardianship of children, and the laws for the regulation of sexual morality and disease"; the legitimization of all children; legalized of birth control; and motherhood endowments. She deplored the disposing of this minority resolution by "a very efficient stream roller" and said that "If some such program could have been exhaustively discussed at that convention, we might be congratulating ourselves that the feminist movement had begun in America. As it is all we can say is that the suffrage movement is ended."[31]
Sharing the exuberance of the time, Eastman clearly underestimated the prospects for a feminist transformation of society. For example, she thought legalized birth control imminent. Her experience with workman's compensation misled her; she had joined that movement just before it widely triumphed (with the help of well-connected people). After the war, however, feminists were Red-baited and warred among themselves. Instead of helping spearhead a revolutionary feminist program, Eastman was reduced to taking sides in the bitter and sterile internecine struggle, which largely immobilized women's progress for a generation, over the relative merits of the ERA and special protective legislation for women. Responding to the lack of viable political options, Eastman in effect privatized the struggle for an egalitarian home in her celebrated "Marriage Under Two Roofs" (1923)--an essay written in autobiographical format, and which was, according to Blanche Wiesen Cook, partly based on her life in England.[32]
Eastman recommended that couples dissatisfied with their marriages consider living in two separate residences. The wife and the children would reside in a small flat near "playgrounds and green spaces"; the husband would live in a rooming house near his office, and visit his family at their mutual pleasure. This would benefit the husband, the wife, the children, and the family as a whole. "Give [your husband] a place of his own, completely outside your jurisdiction," Eastman urged wives, "where he normally sleeps, to which he goes quite simply and naturally whenever he wants to, without explanations and without fear of reproach." She admitted that she had micro-managed her own husband, which made him depressed and irritable because he had "no escape from me, no place where I did not come, no retreat from my influence. Now he has one." In a statement that belied socialist-feminist assertions that Socialism would lower divorce rates, Eastman asserted that "People with simple natures probably do not suffer from this pressure of one's personality on the other in marriage. But for the usual modern type, the complex, sensitive, highly organized city dweller, man or woman, marriage can become such a constant invasion of his very self that it amounts sometimes to torture."[33]
The wife would also benefit from separate residences: she could maintain friendships and maintain interests which bored her husband, or simply enjoy solitude. The husband's absence was a refreshment, a chance to be yourself for a while in a rich, free sense which nothing but a separate roof can give you." Eastman said that
Women, more than men, succumb to marriage. They sink so easily into that fatal habit of depending on one person to rescue them from themselves. And this is the death of love.
The two-roof plan encourages a wife to cultivate initiative in rescuing herself, to develop social courage, to look upon her life as an independent adventure and get interested in it. And every Victorian tradition to the contrary, it is thus only that she can retain her charm down the years.[34]
Eastman maintained that this arrangement had recaptured the warmth and intimacy of her sweetheart days. "Every morning, like lovers, we telephone to exchange the day's greetings and make plans for the evening." Two or three times a week she and her husband dined together at her flat, and he stayed over; if they dined at a friend's or attended the theatre, they met there, knowing that they may or may not sleep together that night. "And because neither course is inexorably forced upon us, either one is a bit of a lark. It is wonderful sometimes to be alone in the night and just know that someone loves you. In other moods you must have that lover in your arms. Marriage under two roofs makes room for moods."[35]
Eastman assured her readers that each partner having their own assured space obviated the violent fights and the petty, vicious bickering that deformed most marriages. While living conventionally, "marriage was destroying us.... Now that we live under two roofs there are no storms, no quarrels, no tears. Our differences of opinion are not passionate and unbearable. They have an almost rational quality. Criticisms and suggestions are made with the gentleness and reserve that is common between friends. And they are received with the open-minded forbearance of one who can be sure of the critic's early departure."[36]
Such peace, Eastman declared, was definitely better for the children, as her humorous (yet acutely accurate) description of the horrors of the family breakfast attested. In the morning everyone was at their worst. The children wanted to sleep, dawdle, and fool, yet mother was forced
to begin being patient and kind at a time in the day when it is against nature to be patient and kind; father, already heavy with his day's work, forced to spend his last precious half-hour in this crude confusion when his whole being cries out for solitude.
This at least can be said for the two-roof scheme: it automatically relieves father of the family breakfast, and the family breakfast of father! And no hard feelings anywhere. In our family father is now a treat.
The "bold romantic step" of separate abodes, therefore, would improve both marriage and family as separate beds and separate rooms could not.[37]
Eastman also publicly endorsed revolutionary Socialism during her editorship of The Liberator. Shortly before the 1918 elections she noted that, of the fifteen members of the SP's Executive Committee, five were in jail and three under indictment, and sardonically noted that "perhaps a Socialist Committeeman can serve his party even better from an American jail." She was not disheartened by the SP's 1918 performance, averring that Socialism represented "a deep-rooted faith and a thoroughly understood intellectual conception which must grow because it satisfies the vital desires of real human beings."[38]
Eastman also praised the "political flexibility" of the Non-Partisan League (NPL) a distinctly non-Socialist force in the mid-West which selected its candidate, ran him in the primary of the party which dominated the particular locale, and then, "counting on the strength of the League plus the inertia of those who will vote the party ticket anyhow," elected him. If their candidate failed in the primary, the NPL might run him as an independent, or endorse the candidate of a third party.[39] Although Eastman admitted that "an absolute idealist might regret this unholy compromise with the corrupt two-party system," she said that by this strategy
the farmers have avoided the long, slow, expensive process of building up a new political party with the inevitable combination of the old parties against it as soon as it begins to look dangerous. This is a shrewd practical method characteristic of the American farmer at his best, and it has already proved a short cut to political power... To "see through" political democracy and yet be keen enough to make immediate and effective use of its machinery for gaining economic ends, requires a high degree of economic-group intelligence.
The NPL, she said, was "consciously or unconsciously, one of the vital forces in the growing social revolt," as evinced by its combination with labor candidates and the ruling-class terrorism with which it was greeted.[40]
Believing that revolutionaries should utilize every possible weapon, Eastman never repudiated electoral politics entirely; yet she increasingly emphasized industrial action. She noted that European Socialists were very closely allied with Labor, and that even in the United States workers were combining political and economic action. She claimed that the majority of AFL members, pace its leadership, were radicals, as evinced by the Mooney Congress of early 1919 and its vote for a general strike to free the framed and imprisoned labor martyr. "Labor in America has held a great Congress without so much as a by-your-leave from Samuel Gompers," she said. "It has voted a general strike in complete defiance of the American Federation of Labor and all the sacred labor-contracts which it has sworn to uphold. That is a blow at craft unionism stronger than any other that could be struck.... A successful general strike will be the beginning of the breakup of craft unionism."[41]
Speaking of the debate over the political use of the general strike at the British Labor Party convention of 1919, Eastman (in comments directly relevant to a similar discussion in the U.S.) disagreed with opponents who called such a tactic undemocratic and unconstitutional.
Every opponent of industrial action called attention to labor's defeat at the polls as a warning and thus gave his case away. For if labor in Great Britain, though strong industrially, is weak at the polls, there must be something the matter with the polls as a register of labor's will. Labor is weak politically because all the institutions which influence and control its political mind--schools, churches, movies, newspapers--are capitalist institutions; and labor is strong industrially because it can't be so easily fooled about questions immediately relating to the job, and because its industrial mind is influenced more and more by its own press and institutions. Moreover, the only kind of education labor needs just now is the realization that political questions are fundamentally industrial.[42]
Eastman was further radicalized by her vivid encounter with actual revolution in Bela Kun's Revolutionary Communist Hungary, which she described in a masterful combination of investigative reporting and philosophical rumination in The Liberator. Witnessing a genuine revolution undermined her beliefs in pacifism, bourgeois civil liberties, and electoral socialism. She exclaimed that "I shall never go into a big, comfortable house again, whether it is a house of a Socialist professor or a railroad president, without quietly figuring up the number of rooms and the number of people, to determine whether the family will be allowed to continue in possession of the whole house when communism comes. So real was my experience in Hungary." She quoted, with seeming acquiescence, Kula's assertion that the suppression of bourgeois publications prevented counter-revolutionary violence, and that the workers' state would inaugurate the world's first genuine freedom of expression, hitherto confined to the property-owning elite.[43]
Contemplating the multitudes of injured and sick children for which there were no facilities, Eastman "thought for the thousandth time how bitterly tragic it is that these great experiments in government must commence at a time when material conditions are so desperate." But, as an important Hungarian official told her, "It is not an accident that revolution and starvation come hand in hand." She described plans for the forcible requisition of food from the peasants and warned her readers that
There is no use having any illusions about the revolution. It was born in starvation, and its first business is war. There is no freedom, no plenty, no joy, except the joys of struggle and faith. Cherished dreams of scientists, educators, artists, engineers, who were waiting for a free society, must be set aside, while the whole proletariat organizes in desperate haste to check the invading hosts of the enemy. And war means recruiting propaganda, conscription, military discipline, the death penalty, the whole damnable business of organized dying and killing.[44]
Crystal's brother Max had proclaimed that when the working-class war for social liberation arrived people would recognize it because the incipient regime would not require conscription. "I thought he spoke a profound truth. I do not think so now.... Now I know there can be no such thing as a democratic army. People don't want to die, and except for a few glorious fanatics they are not going to vote themselves into the front line trenches." Conscription laws, she said, "are inescapable. Nobody takes any chances with the dictatorship." A high Hungarian official assured her that deserters were shot because if they were not, the Czechs would extinguish the Hungarian revolution. Eastman commented that "I hope there is some pacifist revolutionary with an answer to that. I have none."[45]
Radicalized by her contact with actual revolution, Eastman heaped scorn upon the SP's 1920 Convention, which emphasized the upholding of traditional American values and legal norms. She thundered that "the state under capitalism" was exclusively "an agent of the exploiting class"; conservative socialists "have vainly expected the capitalist state to maintain democratic institutions against its own interest, and to stand quietly by while socialists, exercising their constitutional rights, vote to destroy it." She declared that "the experiences of the last four years, which after all have been but the logical development of democracy under capitalism,--have recalled us from those childlike dreams to the stern realities of the class struggle."[46]
Although Socialists must stand with liberals in demanding the honoring of Constitutional guarantees, Eastman said, they must also recognize that
the only way to "restore" liberty is to destroy the capitalist system. And while we shall continue to exercise our political rights, whenever and wherever a capitalist government allows us, we know that the great hope of realizing socialism lies in the leadership of the masses by the workers organized in the industrial field, and that the chief function of a political party of socialism is to define, interpret and explain the industrial struggle, and educate the workers to play their historic part.[47]
She complained that most Socialists had forgotten that profiteering, exploitation, and the suppression of dissent were hallmarks of capitalism, and not merely war-time phenomena. What was the use, she asked, in telling an exploited immigrant "that he was free up to April 3rd, 1917, and now we are going to restore that freedom?" Socialists must recognize that "the First Amendment is as good to-day as it ever was. And it was never any good in a crisis."[48] In a partial repudiation of her own war-time activity as a mainstay of the Civil Liberties Bureau, Eastman said that
the war, which brought socialists and liberals together in the fight to maintain civil liberty, was as bad for the socialists as it was good for the liberals. The fight for free speech demanded constant reference to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. To demand that these documents be lived up to, was the most revolutionary thing a socialist leader could do, except go to jail. And from demanding that they be lived up to, some of these leaders have apparently gotten into the habit of believing they will be lived up to, and that when they are, that will be the Social Revolution.[49]
Eastman excoriated the old-guard conservative leadership. Speaking of conservative Socialist Congressman Victor Berger, who had been indicted for his anti-war views, she said that "Berger would rather go on fighting for his life and liberty and his right to sit in Congress in this capitalist democracy, than take a chance under a rough-and-tumble working-class government, and he says so. Ex-Assemblyman Waldman [one of the five New York State SP assemblymen expelled from the legislature because of their SP affiliations].... knew that he would feel more at home sitting on the steps of the Capital at Albany with the door shut in his face, then he would as a re-callable delegate to an industrial Soviet under communism, and he said so." She denounced the SP platform, and the old guard's throttling of dissent, in equally harsh terms. Debs, she sardonically remarked, was nominated for President only because he was "safe in prison, where he will lend them the glory of his name without the embarrassment of his clear-thinking revolutionary leadership."[50]
As co-editor of The Liberator, Eastman was perhaps the most prominent American woman publicly identified as a revolutionary socialist and a staunch feminist. Yet she was not in any sense a socialist-feminist or a feminist-socialist. Unlike the writers for The Socialist Woman, Eastman perceived no symbiotic connection between her Socialism and her feminism, nor any philosophical, political, or organizational relationships between what were for her (as for her brother Max) two separate and equally necessary causes. Indeed, it seems she never contemplated the seeking of organic connections between the two movements. She emphatically rejected any suggestion that Socialism entailed women's rights, and denied that women had any reform agenda distinct from that of men (except for Feminism itself). She ignored huge segments of The Socialist Woman's critique of capitalist patriarchy and patriarchal capitalism as well as much of its practical program. Her solutions for the evils of the patriarchal household were decidedly private and individualistic.
Eastman explicitly repudiated the leftist canard that Communism would inevitably inaugurate women's equality:
Many feminists are socialists, many are communists, not a few are active leaders in these movements. But the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, sees the women's battle as distinct in its objects and different in its methods from the workers' battle for industrial freedom.... As a feminist she also knows that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.
Woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, can be fought for and conceivably won before the gates open into industrial democracy. On the other hand, woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, is not inherent in the communist ideal.[51]
Eastman cited the familiar example of the leftist stalwart who was blind to feminism and who, confining his wife in a squalid tenement while he rejoiced in the world's challenges, ignored her plight. "If we should graduate into communism tomorrow this man's attitude to his wife would not be changed," Eastman charged. For once echoing The Socialist Woman, Eastman warned that "The proletarian dictatorship may or may not free women. We must begin now to enlighten the future dictators."[52] For reasons similar to the Socialist women, but with no acknowledgement of their debates, insights, and activism, she strongly supported separate women's organizations within Socialist and Labor organizations. Unlike The Socialist Woman, however, she demanded that such groups remain autonomous. Describing the members of one such women's organization in England, Eastman averred that despite their professed and actual Socialist orthodoxy, "they spoke not as socialist women, not as party women, but as women." (This, however, was exactly why Socialist men feared the autonomy of Socialist women's groups.)[53]
Eastman nonchalantly admitted that "the vast majority of women as well as men are without property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a system of society which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few." Surprisingly for one with her direct experience of working-class misery, she did not grasp the implications of this for her feminist program. Indeed, she defined "economic freedom" for women in a thoroughly capitalist sense, as independence not from capitalist exploiters but from their husbands. Female economic freedom, she said, was "not the ideal economic freedom dreamed of by revolutionary socialism, but such economic freedom as it is possible for a human being to achieve under the existing system of competitive production and distribution."[54] This entailed mere equality with men on the job and pay for the work associated with motherhood and home-making. Eastman's article on the Hungarian revolution ignored Communism's impact upon women, and never mentioned the intentions of the revolutionary government with regards to women's issues.
Eastman did criticize the traditional family in much the same way as the socialist-feminists. Women who combined a career with motherhood must be "supermen" [sic!] even if they enjoyed the ever-so-rare feminist husband. Yet her solutions were strictly private: in theory, a husband who did his share of the housework, and in practice, the hiring of maids. She largely ignored the commonplace proposals of various Socialist-feminists, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for socialized housework and childcare. She sometimes accepted the patriarchal assumption that the raising of children was biologically a woman's task.[55] (The entire idea of a maternal, rather than parental, endowment, implied this.) Her "Marriage Under Two Roofs," explicitly aimed at struggling professional families, assumed a stay-at-home mother, and ignored the needs and capacities of working-class families, who could not afford separate beds, much less separate rooms or dwellings.
Eastman's advocacy of birth control ignored the class dimensions of the struggle, so well publicized by Margaret Sanger and the IWW. She did note that rich women with easy access to birth control information opposed the dissemination of such information among the working class, but never asked the reason for this curious (given the elite hysteria over "race suicide" and disdain for working-class women and children) situation. Her proposal for a maternal endowment lacked the precision and realism of most of her ideas, and in particular ignored the class basis of society. How would a maternal endowment be financed in a society where most working-class families lived in destitution, and where the ruling capitalist families (whose taxes alone could pay for it) would adamantly resist? How would the amount of the allotment be determined? Would super-rich Mrs. Belmont and ultra-poor Mrs. Sacks receive the same amount? Eastman never broached, much less confronted, such vexing difficulties.
Contradicting The Socialist Woman, Eastman also insisted that the feminist program would not further the cause of Socialism. Although she occasionally admitted that women's experience influenced their political priorities, she scornfully rejected any suggestion that peace, children's welfare, and other social causes were distinctly women's issues. Both sexes, she declared, had an equal interest in all aspects of human betterment; feminism entailed the full equality of women, and only such equality.[56]
As Cook says, Eastman "occupied a unique and, as the 1920s wore on, an increasingly isolated political position. She was generally the only socialist at feminist movements, [and] one of the very few feminists at socialist meetings." She was virtually blacklisted in the United States, and could find no work in any of the fields in which she was expert. Paul Kellogg, a good and well-connected friend with whom she had disagreed over the AUAM's Civil Liberties Bureau, wrote a despairing Eastman that she confronted "practical difficulties in making a fresh start which it does no good to minimize.... Your various espousals--such as the Woman's Party--would not help in some of the few quarters where industrial research is still carried on....." Even some staunch feminists criticized her "casual sex life" because she had lived with her future second husband before formally divorced from her first.[57]
Eastman's bifurcation of Socialism and Feminism in large part reflected a new social milieu, in which the radical countercultural organizations and publications of the 1910's which had united socialism, feminism, racial egalitarianism, and cultural radicalism, had been suppressed. After she and Max quit The Liberator in 1922, she had difficulty placing her writings. Indeed, few left publications offered a sympathetic venue for her philosophy. She wrote mostly for two strictly Feminist publications: Alice Paul's and the NWP's Equal Rights in the United States, and the Six Point Group's and Lady Rhondda's Time and Tide in England. Neither Paul nor Rhondda had any sympathy for or understanding of economic radicalism. Rhondda, Eastman said, was "a wealthy woman, owner of vast coal properties, with no Socialist tendencies whatsoever." Paul was a single-minded Feminist who used the war, as every other event, for her purposes: "I imagine she could even go through a proletarian revolution without taking sides and be found waiting on the doorstep of the Extraordinary Commission the next morning to see that the revolution's promises to women were not forgotten!"[58] Eastman's divorce of feminism and socialism, then, may have represented the social realities of her time, and her opportunities for expressing her views, as well as her genuine sentiments. She did attempt to interest radical feminists in the activities and views of their labor counterparts, just as she preached feminism in labor publications. She justified her account of an international conference of Socialist women, published in Equal Rights, on the ground that "every new effort at organized expression on the part of women acting by and for themselves must interest a feminist." For similar reasons, she covered the activities of British and International Socialist women for Time and Tide.[59]
The chasm between Eastman's Socialism and her Feminism was evinced by her inevitable entry into the futile and self-destructive women's internecine battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) versus special protective labor legislation for women in the United States. (This controversy also occurred in many other advanced industrial nations.) Although Eastman attempted to maintain her usual moderation, clarity, practicality, and fairness, the terms of the debate militated against such relative objectivity. Eastman wryly commented that the victorious suffragist, after one good night's rest, sallied forth for new conquests; but "on the very first corner she meets the earnest reformer" whose life's work on behalf of special protective laws for working women was thereby endangered. The ERA (then termed the Lucretia Mott amendment), "was hardly 24 hours old before every member of Congress received a letter protesting in the strongest terms against it, signed by the official representatives of seven other national women's organizations, all of the more solid, more established, more distinctly humanitarian type."[60]
Eastman's stance was, as usual, nuanced and sophisticated. Yet she ultimately sided with her own professional class against her working-class sisters. She objected that special protective laws classified women with children and idiots. "Feminism," she said, "has entered upon a new phase; no longer content with asking for their rights, women have begun to question their privileges." Eastman correctly asserted that protective laws evicted women from many well-paying skilled jobs and that many male unions supported such laws for precisely that reason. "This sudden concern for the health of women when they set out to earn their living in competition with men seems a little suspicious to the feminist," she said. The male working-class union members who clamored for special protective legislation for women exploited their own wives at home with scant regard for their health or welfare.[61] Eastman earnestly searched for, and found, a few groups of working-class women who had lost their jobs because of such legislation. However, she sometimes ignored the reality that such laws adversely most affected relatively privileged female workers, while often helping the vast majority who drudged away at dangerous and difficult jobs.
Yet Eastman admitted that some protective laws for women were indeed necessary and beneficial both because new mothers and their children required protection and because female workers were organized only with difficulty. She acknowledged that capitalist exploiters opposed such laws for their own reasons. Noting the lack of enthusiasm of many feminists for birth control and maternal allowances, she conceded that such measures "cannot perhaps be stated literally in terms of equality because the functions of male and female parents are so different." (This, however, was itself a cause and reflection of gender inequality both within the home and within the larger society.) Nevertheless, she insisted that "A good deal can be said for both these reforms from a Feminist standpoint. They seem to me to bear with considerable directness on securing equality of status for the married woman. But your pure Feminist is apt to be a bit of a doctrinaire. She likes to advocate something that can be stated literally in terms of equality."[62]
Eastman attempted to reconcile the welfare of working women with women's equality by demanding "not that protective legislation should be abolished, but that it should be made to apply to men and women alike."[63] Yet this contradicted her usual practical good sense, for it ignored Muller vs. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court decision which wrote traditional gender stereotypes and roles into the Constitution by validating, for women, protective legislation which it banned for men.[64] This decision crippled the American left by vitiating labor unity, feminist unity, and labor-feminist unity, and demanding that every individual and organization choose between protecting women or protecting no one at all. Given the industrial mass murder imposed on much of the working class, the "slaughter-pens" in which many male and female workers worked and lived, the resulting divisions were acrimonious and intractable.
Eastman herself increasingly differentiated the strict feminists, who insisted upon full equality, from the humanitarians, who downplayed such equality in favor of general human betterment. Her affiliations with the NWP and the Six Point Group, and the acute scarcity of feminists within the Socialist and Labor movements, drove her inexorably towards a more and more intransigent feminist position. She increasingly belittled the humanitarians as tepid reformers intent on helping others rather than placing women in the position to protect themselves. Sounding for all the world like a sectarian revolutionary purist, she said, in praise of Alice Paul, that "it is almost never a mistake to create a situation which divides the polite and timid advocates of justice from those who are really determined to get it."[65]
When the International Suffragist Alliance, at its 1926 convention in Paris, rejected the NWP's application for affiliation because the NWP stridently opposed protective legislation, Eastman, again using sectarian phraseology startlingly resembling that of the Third International, rejoiced that the NWP's defeat would "mean infinitely more to the progress of feminism than our acceptance in the International could ever have meant.... The feminists of the world must find each other and unite on a policy of action. It is thus that a new international will be born."[66] Amidst the debate, France fired all women from their night telephone operator jobs, in accordance with the dictates of the League of Nation's International Labor Organization. The women were forced into lower-paid day jobs, and when they protested, male unionists violently disrupted their meetings. Eastman asserted that
This news, straight from the industrial field gave point and purpose to all our talk. It made sharp and clear the need for a Feminist party of action in the international field. Those Paris telephone girls are fighting an international tyranny. There is no international body of women to speak for them, much less to fight for them..... The expedition of the Woman's Party to Paris has demonstrated that there is at present no Feminist international with a purpose and plan of action.... The future is ours![67]
However inhumane Eastman's stance (which hurt many more women than it helped) may have seemed to Florence Kelley and other staunchly feminist social reformers, it reflected rather than causing Eastman's dilemma. Any socialist-feminist or feminist-socialist position faced shipwreck upon the shoals of the dilemma of special protective legislation for women, regardless of the good will and good sense of any individual participant in the debate. The very existence of the problem, rather than the proposed and contradictory solutions, devastated the left. As Eastman noted, coalitions, rather than forming or strengthening after the suffrage victory, disintegrated over this intractable issue. In the pre-war years Conger-Kaneko's intrepid group of socialist-feminists and feminist-socialists had valiantly attempted to synthesize their two favorite causes, and had run aground upon the shoals of class divisions within the feminist movement and gender divisions within the working class. By Eastman's heyday, The Socialist Woman's project seemed so utopian and distant as to be scarcely worthy of consideration. There is no evidence that Eastman was even aware of Conger-Kaneko, her publications, or the stellar constellation of intellectuals whose debates these publications had fostered.
As both the Socialist and feminist movements disintegrated, Eastman's personal and professional lives in the 1920s mirrored the estrangement and collapse of both movements. Her death in 1928 at the age of 46, while not directly caused by her political travails, symbolized the end of an era, the shattering of the bright hopes which both Socialists and Feminists had entertained during the previous decade.
Eastman could not achieve the feminist personal life for which she hoped, any more than she could single-handedly synthesize Socialism and Feminism in an age when both were divided and demoralized. With great misgivings, and over the opposition of some of her family, she had married insurance salesman Wallace Benedict in 1911. After becoming engaged, she fell sick and recuperated at her father's house (her mother had recently died). When Max, also contemplating marriage with trepidation, hypothesized that her dread of matrimony had sickened her, she responded that "I've been feeling very scared about getting married all through this sickness. Getting back to New York and living with you was the hope I fed my drooping spirits on--not Milwaukee and the married state."[68] Although her husband fully supported her suffrage work, she separated from him after a few years, and moved back to New York.
Eastman's second marriage, to The Freeman editor Walter Fuller, lasted until his death and brought two children. Yet fragmentary evidence indicates that it, too, was far from a happy partnership. The couple suffered from severe financial difficulties after Eastman, ill after giving premature birth to her second child, resigned from her relatively well-paying job managing The Liberator. Walter, whose salary was only two-thirds of what hers had been, resigned from The Freeman and moved to England in search of better-paying work. Yet he may have moved partly to get away from Eastman. He apparently departed (three months after the birth of his second child) without so much as informing her, for she wrote him
Don't worry about harsh words. Have I said any? If I have they certainly can be forgotten now. I knew you had to run away. That you couldn't even send me a line to say so and say you were sorry will forever be incomprehensible to me. But then four-fifths of you is a closed book to me and four-fifths of me is a closed book to you,--and yet we love each other a great deal. Don't we?[69]
After Walter left she wrote him that she was "so lonely it makes a sick feeling in my solar plexus.... I hope you will come back." She found him a congenial job at The Survey Graphic, but he rejected it and stayed in England.[70] Evidence from "Marriage Under Two Roofs" also supports the supposition that the couple did not live harmoniously together: Eastman admitted that she relentlessly badgered her husband, and commented that he was a silent, uncommunicative type whom she could not comprehend. From 1922 until Walter's death in 1927, he lived in England; she resided for long periods in the United States, and at times near him (although possibly in a separate dwelling) in England.
Eastman also suffered from her virtual blacklisting in the United States and her inability to find congenial work in England. Cook says that Eastman was "morose and melancholic" when she lacked full-time (or over full-time) occupations. "Eastman hated to rest, she hated inactivity and she hated to be without a steady job. Her inability to find work, the fact that she was actually barred from the kind of work she sought, was the hardest for her to comprehend." Her income derived largely from rents on her two houses, in Greenwich Village and Croton-on-the-Hudson.[71] Finally, in 1927, she decided to return to the United States permanently, writing her friend Paul Kellogg that she was "simply crazy to work. England holds nothing for me.... I have tried for two years to get a job--research, organizing, editorial, speaking, anything...." She begged him to "just say you think I can get work and begin to build my life again"; he apparently offered his assistance.[72]
She secured a temporary job organizing a celebration for The Nation magazine;[73] Walter would follow when she found more permanent work. However, she never saw him again, for he soon died of a stroke. Meanwhile, Eastman's own health disintegrated. Blaming herself for her illness and cursing her "good for nothing body," she struggled on, hoping that she could support her children and provide a happy home for them. She enthused that "there IS SO MUCH for me to do." Yet she succumbed to an illness which, as Cook says, "was never properly diagnosed or treated," and died within ten months of her husband.[74] Her tragic, depressing death, after a long struggle with a painful illness, mirrors that of the socialist-feminist enterprise. And who is to say that her blacklisting from meaningful, sustaining work, and the lack of a political movement in which she could feel genuinely at home and fully express the many sides of her multifaceted personality, did not contribute to her obsessive neglect of her own health? It obviously underlay her frequent--and, for such an effervescent person, so unnatural--depression.
Whatever the cause of Eastman's death, it did symbolize the end of an era, just as Henry Crosby's suicide ended, for Malcolm Cowley, the 1920s.[75] Eastman's writings and her activist legacy, like those of her sisters at The Socialist Woman, were almost totally lost to history for many decades. They have been only partly recovered even today.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] CE, "Mother-Worship," The Nation, March 16, 1927, in Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) 41-46. Cook has reprinted most of Eastman's writings. The texts seem accurate, but at times Cook mis-identifies the date and/or time of publication. As Cook's anthology is much more readily accessible than the original sources, I will refer to her anthology except when quoting sources not included therein. When I have noticed an erroneous date or place of publication, I have given both the actual date and Cook's. Cook also edited Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution (Garland, New York, 1976). This anthology contains almost every Crystal Eastman article reprinted in the Oxford volume, plus a few other minor pieces. I have referred to this as Cook II. "Mother Worship" is also reprinted in Cook II, with an additional paragraph added by The Nation, to which CE strenuously objected. Cook noted this paragraph but omitted it from the Oxford anthology.
[2] CE, "Mother-Worship," The Nation, March 16, 1927, in Cook, 41-46.
[3] CE, Work Accidents and the Law (New York, Charities Publication Committee, Russell Sage Foundation, 1910). "The Temper of the Workers Under Trial" is on pp. 221-237, reprinted in Cook II, 345-363. Biographical information is in Cook, 3-7.
[4] CE, "Work Accidents and Employers' Liability," The Survey, September 1910, quote is in Cook, 271; CE, "The Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, July--December 1911, quote is in Cook, 288-289. CE added that workman's compensation would mean that "an employer can reduce his accident costs, not by hiring a more unscrupulous attorney and a more hard-hearted claims agent, but only by reducing his accidents."
[5] CE, "Work Accidents and Employers' Liability," The Survey, September 1910, quote is in Cook, 278-280.
[6] CE, "The Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, July--December 1911, quote is in Cook, 281-282.
[7] CE, "The Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, July--December 1911, in Cook, 280-290, quote is in Cook, 285-286.
[8] CE, "Report on the Wisconsin Suffrage Campaign," Proceedings of the 44th Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Philadelphia, November 21-26, 1912, in Cook, 66-70. CE was the manager of the campaign.
[9] Cook, 10-24, Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, (Princeton, 1973), pp. 184, 263, 319, 196, 216-221, 240-243, 249-258; 303-305.
[10] Marchand, 255; CE, "War and Peace," The Survey, December 30, 1916, in Cook, 252-254; Cook, 10-24, Marchand, 184, 263, 319, 196, 216-221, 240-243, 249-258; 303-305.
[11] CE, "To Make War Unthinkable," letter in The New Republic, July 24, 1915, in Cook, 235-237; CE, "Interview with Dr. Jacobs," The Survey, October 9, 1915 in Cook, 237-241; CE, "A Platform of Real Preparedness," The Survey, November 13, 1915, in Cook, 241-247.
[12] CE, "Suggestions for 1916-1917," AUAM Pamphlet, October 1916, in Cook, 247-252; Marchand, 243, Coo, 15-16. Cook and Marchand disagree on some points. Cook claims the Mexican and American mediators met in El Paso, Marchand says they were unable to meet in El Paso, and met in New York instead. More importantly, Cook gives the peoples' commission full credit for averting war, while Marchand merely states that the AUAM and its allies claimed such credit.
[13] CE, letter to Balch, June 14, 1917, in Cook, 254-260; Cook, 15-18; Marchand, however, denies that the AUAM actually endorsed Wilson [248-249].
[14] Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, Oxford, 1990, p. 37. Baldwin, of course, was later jailed as a conscientious objector.
[15] CE to Balch, June 14, 1917 in Cook, 254-260; Marchand, 254--258.
[16] Marchand, 256-7, 304-5, 294-326, 381-85, especially 302-3, 306-12, 315.
[17] CE, "Our War Record: A Plea for Tolerance," January 1, 1918, in Cook, 264-265. For Crystal's view of free trade, see the ad for The International Free Trade League, on whose advisory committee she sat; The Liberator, January 1919, 2.
[18] CE, "A Program for Voting Women, WPP of New York, March 1918, Cook 266-268.
[19] CE, "A Program for Voting Women," WPPNY pamphlet, March 1918, in Cook, 266-67.
[20] Lenin, "Brest-Litovsk--A Brigand's Peace," Liberator, October 1922 [??? sounds like wrong date to me]
[21] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[22] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[23] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[24] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[25] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49; CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[26] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[27] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[28] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[29] CE, "Practical Feminism," The Liberator, January 1920, in Cook, 51-52.
[30] CE, "Feminism: Statement Read at the First Feminist Congress in the United States, New York, March 1, 1919, in The Liberator, May 1919, in Cook, 49-51.
[31] CE, "Alice Paul's Convention," The Liberator, April 1921, in Cook, 57-63.
[32] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83; Cook, 29.
[33] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[34] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[35] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[36] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[37] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[38] CE, "Aeroplanes and Jails," The Liberator, November 1918, in Cook, 294-295 [Cook mistakenly places it in the November issue]; CE, "The Socialist Vote," The Liberator, December 1918, in Cook, 293-294.
[39] CE, introduction to "The Farmers' Crusade," The Liberator, October 1918, 5-6. This is not in either of Cook's anthologies.
[40] CE, introduction to "The Farmers' Crusade," The Liberator, October 1918, 5-6. This is not in either of Cook's anthologies.
[41] CE, "The Mooney Congress," The Liberator, March 1919, in Cook, 302-315.
[42] CE, "British Labor is Moving", The Liberator, September 1919, in Cook, 328-335.
[43] CE, "In Communist Hungary," The Liberator, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[44] CE, "In Communist Hungary," The Liberator, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[45] CE, "In Communist Hungary," The Liberator, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[46] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[47] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[48] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356. She used the phrase "ignorant foreigner" perhaps with irony: the foreigner, she implied, would recognize, as SP officials did not, that his lack of freedom was a permanent condition, not a wartime aberration.
[49] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[50] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[51] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[52] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[53] CE, "A Matter of Emphasis," Time and Tide, June 5, 1925, in Cook, 136-139.
[54] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57; CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[55] For example, in "Now We Can Begin," (The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57, she asserts both that raising children "naturally falls" upon the mother and that most mothers want to raise or superintend the raising of their children to the extent that makes any other full-time job impossible for ten or fifteen years. However, in that same article she also demands that husbands do their equal part in home-making. In "Bed-Makers and Bosses," (Time and Tide, October 12, 1923, in Cook, 83-85, strongly denies any biological basis for the sexual division of labor.
[56] CE, "An Acid Test for Suffragists," London Daily Herald, Mary 1925, in Cook, 154-156; CE, Letter to the Editor, Time and Tide, March 18, 1927, in Cook, 223-225; CE, "Feminists Must Fight," The Nation, November 12, 1924, in Cook, 160-161.
[57] Cook, 1, 21, 22, 29.
[58] Cook, 33; CE, "Alice Paul's Convention," The Liberator, April 1921, in Cook, 57-63.
[59] CE, "Socialist Women of Eighteen Countries Meet at Marseilles", Equal Rights, September 26, 1925, in Cook, 146-153; CE, "A Matter of Emphasis," Time and Tide, June 5, 1925, in Cook, 136-139.
[60] CE, "Equality or Protection?," Equal Rights, March 15, 1924, in Cook, 156-159.
[61] CE, "Women, Rights, and Privileges," The Outlook (London), February 5, 1927, in Cook, 220-223.
[62] CE, "Equality or Protection?", Equal Rights, March 15, 1924, in Cook, 156-159; CE, "Protective Legislation in England," Equal Rights, October 3, 1925, in Cook, 170-172; CE, "Egalitarian v. Reformer," Equal Rights, June 4, 1927, in Cook, 225-231.
[63] CE, "Women, Rights, and Privileges," The Outlook (London), February 5, 1927, in Cook, 220-223.
[64] See Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History With Documents, ed. Nancy Woloch, Bedford/St. Martins, ------.
[65] CE, "Personalities and Powers: Alice Paul," Time and Tide, July 20, 1923, in Cook, 63-66.
[66] CE, "Woman's Party Accepts Paris Congress Repulse as Spur to a World-Wide Feminist Movement," The World, June 27, 1926, in Cook, 186-195. The International Suffrage Alliance cited a host of reasons for denying the NWP's application for affiliation, but Eastman convincingly argues that the NWP's position on protective legislation underlay its rejection. Eastman claimed that the NWP was rejected precisely because so ISA many member-organizations agreed with the NWP's position that the ISA leaders feared that the NWP's agitation would split the ISA.
[67] CE, "The Great Rejection: Part III," Equal Rights, July 3, 1926, in Cook, 207-211.
[68] Cook, 10-11.
[69] Cook, 28.
[70] Cook, 28.
[71] Cook, 27, 29-30.
[72] Cook, 33.
[73] Cook claims it was the magazine's tenth anniversary celebration; but The Nation was founded in 1865.
[74] Cook, 34.
[75] Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (Compass Press edition, 1959 [original edition 1934]), 246-288, especially 246-247.
The bifurcation of Socialism and feminism in Eastman's thought partly reflected the social environment of the 1920s: Eastman wrote for two distinct constituencies which seldom overlapped. Indeed, she complained that she was usually the only feminist at Socialist meetings, and the only Socialist at feminist ones. Her articles, therefore, usually addressed either Socialists or feminists, but not both. Further, a bitter controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) sharply divided Socialists from feminists, women who identified primarily with the labor movement from those who considered themselves women (and, implicitly, professional women) before or instead of identifying themselves as workers. Finally, Eastman's career demonstrates the impossibility of fusing socialism and feminism without an independent publication and organizational base specifically dedicated to that cause. Eastman was marginalized even geographically in the last decade of her life: denied suitable employment in the United States, she migrated between her native country and England, but found a home and solace in neither. Eastman's separation of Socialism and feminism, however, also represented a conscious choice: she insisted that the two causes had little or no connection. All in all, her life illustrates the difficulties of meaningfully advancing either socialism or feminism in the climate of the 1920s, much less fusing the two.
Crystal Eastman shared the remarkable upbringing of her more famous brother Max. Her parents were practicing feminists who demonstrated in life the feasibility of an egalitarian family. Her mother, like her father an ordained Congregational minister, was the more celebrated of her parents; but her father supported Crystal's insistence that "there was no such thing in our family as boys' work and girls' work." In the Eastman household, everyone made beds, washed dishes, and chopped wood. He also upheld Eastman's short skirt, which allowed free movement, against a delegation of church ladies, and (facing yet another delegation, this time of neighborhood men) defended her wearing of a man's bathing suit (which lacked a skirt and stockings, but included a top). Eastman later said that "He was, I know, startled and embarrassed to see his only daughter in a man's bathing suit with bare brown legs for all the world to see. I think it shocked him to his dying day. But he himself had been a swimmer; he knew he would not want to swim in a skirt and stockings. Why then should I?"[1]
In such a household, Eastman was a born feminist, writing, at the age of fifteen, an essay which, she said in 1927, showed her "as wise in feminism then as I am now":
The trouble with women is that they have no impersonal interests. They must have work of their own, first because no one who has to depend on another person for his living is really grown up; and second, because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. Children can die or grow up, husbands can leave you. No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster.
Eastman matured "confidently expecting to have a profession and earn my own living, and also confidently expecting to be married and have children... And my mother was the triumphant answer to all doubts as to the success of this double role."[2]
Eastman's education was world-class in both academics and in the harsh realities of America's economic life. After graduating from Vassar, she moved into a settlement house, earned an M.A. in sociology at Columbia, and (in 1907) received a law degree from New York University. Living with like-minded friends in Greenwich Village, she became an expert in labor law and working conditions. She studied industrial accidents for the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) and burst into the world of print with her Work Accidents and the Law (1910), a tome bristling with tables, charts, pictures, and cold, hard facts. (Her work was one of the six volumes resulting from the RSF's acclaimed Pittsburgh Survey.) New York's Governor Hughes then appointed her as the only woman among New York's fourteen Employer Liability Commission members, where she drafted New York State's celebrated workman's compensation law.
Although Blanche Wisen Cook, the scholar most familiar with Eastman's life and writings, asserts that Eastman "began to identify herself as a socialist in this period," Eastman's writings, in mainstream liberal rather than radical venues, epitomized the elitist, step-by-step reformism of affluent "social feminists." Meticulous research by sympathetic experts, Eastman believed, would generate practical, specific reforms without the need of class struggle. Her extraordinarily sensitive "The Temper of the Workers Under Trial," an appendix to Work Accidents and the Law, movingly described the plight of the working class and its heroic, yet matter-of-fact, response to calamity. Yet her description of "these people" correctly recognized the chasm that separated her from the subjects of her study and solicitude; her entire book addressed an urbane, liberal audience on behalf of reform, rather than fomenting workers' self-activity. Indeed, Eastman felt it necessary to refute "the opinion held by many, that working people do not feel their sorrows as keenly as others do."[3]
Eastman also published two essays summarizing her work, findings, and recommendations--"Work Accidents and Employers' Liability," published in the liberal bastion The Survey, and "Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," which appeared in the American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals. Both were models of patient investigation, careful analysis, and moderate, ameliorative proposals, more devastating in their effect for their severe understatement. Her choice of words indicated her cautious approach; she used the word "employer" rather than "capitalist," and "competition" instead of "capitalism." Although she chronicled the devastating effects of current law, which left most workers and their families totally unprotected against disaster at work, she exonerated the capitalists from deliberate cruelty and murder, even as she implicitly criticized the capitalist system. Accidents, she said, were "an ordinary outcome of competition" and "happen more or less inevitably in the course of industry. If it were carried on slowly and carefully with safety as the first concern of all, there would be few accidents, but carried on as it is today in America, there are many accidents." On the other hand, her demand for a workman's compensation law was avowedly based upon the assumption that only monetary savings would evoke employer concern with safety; such compensation "makes every serious accident a considerable cost to an employer and thus insures his invaluable cooperation with the labor department in promoting safety."[4]
Eastman realistically confronted the two main obstacles impeding workman's compensation laws (already enacted "in nearly every European country".) First, interstate competition encouraged capitalist whining that competition from states lacking such laws would produce ruin, and, Eastman acknowledged, "whether we sympathize with his plight or not, we must recognize the effectiveness of his argument before our state legislatures." Second, constitutional provisions "originally intended no doubt to safeguard the rights of the people, serve often, so it seems to some of us today, to deny the rights of the people." Eastman therefore proposed a law with three significant limitations: it exempted industries engaged in interstate competition, applied only where especially dangerous conditions invited state regulation, and covered only certain categories of accidents. Such a law, she felt, would render the principle of workman's compensation acceptable, and show employers that they also reaped significant benefits. Later, the law could be expanded.[5]
In her second article, written after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Eastman focused on preventing accidents more than on compensating victims. Contemplating the mangled bodies of workers killed when employers, saving pennies, violated a safety law, Eastman exclaimed that in such cases she and her allies did not want compensation for the family, "we want to put somebody in jail." When considering the piles of charred girls' bodies left by the Triangle fire, she exclaimed, "who wants to hear about a relief fund? What we want is to start a revolution." However, she quickly qualified her seemingly incendiary remark:
The first thing we need is information, complete and accurate information about the accidents that are happening. It seems a tame thing to drop so suddenly from talk of revolutions to talk of statistics. But I believe in statistics just as firmly as I believe in revolutions. And what is more, I believe statistics are good stuff to start a revolution with.... We must try to get every fact that will enable us to analyze accidents with a view to prevention.[6]
Once again her specific proposals were concrete and practical. Stating that "the administration of labor law is rapidly coming to be the most important function of government," she recommended a system of complete accident reporting, a strong workplace safety commissioner with powers of enforcement (including the closing of violating plants), and workman's compensation.[7] Such recommendations, while certainly worthy, assumed a paternalistic and benevolent state, ignored capitalism as the root cause of industrial mass murder, and neglected any mention of a self-conscious, organized working class which enforced its own law at the point of production. Eastman's analysis and program was worlds away from those of the SP and the IWW, which she would later embrace.
Eastman's discussion of the unexpected defeat of the Wisconsin suffrage amendment in 1912 evinced a similar analytical sophistication, lack of dogmatism, and partial focus on issues of class. She blamed the defeat largely on the brewery interests. "The brewers didn't fight us openly," she said. "They didn't need to. The important thing was that everybody who did business with them from the farmer who sold them barley to the big city newspapers who sold them advertising space, knew how they stood.... Have you ever thought how many industries there would be in a brewing state dependent upon the brewing industry for their success?" She claimed that there were entire cities where no businessmen allowed his wife to endorse suffrage. "They put their business, as, alas, most big corporations do, ahead of democracy, justice and simple human right." Yet she also admitted that the breweries did not control the majority of the votes, and won only in alliance with ignorance and prejudice. Although she believed that outright Socialist Party members supported suffrage, she noted that many SP sympathizers did not; Milwaukee wards which victorious SP Congressional candidate Victor Berger easily carried rejected suffrage by huge margins. "I sometimes think the last thing a man becomes progressive about is the activities of his own wife," she said. Eastman became a charter member of Alice Paul's ultra-militant (and distinctly un-Socialist) Congressional Committee (soon renamed the National Woman's Party).[8]
When Europe plunged into its latest bloodbath, Eastman dropped all other activities in favor of anti-war agitation. Like her brother Max, she feared that U.S. involvement would annihilate the fragile structure of recently-enacted social legislation, destroy civil liberties, and render further progress impossible. (Many other social reformers and Socialists concluded that war, by inevitably increasing government regulation of the economy, would hasten the advent of Socialism.) Eastman actively helped form four major peace organizations: the Woman's Peace Party of New York (WPPNY, November 1914); the national Woman's Peace Party (WPP, January 1915), the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM, November 1915), and the People's Council (PC, late May, 1917). She was virtual head of the WPPNY, a very important official of the AUAM, and one of the driving forces behind the PC.[9]
Eastman's political stance in these organizations was suitably nuanced. Acutely aware of the delicate balance between "the revolutionary and the non-resistant motives that make up our combination," she advocated militant, mass action against war but also placated the more influential and conservative members of her organizations. She often mediated between quarreling factions. Although she closely associated with Socialists and other radicals, her own writings evince a pacifist rather than a social-revolutionary opposition to war. (She described herself as a pacifist, but not as a Socialist--a characterization that her later article about the Hungarian revolution would validate.) Discussion of the class nature of the war found its way into WPPNY and AUAM pronouncements as demands for the nationalization of armaments industries and a progressive income tax, rather than as an analysis of capitalism as the cause of the conflagration. Eastman perceived conscription as "a demand stimulated by the self-interest of capitalists, imperialists and war traders," but also supported by sincere democrats enthralled by the idea of national service and equality of sacrifice. She called for thinking lovers of liberty who recognized that "military training is bad for the bodies and minds and souls of boys; that free minds, and souls undrilled to obedience are vital to the life of democracy." Freedom, she said, was different from equality; universal military service was no more democratic than prison life. The WPPNY, echoing the SP's 1916 Presidential candidate Allan Benson, demanded a national referendum before a declaration of war--a demand which implicitly denied that Congress legitimately represented the American people.[10]
Eastman insisted that pacifists aimed "to establish new values, to create an overpowering sense of the sacredness of life, so that war will be unthinkable" even when grave disputes arose. She sympathetically entertained the feminist notion (which implicitly critiqued Socialist doctrine) that women cared more about people than profit, and would inaugurate world peace when enfranchised. In addition to urging the nationalization of war industries and taxes on the rich, she also demanded the end of U.S. imperialism in South America and Asia, the end of the Asian exclusion policy, and a general fostering of inter-racial harmony.[11]
Eastman was the driving force behind the peace movement's most spectacular success, the grass-roots averting of war with Mexico in the summer of 1916. When war threatened, the AUAM organized a massive publicity barrage that resulted in unofficial meetings between three Mexican and three American anti-militarists. In a press conference in Washington D.C., Eastman highlighted U.S. ownership of vast portions of Mexico and attacked U.S. imperialism. Largely as a result of this popular mobilization and peoples' diplomacy, Wilson steered clear of war. Confident that this victory demonstrated that an aroused populace could prevent its government from embarking on war, Eastman exulted that
we must make the most of our Mexican experience. We must make it known to everybody that the people acting directly--not through their governments or diplomats or armies--stopped that war, and can stop all wars if enough of them will act together and act quickly..... Then let us seriously and patiently construct the machinery for instant mobilization of the people for the prevention of any future war that might threaten this country.... There never could be a war if our peace forces could mobilize like that in 48 hours.... What succeeded with Mexico will succeed with Japan, but we must be ready. We must be able to mobilize--hands and hearts and minds across the sea,--in forty-eight hours.[12]
In her capacities as high officer of both the WPPNY and the AUAM, Eastman pursued a dual strategy of mobilizing prominent, influential reformers with direct access to the nomenklatura, while also organizing mass demonstrations against the war. She noted that the AUAM had "a certain standing and influence, both at Washington and in many liberal circles throughout the country" and "an unusual combination of influential people in our Committee. These are assets." Until at least mid-1917 she retained the illusion, widespread among social reformers and pacifists, that Woodrow Wilson was a decent person who was at heart on their side. Indeed, the AUAM actually supported Wilson in 1916, despite his rejection of the suffrage amendment, over progressive reformer Charles Hughes, a former ally of Eastman's who endorsed suffrage. (Eastman's own position in this split between militant suffragists and militant pacifists was ambivalent; although she was a moving spirit behind the AUAM, she gave a rousing "suffrage first" speech at the NWP's Convention in June 1916.)[13] In her opinion, elite pressure and mass action were complementary rather than incompatible strategies; massive public demonstrations empowered the informal diplomacy of the liberal elites. Indeed, both Roger Baldwin and Eastman, convinced that Wilson's terrorist minions meant no harm, provided the secret police with potentially compromising information about pacifist supporters of the AUAM's Civil Liberties Bureau.[14] Yet as Wilson edged towards war, and violent thugs (sometimes in uniform) broke up peace meetings (the press, predictably, blamed the women for the violence), Eastman's militant, mass-mobilizing, confrontational tactics increasingly alienated her prominent associates. When the United States entered the war, and the Wilson administration criminalized dissent, important AUAM officials became more alarmed at Eastman's militance.
In particular, the AUAM's fostering of a Conscientious Objectors' Bureau (COB)--spearheaded by Baldwin and Eastman--frightened many of the AUAM's more prominent and respectable members, who felt that such activity obstructed the war effort, alienated the Wilson administration, invited repression, and sabotaged the organization's work for a liberal post-war settlement. However, Eastman maintained that Wilson was still "obviously bidding for liberal support," genuinely opposed conscription of the unwilling, and would welcome a Conscientious Objectors' Bureau as helping rather than hindering administration policy. "Our plan for maintaining free speech, free press, free assembly, should logically command the support of those liberal democrats whose avowed leader the President until recently has been," she claimed. The AUAM's policy was not one of "obstruction," but was rather a "'democracy first'" movement of which the COB was "only a part." Conciliating those who felt that the COB advocated conscientious objection rather than merely defending its practitioners, she negotiated a compromise: the COB was re-christened the Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), and correspondingly broadened its program to include the defense of free speech, free assembly, and other constitutional rights. She rhetorically asked, "Will there be a hundred liberals whom we can count on our side in working for a liberal negotiated peace, whom we can not also count on our side in working to save this country from the disgrace of forcing young men to kill and be killed in a cause which their reason and conscience do not support?" Surprised by the answer--the resignation of most prominent AUAM backers and the disintegration of the organization--she funnelled the defunct AUAM's funds to the Civil Liberties Bureau, whose activities, she said as early as September 1917, "has come to be our chief war-work. A Union Against Militarism, becomes, during war time, inevitably a Union for the Defense of Civil Liberty."[15] The CLB emerged after the war as the American Civil Liberties Union.
As the mainstream peace movement disintegrated after U.S. entry into the war and the onset of Wilson's reign of terror, peace activists (beginning in late May 1917) formed the People's Council, a broadly-based coalition which welcomed liberals, dissident farmers, anti-AFL unions, and radicals of most stripes. (Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, however, were dissuaded from seeking leadership roles on the grounds that their presence would taint the new organization.) In practice, however, the Peoples' Council attracted mostly radicals unaffiliated with powerful organizations which had links to the government and mainstream society. Indeed, proposed affiliation with the Peoples' Council was one of the issues which destroyed the AUAM, despite Eastman's attempt at compromise. Eastman was one of the moving forces behind the Council which, as Roland Marchand has stated, "drew its major inspiration from the Russian Revolution and its major model from the Petrograd Soviet," and used the word "Council" as a direct translation of the Russian word "Soviet." Important leaders of the Peoples' Council in effect denied the legitimacy of the United States government, and implied that Peoples' Councils, representing an alliance of the progressive workers, farmers, and social activists of America, would supersede the old, discredited capitalist regime. The Peoples' Council demanded a total reconstruction and democratization of all aspects of American life and supported the peace terms promulgated by the revolutionary Russian government. The Peoples Council, however, was destroyed by terrorism and violence before it could fully organize; in early September 1917 the Council was denied permission to meet in Minneapolis, North Dakota, and Wisconsin before it formed "a permanent organization during a hurried session in Chicago before troops arrived to break up the meeting."[16]
As the AUAM disintegrated and the Peoples' Council was repressed, Eastman threw herself into the New York City mayoralty campaign of SP leader Morris Hillquit, main author of the SP's stridently anti-war St. Louis Manifesto. Such electioneering (itself possible mainly in selected, radical urban enclaves where the SP still survived) was one of the few avenues for legal anti-war protest by late 1917. The WPP split and disintegrated but its radical New York branch, its publication Four Lights suppressed, struggled on. (In 1919 it became part of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.) By the end of 1917, however, Eastman was reduced to protesting the WPPNY's essential loyalty and begging for official tolerance. Although the WPPNY had opposed war and conscription, she said, once they "became the law of this land, our agitation against them ceased. Common sense as well as loyalty and the habit of obedience to law counseled this course. We have never in the slightest degree urged or suggested resistance to the selective service law nor followed any other policy of obstruction." Instead, the WPPNY had applauded the peace terms promulgated by revolutionary Russia--"no forcible annexations, no punitive indemnities, free development for all nations"--and urged that the U.S. endorse these goals. The WPPNY demanded "Free Markets [which for Eastman implied the abolition of capitalism and colonialism] and Free Seas, Universal Disarmament, and a League of Nations.... And since we are wise enough to know that these ends cannot be achieved at a gathering of military personages and appointed diplomats, we are demanding direct democratic representation of the peoples of all countries at the peace conference."[17] As late as March 1918 she optimistically predicted that "by next fall our support will be something to be reckoned with. There are thousands of radical women in this state, whose energies, whose passion for humanity, have been released by the suffrage victory of last November."[18]
During the war Eastman had somewhat muted her feminism (although she helped ensure that the WPPNY included women suffrage in its platform) and had not directly and publicly expressed Socialist sentiments. The WPPNY, she said, would electorally support whichever candidates backed its international program. (SP candidates were most likely to support the WPPNY's agenda.) Indeed, as a feminist "who believes in breaking down sex barriers so that women and men can work and play and build the world together," Eastman had felt compelled to justify the separate existence of a woman's peace organization.[19] But in 1918, Eastman emerged as the most important female advocate of socialism and feminism in the United States.
Because Max Eastman's widow has sequestered Eastman's letters and private papers, we cannot be sure of the reasons for her new stance. Her published writings provide some clues, but all of her articles were deeply influenced by the forum in which they appeared. Before the war, she argued for labor reform in respectable, mainstream journals; during the war she fought for peace in various organizations, all of which were coalitions representing divergent views on important social issues. Although a militant pacifist, Crystal was also a coalition-builder and a conciliator who always sought the widest possible support for her organizations, especially among respectable liberals who wielded some clout in the corridors of power. This may have tempered public expression of her views on socialism.
However, the war radicalized many persons who were not clubbed into submission, and Eastman may well have been one of the liberals driven leftward by events. The entry of the United States into the war very shortly after the people had re-elected Wilson on a platform of peace, the ferocious campaign of terrorism and violence which Wilson unleashed upon dissenters of all varieties, and the flagrant profiteering by the very capitalists who had supported Preparedness radicalized those whom terror did not intimidate. Wilson's private, undeclared war against Bolshevik Russia and the disgraceful shenanigans at Versailles only deepened the disillusionment and radicalism of many former liberals, while the suffrage victory in New York in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, and the post-war labor upsurge all promoted optimism about the possibilities of radical transformation.
Eastman had more personal reasons for what was, in all probability, partly a deepening radicalism and partly a new-found opportunity for free expression. Her famous brother Max had seen his publication The Masses suppressed, and he and his co-editors were indicted for opposing the war. Yet even before standing trial Max had launched The Liberator, one of the best and most influential left publications of its era. Eastman was part owner and co-editor. The Liberator carried on the tradition of The Masses in almost every regard but one: it did not oppose the war. This was in part mere caution and common sense: Max and his fellow Masses editors did not relish serving twenty years in jail and having their new publication suppressed. (Max openly stated that The Liberator did not say everything its contributors would have said in a free society.) The Liberator also avoided anti-war agitation out of political calculation: Max believed that the United States was in the war for its duration, and that progressives could possibly influence only the eventual peace, not the fact of U.S. participation. Further, the Bolshevik Revolution had enormously heartened radicals, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which Lenin, in The Liberator, dubbed "a brigand's peace")[20] made Germany's threat to the Soviet Union glaringly apparent. Defeat of Germany, many radicals believed, would not only preserve the threatened Soviet Union, but unleash a tide of socialist revolution in Germany and throughout Europe.
In early 1918, therefore, a newly radicalized Crystal Eastman emerged, for the first and last time in her life, into a position where she could express her actual views on every subject (except pacifism) without fear of undermining her support, alienating key supporters, or fragmenting an important organization.
Eastman's radical feminism was, in a sense, liberated by the 1917 suffrage victory in New York, and even more by the ratification of the 19th amendment. Eastman believed that the winning of suffrage was the beginning of true feminism because "In fighting for the right to vote most women have tried to be either non-committal or thoroughly respectable on every other subject. Now they can say what they are really after; and what they are really after, in common with all the rest of the struggling world, is freedom."[21] Freedom, like feminism, was an expansive concept with many meanings. Women's freedom entailed, first of all, "economic freedom," defined as equal opportunity and pay for every kind of work, and
definite economic rewards for one's work when it happens to be "home-making".... Until women learn to want economic independence, i.e., the ability to earn their own living independently of husbands, fathers, brothers, or lovers,--and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me that feminism has no roots. Its manifestations are often delightful and stimulating but they are sporadic, they effect no lasting change in the attitudes of men to women, or women to themselves.[22]
Much as Walter Lenfersiek in his controversial Progressive Woman article, therefore, Eastman proposed the endowment of motherhood, saying that "If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless." Most women wanted children, and to raise their children themselves, or at least so closely superintend their raising "as to make any other full-time occupation impossible for at least ten or fifteen years." This rendered her economic independence for those years difficult or impossible unless the American people acknowledged "that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle is accepted."[23]
Birth control constituted the second, and related, "elementary essential in all aspects of feminism." Whether feminists followed Alice Paul, Ellen Key, or Olive Schreiner,
we must all be followers of Margaret Sanger. Feminists are not nuns.... We want to love and to be loved, and most of us want children, one or two at least. But we want our love to be joyous and free--not clouded with ignorance and fear. And we want our children to be deliberately, eagerly called into being, when we are at our best, not crowded upon us in times of poverty and weakness. We want this precious sex knowledge not just for ourselves, the conscious feminists; we want it for all the millions of unconscious feminists that swarm the earth,--we want it for all women.[24]
Eastman said that "Life is a big battle for the complete feminist even when she can regulate the size or her family." Women who combined a professional career with motherhood must have "a more determined ambition than men of equal gifts, in order to make up for the time and energy and thought and devotion that child-bearing and rearing, even in the most 'advanced' families, seems inexorably to demand of the mother. But if we add to this handicap complete uncertainty as to when children may come, how often they come or how many there shall be, the thing becomes impossible. I would almost say that the whole structure of the feminist's dream of society rests upon the rapid extension of scientific knowledge about birth control." Birth control "ensures some freedom of occupational choice; those who do not wish to be mothers will not have an undesired occupation thrust upon them by accident, and those who do wish to be mothers may choose in a general way how many years of their lives they will devote to the occupation of child-raising."[25]
Eastman also demanded a cultural revolution in the home,
a revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls. It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies in life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle. The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters... a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him better than the reputation for having a violent temper. In was his mother's fault in the beginning, but even as a boy he was quick to see how a general reputation for being "no good around the house" would serve him throughout life, and half-consciously he began to cultivate that helplessness until to-day it is the despair of feminist wives.[26]
Eastman asserted that many men admired professional women, and, at a time when achieving a middle-class lifestyle was increasingly difficult, valued the income they brought to the household. "But these breadwinning wives have not yet developed home-making husbands. When the two come home from the factory the man sits down while his wife gets supper, and he does so with exactly the same sense of fore-ordained right as if he were 'supporting' her." Although two women could make a home together as "a pleasant partnership, more fun than work," the wife "simply adds running the home to her regular outside job. Unless she is very strong, it is too much for her, she gets tired and bitter over it, and finally perhaps gives up her outside work and condemns herself to the tiresome half-job of housekeeping for two." Eastman recognized that "laws or revolutionary decrees" could not address this problem; perhaps women "must cultivate or simulate a little of that highly prized helplessness ourselves. But fundamentally it is a problem of education, of early training--we must bring up feminist sons."[27]
Obliquely responding to Emma Goldman's "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," Eastman agreed that an inner, spiritual freedom was necessary, but argued that legislation could not create such liberty. Law could, however, generate its material preconditions. "I can agree that women will never be great until they achieve a certain emotional freedom, a strong healthy egoism, and some un-personal sources of joy--that in this inner sense we cannot make woman free by changing her economic status. What we can do, however, is to create conditions of outward freedom in which a free woman's soul can be born and grow. It is these outward conditions with which an organized feminist movement must concern itself."[28] Towards this end, Eastman endorsed affirmative action. When the Labor Party (1920) placed one man and one woman from each state on its National Executive Committee, she enthused that such an act had "never been heard of in the history of the world, not in trades-unions, not in co-operatives, not in Socialist parties, not in Utopias." This action "means more for feminism than a million resolutions. For after all these centuries of retirement women need more than an 'equal opportunity' to show what's in them. They need a generous shove into positions of responsibility."[29]
Eastman did more than define and advocate feminism; she worked for it. Under the auspices of the WPPNY she convoked the First Feminist Congress in the United States in March 1919. Her statement, printed in The Liberator, demanded full political rights, economic equality on the job and in the unions, the education of girls for economic independence, maternal endowment or a wife's "legal recognition to a share of her husband's earnings in recognition of her service as houseworker and nurse," and birth control, without which "marriage can become virtual slavery for women."[30] She expressed disappointment that Alice Paul and the NWP, after their suffrage victory, vaguely agitated for the removal of "all the remaining forms of the subjection of women" (a demand that was soon watered down even further in the Equal Rights Amendment), rather than specifying the evils which must be eliminated. Eastman might well have written, and certainly endorsed, a minority resolution that called for the rewriting of laws of marriage, "of divorce, of inheritance, of the guardianship of children, and the laws for the regulation of sexual morality and disease"; the legitimization of all children; legalized of birth control; and motherhood endowments. She deplored the disposing of this minority resolution by "a very efficient stream roller" and said that "If some such program could have been exhaustively discussed at that convention, we might be congratulating ourselves that the feminist movement had begun in America. As it is all we can say is that the suffrage movement is ended."[31]
Sharing the exuberance of the time, Eastman clearly underestimated the prospects for a feminist transformation of society. For example, she thought legalized birth control imminent. Her experience with workman's compensation misled her; she had joined that movement just before it widely triumphed (with the help of well-connected people). After the war, however, feminists were Red-baited and warred among themselves. Instead of helping spearhead a revolutionary feminist program, Eastman was reduced to taking sides in the bitter and sterile internecine struggle, which largely immobilized women's progress for a generation, over the relative merits of the ERA and special protective legislation for women. Responding to the lack of viable political options, Eastman in effect privatized the struggle for an egalitarian home in her celebrated "Marriage Under Two Roofs" (1923)--an essay written in autobiographical format, and which was, according to Blanche Wiesen Cook, partly based on her life in England.[32]
Eastman recommended that couples dissatisfied with their marriages consider living in two separate residences. The wife and the children would reside in a small flat near "playgrounds and green spaces"; the husband would live in a rooming house near his office, and visit his family at their mutual pleasure. This would benefit the husband, the wife, the children, and the family as a whole. "Give [your husband] a place of his own, completely outside your jurisdiction," Eastman urged wives, "where he normally sleeps, to which he goes quite simply and naturally whenever he wants to, without explanations and without fear of reproach." She admitted that she had micro-managed her own husband, which made him depressed and irritable because he had "no escape from me, no place where I did not come, no retreat from my influence. Now he has one." In a statement that belied socialist-feminist assertions that Socialism would lower divorce rates, Eastman asserted that "People with simple natures probably do not suffer from this pressure of one's personality on the other in marriage. But for the usual modern type, the complex, sensitive, highly organized city dweller, man or woman, marriage can become such a constant invasion of his very self that it amounts sometimes to torture."[33]
The wife would also benefit from separate residences: she could maintain friendships and maintain interests which bored her husband, or simply enjoy solitude. The husband's absence was a refreshment, a chance to be yourself for a while in a rich, free sense which nothing but a separate roof can give you." Eastman said that
Women, more than men, succumb to marriage. They sink so easily into that fatal habit of depending on one person to rescue them from themselves. And this is the death of love.
The two-roof plan encourages a wife to cultivate initiative in rescuing herself, to develop social courage, to look upon her life as an independent adventure and get interested in it. And every Victorian tradition to the contrary, it is thus only that she can retain her charm down the years.[34]
Eastman maintained that this arrangement had recaptured the warmth and intimacy of her sweetheart days. "Every morning, like lovers, we telephone to exchange the day's greetings and make plans for the evening." Two or three times a week she and her husband dined together at her flat, and he stayed over; if they dined at a friend's or attended the theatre, they met there, knowing that they may or may not sleep together that night. "And because neither course is inexorably forced upon us, either one is a bit of a lark. It is wonderful sometimes to be alone in the night and just know that someone loves you. In other moods you must have that lover in your arms. Marriage under two roofs makes room for moods."[35]
Eastman assured her readers that each partner having their own assured space obviated the violent fights and the petty, vicious bickering that deformed most marriages. While living conventionally, "marriage was destroying us.... Now that we live under two roofs there are no storms, no quarrels, no tears. Our differences of opinion are not passionate and unbearable. They have an almost rational quality. Criticisms and suggestions are made with the gentleness and reserve that is common between friends. And they are received with the open-minded forbearance of one who can be sure of the critic's early departure."[36]
Such peace, Eastman declared, was definitely better for the children, as her humorous (yet acutely accurate) description of the horrors of the family breakfast attested. In the morning everyone was at their worst. The children wanted to sleep, dawdle, and fool, yet mother was forced
to begin being patient and kind at a time in the day when it is against nature to be patient and kind; father, already heavy with his day's work, forced to spend his last precious half-hour in this crude confusion when his whole being cries out for solitude.
This at least can be said for the two-roof scheme: it automatically relieves father of the family breakfast, and the family breakfast of father! And no hard feelings anywhere. In our family father is now a treat.
The "bold romantic step" of separate abodes, therefore, would improve both marriage and family as separate beds and separate rooms could not.[37]
Eastman also publicly endorsed revolutionary Socialism during her editorship of The Liberator. Shortly before the 1918 elections she noted that, of the fifteen members of the SP's Executive Committee, five were in jail and three under indictment, and sardonically noted that "perhaps a Socialist Committeeman can serve his party even better from an American jail." She was not disheartened by the SP's 1918 performance, averring that Socialism represented "a deep-rooted faith and a thoroughly understood intellectual conception which must grow because it satisfies the vital desires of real human beings."[38]
Eastman also praised the "political flexibility" of the Non-Partisan League (NPL) a distinctly non-Socialist force in the mid-West which selected its candidate, ran him in the primary of the party which dominated the particular locale, and then, "counting on the strength of the League plus the inertia of those who will vote the party ticket anyhow," elected him. If their candidate failed in the primary, the NPL might run him as an independent, or endorse the candidate of a third party.[39] Although Eastman admitted that "an absolute idealist might regret this unholy compromise with the corrupt two-party system," she said that by this strategy
the farmers have avoided the long, slow, expensive process of building up a new political party with the inevitable combination of the old parties against it as soon as it begins to look dangerous. This is a shrewd practical method characteristic of the American farmer at his best, and it has already proved a short cut to political power... To "see through" political democracy and yet be keen enough to make immediate and effective use of its machinery for gaining economic ends, requires a high degree of economic-group intelligence.
The NPL, she said, was "consciously or unconsciously, one of the vital forces in the growing social revolt," as evinced by its combination with labor candidates and the ruling-class terrorism with which it was greeted.[40]
Believing that revolutionaries should utilize every possible weapon, Eastman never repudiated electoral politics entirely; yet she increasingly emphasized industrial action. She noted that European Socialists were very closely allied with Labor, and that even in the United States workers were combining political and economic action. She claimed that the majority of AFL members, pace its leadership, were radicals, as evinced by the Mooney Congress of early 1919 and its vote for a general strike to free the framed and imprisoned labor martyr. "Labor in America has held a great Congress without so much as a by-your-leave from Samuel Gompers," she said. "It has voted a general strike in complete defiance of the American Federation of Labor and all the sacred labor-contracts which it has sworn to uphold. That is a blow at craft unionism stronger than any other that could be struck.... A successful general strike will be the beginning of the breakup of craft unionism."[41]
Speaking of the debate over the political use of the general strike at the British Labor Party convention of 1919, Eastman (in comments directly relevant to a similar discussion in the U.S.) disagreed with opponents who called such a tactic undemocratic and unconstitutional.
Every opponent of industrial action called attention to labor's defeat at the polls as a warning and thus gave his case away. For if labor in Great Britain, though strong industrially, is weak at the polls, there must be something the matter with the polls as a register of labor's will. Labor is weak politically because all the institutions which influence and control its political mind--schools, churches, movies, newspapers--are capitalist institutions; and labor is strong industrially because it can't be so easily fooled about questions immediately relating to the job, and because its industrial mind is influenced more and more by its own press and institutions. Moreover, the only kind of education labor needs just now is the realization that political questions are fundamentally industrial.[42]
Eastman was further radicalized by her vivid encounter with actual revolution in Bela Kun's Revolutionary Communist Hungary, which she described in a masterful combination of investigative reporting and philosophical rumination in The Liberator. Witnessing a genuine revolution undermined her beliefs in pacifism, bourgeois civil liberties, and electoral socialism. She exclaimed that "I shall never go into a big, comfortable house again, whether it is a house of a Socialist professor or a railroad president, without quietly figuring up the number of rooms and the number of people, to determine whether the family will be allowed to continue in possession of the whole house when communism comes. So real was my experience in Hungary." She quoted, with seeming acquiescence, Kula's assertion that the suppression of bourgeois publications prevented counter-revolutionary violence, and that the workers' state would inaugurate the world's first genuine freedom of expression, hitherto confined to the property-owning elite.[43]
Contemplating the multitudes of injured and sick children for which there were no facilities, Eastman "thought for the thousandth time how bitterly tragic it is that these great experiments in government must commence at a time when material conditions are so desperate." But, as an important Hungarian official told her, "It is not an accident that revolution and starvation come hand in hand." She described plans for the forcible requisition of food from the peasants and warned her readers that
There is no use having any illusions about the revolution. It was born in starvation, and its first business is war. There is no freedom, no plenty, no joy, except the joys of struggle and faith. Cherished dreams of scientists, educators, artists, engineers, who were waiting for a free society, must be set aside, while the whole proletariat organizes in desperate haste to check the invading hosts of the enemy. And war means recruiting propaganda, conscription, military discipline, the death penalty, the whole damnable business of organized dying and killing.[44]
Crystal's brother Max had proclaimed that when the working-class war for social liberation arrived people would recognize it because the incipient regime would not require conscription. "I thought he spoke a profound truth. I do not think so now.... Now I know there can be no such thing as a democratic army. People don't want to die, and except for a few glorious fanatics they are not going to vote themselves into the front line trenches." Conscription laws, she said, "are inescapable. Nobody takes any chances with the dictatorship." A high Hungarian official assured her that deserters were shot because if they were not, the Czechs would extinguish the Hungarian revolution. Eastman commented that "I hope there is some pacifist revolutionary with an answer to that. I have none."[45]
Radicalized by her contact with actual revolution, Eastman heaped scorn upon the SP's 1920 Convention, which emphasized the upholding of traditional American values and legal norms. She thundered that "the state under capitalism" was exclusively "an agent of the exploiting class"; conservative socialists "have vainly expected the capitalist state to maintain democratic institutions against its own interest, and to stand quietly by while socialists, exercising their constitutional rights, vote to destroy it." She declared that "the experiences of the last four years, which after all have been but the logical development of democracy under capitalism,--have recalled us from those childlike dreams to the stern realities of the class struggle."[46]
Although Socialists must stand with liberals in demanding the honoring of Constitutional guarantees, Eastman said, they must also recognize that
the only way to "restore" liberty is to destroy the capitalist system. And while we shall continue to exercise our political rights, whenever and wherever a capitalist government allows us, we know that the great hope of realizing socialism lies in the leadership of the masses by the workers organized in the industrial field, and that the chief function of a political party of socialism is to define, interpret and explain the industrial struggle, and educate the workers to play their historic part.[47]
She complained that most Socialists had forgotten that profiteering, exploitation, and the suppression of dissent were hallmarks of capitalism, and not merely war-time phenomena. What was the use, she asked, in telling an exploited immigrant "that he was free up to April 3rd, 1917, and now we are going to restore that freedom?" Socialists must recognize that "the First Amendment is as good to-day as it ever was. And it was never any good in a crisis."[48] In a partial repudiation of her own war-time activity as a mainstay of the Civil Liberties Bureau, Eastman said that
the war, which brought socialists and liberals together in the fight to maintain civil liberty, was as bad for the socialists as it was good for the liberals. The fight for free speech demanded constant reference to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. To demand that these documents be lived up to, was the most revolutionary thing a socialist leader could do, except go to jail. And from demanding that they be lived up to, some of these leaders have apparently gotten into the habit of believing they will be lived up to, and that when they are, that will be the Social Revolution.[49]
Eastman excoriated the old-guard conservative leadership. Speaking of conservative Socialist Congressman Victor Berger, who had been indicted for his anti-war views, she said that "Berger would rather go on fighting for his life and liberty and his right to sit in Congress in this capitalist democracy, than take a chance under a rough-and-tumble working-class government, and he says so. Ex-Assemblyman Waldman [one of the five New York State SP assemblymen expelled from the legislature because of their SP affiliations].... knew that he would feel more at home sitting on the steps of the Capital at Albany with the door shut in his face, then he would as a re-callable delegate to an industrial Soviet under communism, and he said so." She denounced the SP platform, and the old guard's throttling of dissent, in equally harsh terms. Debs, she sardonically remarked, was nominated for President only because he was "safe in prison, where he will lend them the glory of his name without the embarrassment of his clear-thinking revolutionary leadership."[50]
As co-editor of The Liberator, Eastman was perhaps the most prominent American woman publicly identified as a revolutionary socialist and a staunch feminist. Yet she was not in any sense a socialist-feminist or a feminist-socialist. Unlike the writers for The Socialist Woman, Eastman perceived no symbiotic connection between her Socialism and her feminism, nor any philosophical, political, or organizational relationships between what were for her (as for her brother Max) two separate and equally necessary causes. Indeed, it seems she never contemplated the seeking of organic connections between the two movements. She emphatically rejected any suggestion that Socialism entailed women's rights, and denied that women had any reform agenda distinct from that of men (except for Feminism itself). She ignored huge segments of The Socialist Woman's critique of capitalist patriarchy and patriarchal capitalism as well as much of its practical program. Her solutions for the evils of the patriarchal household were decidedly private and individualistic.
Eastman explicitly repudiated the leftist canard that Communism would inevitably inaugurate women's equality:
Many feminists are socialists, many are communists, not a few are active leaders in these movements. But the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, sees the women's battle as distinct in its objects and different in its methods from the workers' battle for industrial freedom.... As a feminist she also knows that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.
Woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, can be fought for and conceivably won before the gates open into industrial democracy. On the other hand, woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, is not inherent in the communist ideal.[51]
Eastman cited the familiar example of the leftist stalwart who was blind to feminism and who, confining his wife in a squalid tenement while he rejoiced in the world's challenges, ignored her plight. "If we should graduate into communism tomorrow this man's attitude to his wife would not be changed," Eastman charged. For once echoing The Socialist Woman, Eastman warned that "The proletarian dictatorship may or may not free women. We must begin now to enlighten the future dictators."[52] For reasons similar to the Socialist women, but with no acknowledgement of their debates, insights, and activism, she strongly supported separate women's organizations within Socialist and Labor organizations. Unlike The Socialist Woman, however, she demanded that such groups remain autonomous. Describing the members of one such women's organization in England, Eastman averred that despite their professed and actual Socialist orthodoxy, "they spoke not as socialist women, not as party women, but as women." (This, however, was exactly why Socialist men feared the autonomy of Socialist women's groups.)[53]
Eastman nonchalantly admitted that "the vast majority of women as well as men are without property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a system of society which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few." Surprisingly for one with her direct experience of working-class misery, she did not grasp the implications of this for her feminist program. Indeed, she defined "economic freedom" for women in a thoroughly capitalist sense, as independence not from capitalist exploiters but from their husbands. Female economic freedom, she said, was "not the ideal economic freedom dreamed of by revolutionary socialism, but such economic freedom as it is possible for a human being to achieve under the existing system of competitive production and distribution."[54] This entailed mere equality with men on the job and pay for the work associated with motherhood and home-making. Eastman's article on the Hungarian revolution ignored Communism's impact upon women, and never mentioned the intentions of the revolutionary government with regards to women's issues.
Eastman did criticize the traditional family in much the same way as the socialist-feminists. Women who combined a career with motherhood must be "supermen" [sic!] even if they enjoyed the ever-so-rare feminist husband. Yet her solutions were strictly private: in theory, a husband who did his share of the housework, and in practice, the hiring of maids. She largely ignored the commonplace proposals of various Socialist-feminists, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for socialized housework and childcare. She sometimes accepted the patriarchal assumption that the raising of children was biologically a woman's task.[55] (The entire idea of a maternal, rather than parental, endowment, implied this.) Her "Marriage Under Two Roofs," explicitly aimed at struggling professional families, assumed a stay-at-home mother, and ignored the needs and capacities of working-class families, who could not afford separate beds, much less separate rooms or dwellings.
Eastman's advocacy of birth control ignored the class dimensions of the struggle, so well publicized by Margaret Sanger and the IWW. She did note that rich women with easy access to birth control information opposed the dissemination of such information among the working class, but never asked the reason for this curious (given the elite hysteria over "race suicide" and disdain for working-class women and children) situation. Her proposal for a maternal endowment lacked the precision and realism of most of her ideas, and in particular ignored the class basis of society. How would a maternal endowment be financed in a society where most working-class families lived in destitution, and where the ruling capitalist families (whose taxes alone could pay for it) would adamantly resist? How would the amount of the allotment be determined? Would super-rich Mrs. Belmont and ultra-poor Mrs. Sacks receive the same amount? Eastman never broached, much less confronted, such vexing difficulties.
Contradicting The Socialist Woman, Eastman also insisted that the feminist program would not further the cause of Socialism. Although she occasionally admitted that women's experience influenced their political priorities, she scornfully rejected any suggestion that peace, children's welfare, and other social causes were distinctly women's issues. Both sexes, she declared, had an equal interest in all aspects of human betterment; feminism entailed the full equality of women, and only such equality.[56]
As Cook says, Eastman "occupied a unique and, as the 1920s wore on, an increasingly isolated political position. She was generally the only socialist at feminist movements, [and] one of the very few feminists at socialist meetings." She was virtually blacklisted in the United States, and could find no work in any of the fields in which she was expert. Paul Kellogg, a good and well-connected friend with whom she had disagreed over the AUAM's Civil Liberties Bureau, wrote a despairing Eastman that she confronted "practical difficulties in making a fresh start which it does no good to minimize.... Your various espousals--such as the Woman's Party--would not help in some of the few quarters where industrial research is still carried on....." Even some staunch feminists criticized her "casual sex life" because she had lived with her future second husband before formally divorced from her first.[57]
Eastman's bifurcation of Socialism and Feminism in large part reflected a new social milieu, in which the radical countercultural organizations and publications of the 1910's which had united socialism, feminism, racial egalitarianism, and cultural radicalism, had been suppressed. After she and Max quit The Liberator in 1922, she had difficulty placing her writings. Indeed, few left publications offered a sympathetic venue for her philosophy. She wrote mostly for two strictly Feminist publications: Alice Paul's and the NWP's Equal Rights in the United States, and the Six Point Group's and Lady Rhondda's Time and Tide in England. Neither Paul nor Rhondda had any sympathy for or understanding of economic radicalism. Rhondda, Eastman said, was "a wealthy woman, owner of vast coal properties, with no Socialist tendencies whatsoever." Paul was a single-minded Feminist who used the war, as every other event, for her purposes: "I imagine she could even go through a proletarian revolution without taking sides and be found waiting on the doorstep of the Extraordinary Commission the next morning to see that the revolution's promises to women were not forgotten!"[58] Eastman's divorce of feminism and socialism, then, may have represented the social realities of her time, and her opportunities for expressing her views, as well as her genuine sentiments. She did attempt to interest radical feminists in the activities and views of their labor counterparts, just as she preached feminism in labor publications. She justified her account of an international conference of Socialist women, published in Equal Rights, on the ground that "every new effort at organized expression on the part of women acting by and for themselves must interest a feminist." For similar reasons, she covered the activities of British and International Socialist women for Time and Tide.[59]
The chasm between Eastman's Socialism and her Feminism was evinced by her inevitable entry into the futile and self-destructive women's internecine battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) versus special protective labor legislation for women in the United States. (This controversy also occurred in many other advanced industrial nations.) Although Eastman attempted to maintain her usual moderation, clarity, practicality, and fairness, the terms of the debate militated against such relative objectivity. Eastman wryly commented that the victorious suffragist, after one good night's rest, sallied forth for new conquests; but "on the very first corner she meets the earnest reformer" whose life's work on behalf of special protective laws for working women was thereby endangered. The ERA (then termed the Lucretia Mott amendment), "was hardly 24 hours old before every member of Congress received a letter protesting in the strongest terms against it, signed by the official representatives of seven other national women's organizations, all of the more solid, more established, more distinctly humanitarian type."[60]
Eastman's stance was, as usual, nuanced and sophisticated. Yet she ultimately sided with her own professional class against her working-class sisters. She objected that special protective laws classified women with children and idiots. "Feminism," she said, "has entered upon a new phase; no longer content with asking for their rights, women have begun to question their privileges." Eastman correctly asserted that protective laws evicted women from many well-paying skilled jobs and that many male unions supported such laws for precisely that reason. "This sudden concern for the health of women when they set out to earn their living in competition with men seems a little suspicious to the feminist," she said. The male working-class union members who clamored for special protective legislation for women exploited their own wives at home with scant regard for their health or welfare.[61] Eastman earnestly searched for, and found, a few groups of working-class women who had lost their jobs because of such legislation. However, she sometimes ignored the reality that such laws adversely most affected relatively privileged female workers, while often helping the vast majority who drudged away at dangerous and difficult jobs.
Yet Eastman admitted that some protective laws for women were indeed necessary and beneficial both because new mothers and their children required protection and because female workers were organized only with difficulty. She acknowledged that capitalist exploiters opposed such laws for their own reasons. Noting the lack of enthusiasm of many feminists for birth control and maternal allowances, she conceded that such measures "cannot perhaps be stated literally in terms of equality because the functions of male and female parents are so different." (This, however, was itself a cause and reflection of gender inequality both within the home and within the larger society.) Nevertheless, she insisted that "A good deal can be said for both these reforms from a Feminist standpoint. They seem to me to bear with considerable directness on securing equality of status for the married woman. But your pure Feminist is apt to be a bit of a doctrinaire. She likes to advocate something that can be stated literally in terms of equality."[62]
Eastman attempted to reconcile the welfare of working women with women's equality by demanding "not that protective legislation should be abolished, but that it should be made to apply to men and women alike."[63] Yet this contradicted her usual practical good sense, for it ignored Muller vs. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court decision which wrote traditional gender stereotypes and roles into the Constitution by validating, for women, protective legislation which it banned for men.[64] This decision crippled the American left by vitiating labor unity, feminist unity, and labor-feminist unity, and demanding that every individual and organization choose between protecting women or protecting no one at all. Given the industrial mass murder imposed on much of the working class, the "slaughter-pens" in which many male and female workers worked and lived, the resulting divisions were acrimonious and intractable.
Eastman herself increasingly differentiated the strict feminists, who insisted upon full equality, from the humanitarians, who downplayed such equality in favor of general human betterment. Her affiliations with the NWP and the Six Point Group, and the acute scarcity of feminists within the Socialist and Labor movements, drove her inexorably towards a more and more intransigent feminist position. She increasingly belittled the humanitarians as tepid reformers intent on helping others rather than placing women in the position to protect themselves. Sounding for all the world like a sectarian revolutionary purist, she said, in praise of Alice Paul, that "it is almost never a mistake to create a situation which divides the polite and timid advocates of justice from those who are really determined to get it."[65]
When the International Suffragist Alliance, at its 1926 convention in Paris, rejected the NWP's application for affiliation because the NWP stridently opposed protective legislation, Eastman, again using sectarian phraseology startlingly resembling that of the Third International, rejoiced that the NWP's defeat would "mean infinitely more to the progress of feminism than our acceptance in the International could ever have meant.... The feminists of the world must find each other and unite on a policy of action. It is thus that a new international will be born."[66] Amidst the debate, France fired all women from their night telephone operator jobs, in accordance with the dictates of the League of Nation's International Labor Organization. The women were forced into lower-paid day jobs, and when they protested, male unionists violently disrupted their meetings. Eastman asserted that
This news, straight from the industrial field gave point and purpose to all our talk. It made sharp and clear the need for a Feminist party of action in the international field. Those Paris telephone girls are fighting an international tyranny. There is no international body of women to speak for them, much less to fight for them..... The expedition of the Woman's Party to Paris has demonstrated that there is at present no Feminist international with a purpose and plan of action.... The future is ours![67]
However inhumane Eastman's stance (which hurt many more women than it helped) may have seemed to Florence Kelley and other staunchly feminist social reformers, it reflected rather than causing Eastman's dilemma. Any socialist-feminist or feminist-socialist position faced shipwreck upon the shoals of the dilemma of special protective legislation for women, regardless of the good will and good sense of any individual participant in the debate. The very existence of the problem, rather than the proposed and contradictory solutions, devastated the left. As Eastman noted, coalitions, rather than forming or strengthening after the suffrage victory, disintegrated over this intractable issue. In the pre-war years Conger-Kaneko's intrepid group of socialist-feminists and feminist-socialists had valiantly attempted to synthesize their two favorite causes, and had run aground upon the shoals of class divisions within the feminist movement and gender divisions within the working class. By Eastman's heyday, The Socialist Woman's project seemed so utopian and distant as to be scarcely worthy of consideration. There is no evidence that Eastman was even aware of Conger-Kaneko, her publications, or the stellar constellation of intellectuals whose debates these publications had fostered.
As both the Socialist and feminist movements disintegrated, Eastman's personal and professional lives in the 1920s mirrored the estrangement and collapse of both movements. Her death in 1928 at the age of 46, while not directly caused by her political travails, symbolized the end of an era, the shattering of the bright hopes which both Socialists and Feminists had entertained during the previous decade.
Eastman could not achieve the feminist personal life for which she hoped, any more than she could single-handedly synthesize Socialism and Feminism in an age when both were divided and demoralized. With great misgivings, and over the opposition of some of her family, she had married insurance salesman Wallace Benedict in 1911. After becoming engaged, she fell sick and recuperated at her father's house (her mother had recently died). When Max, also contemplating marriage with trepidation, hypothesized that her dread of matrimony had sickened her, she responded that "I've been feeling very scared about getting married all through this sickness. Getting back to New York and living with you was the hope I fed my drooping spirits on--not Milwaukee and the married state."[68] Although her husband fully supported her suffrage work, she separated from him after a few years, and moved back to New York.
Eastman's second marriage, to The Freeman editor Walter Fuller, lasted until his death and brought two children. Yet fragmentary evidence indicates that it, too, was far from a happy partnership. The couple suffered from severe financial difficulties after Eastman, ill after giving premature birth to her second child, resigned from her relatively well-paying job managing The Liberator. Walter, whose salary was only two-thirds of what hers had been, resigned from The Freeman and moved to England in search of better-paying work. Yet he may have moved partly to get away from Eastman. He apparently departed (three months after the birth of his second child) without so much as informing her, for she wrote him
Don't worry about harsh words. Have I said any? If I have they certainly can be forgotten now. I knew you had to run away. That you couldn't even send me a line to say so and say you were sorry will forever be incomprehensible to me. But then four-fifths of you is a closed book to me and four-fifths of me is a closed book to you,--and yet we love each other a great deal. Don't we?[69]
After Walter left she wrote him that she was "so lonely it makes a sick feeling in my solar plexus.... I hope you will come back." She found him a congenial job at The Survey Graphic, but he rejected it and stayed in England.[70] Evidence from "Marriage Under Two Roofs" also supports the supposition that the couple did not live harmoniously together: Eastman admitted that she relentlessly badgered her husband, and commented that he was a silent, uncommunicative type whom she could not comprehend. From 1922 until Walter's death in 1927, he lived in England; she resided for long periods in the United States, and at times near him (although possibly in a separate dwelling) in England.
Eastman also suffered from her virtual blacklisting in the United States and her inability to find congenial work in England. Cook says that Eastman was "morose and melancholic" when she lacked full-time (or over full-time) occupations. "Eastman hated to rest, she hated inactivity and she hated to be without a steady job. Her inability to find work, the fact that she was actually barred from the kind of work she sought, was the hardest for her to comprehend." Her income derived largely from rents on her two houses, in Greenwich Village and Croton-on-the-Hudson.[71] Finally, in 1927, she decided to return to the United States permanently, writing her friend Paul Kellogg that she was "simply crazy to work. England holds nothing for me.... I have tried for two years to get a job--research, organizing, editorial, speaking, anything...." She begged him to "just say you think I can get work and begin to build my life again"; he apparently offered his assistance.[72]
She secured a temporary job organizing a celebration for The Nation magazine;[73] Walter would follow when she found more permanent work. However, she never saw him again, for he soon died of a stroke. Meanwhile, Eastman's own health disintegrated. Blaming herself for her illness and cursing her "good for nothing body," she struggled on, hoping that she could support her children and provide a happy home for them. She enthused that "there IS SO MUCH for me to do." Yet she succumbed to an illness which, as Cook says, "was never properly diagnosed or treated," and died within ten months of her husband.[74] Her tragic, depressing death, after a long struggle with a painful illness, mirrors that of the socialist-feminist enterprise. And who is to say that her blacklisting from meaningful, sustaining work, and the lack of a political movement in which she could feel genuinely at home and fully express the many sides of her multifaceted personality, did not contribute to her obsessive neglect of her own health? It obviously underlay her frequent--and, for such an effervescent person, so unnatural--depression.
Whatever the cause of Eastman's death, it did symbolize the end of an era, just as Henry Crosby's suicide ended, for Malcolm Cowley, the 1920s.[75] Eastman's writings and her activist legacy, like those of her sisters at The Socialist Woman, were almost totally lost to history for many decades. They have been only partly recovered even today.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] CE, "Mother-Worship," The Nation, March 16, 1927, in Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) 41-46. Cook has reprinted most of Eastman's writings. The texts seem accurate, but at times Cook mis-identifies the date and/or time of publication. As Cook's anthology is much more readily accessible than the original sources, I will refer to her anthology except when quoting sources not included therein. When I have noticed an erroneous date or place of publication, I have given both the actual date and Cook's. Cook also edited Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution (Garland, New York, 1976). This anthology contains almost every Crystal Eastman article reprinted in the Oxford volume, plus a few other minor pieces. I have referred to this as Cook II. "Mother Worship" is also reprinted in Cook II, with an additional paragraph added by The Nation, to which CE strenuously objected. Cook noted this paragraph but omitted it from the Oxford anthology.
[2] CE, "Mother-Worship," The Nation, March 16, 1927, in Cook, 41-46.
[3] CE, Work Accidents and the Law (New York, Charities Publication Committee, Russell Sage Foundation, 1910). "The Temper of the Workers Under Trial" is on pp. 221-237, reprinted in Cook II, 345-363. Biographical information is in Cook, 3-7.
[4] CE, "Work Accidents and Employers' Liability," The Survey, September 1910, quote is in Cook, 271; CE, "The Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, July--December 1911, quote is in Cook, 288-289. CE added that workman's compensation would mean that "an employer can reduce his accident costs, not by hiring a more unscrupulous attorney and a more hard-hearted claims agent, but only by reducing his accidents."
[5] CE, "Work Accidents and Employers' Liability," The Survey, September 1910, quote is in Cook, 278-280.
[6] CE, "The Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, July--December 1911, quote is in Cook, 281-282.
[7] CE, "The Three Essentials for Accident Prevention," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, July--December 1911, in Cook, 280-290, quote is in Cook, 285-286.
[8] CE, "Report on the Wisconsin Suffrage Campaign," Proceedings of the 44th Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Philadelphia, November 21-26, 1912, in Cook, 66-70. CE was the manager of the campaign.
[9] Cook, 10-24, Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, (Princeton, 1973), pp. 184, 263, 319, 196, 216-221, 240-243, 249-258; 303-305.
[10] Marchand, 255; CE, "War and Peace," The Survey, December 30, 1916, in Cook, 252-254; Cook, 10-24, Marchand, 184, 263, 319, 196, 216-221, 240-243, 249-258; 303-305.
[11] CE, "To Make War Unthinkable," letter in The New Republic, July 24, 1915, in Cook, 235-237; CE, "Interview with Dr. Jacobs," The Survey, October 9, 1915 in Cook, 237-241; CE, "A Platform of Real Preparedness," The Survey, November 13, 1915, in Cook, 241-247.
[12] CE, "Suggestions for 1916-1917," AUAM Pamphlet, October 1916, in Cook, 247-252; Marchand, 243, Coo, 15-16. Cook and Marchand disagree on some points. Cook claims the Mexican and American mediators met in El Paso, Marchand says they were unable to meet in El Paso, and met in New York instead. More importantly, Cook gives the peoples' commission full credit for averting war, while Marchand merely states that the AUAM and its allies claimed such credit.
[13] CE, letter to Balch, June 14, 1917, in Cook, 254-260; Cook, 15-18; Marchand, however, denies that the AUAM actually endorsed Wilson [248-249].
[14] Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, Oxford, 1990, p. 37. Baldwin, of course, was later jailed as a conscientious objector.
[15] CE to Balch, June 14, 1917 in Cook, 254-260; Marchand, 254--258.
[16] Marchand, 256-7, 304-5, 294-326, 381-85, especially 302-3, 306-12, 315.
[17] CE, "Our War Record: A Plea for Tolerance," January 1, 1918, in Cook, 264-265. For Crystal's view of free trade, see the ad for The International Free Trade League, on whose advisory committee she sat; The Liberator, January 1919, 2.
[18] CE, "A Program for Voting Women, WPP of New York, March 1918, Cook 266-268.
[19] CE, "A Program for Voting Women," WPPNY pamphlet, March 1918, in Cook, 266-67.
[20] Lenin, "Brest-Litovsk--A Brigand's Peace," Liberator, October 1922 [??? sounds like wrong date to me]
[21] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[22] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[23] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[24] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[25] CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49; CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[26] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[27] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[28] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[29] CE, "Practical Feminism," The Liberator, January 1920, in Cook, 51-52.
[30] CE, "Feminism: Statement Read at the First Feminist Congress in the United States, New York, March 1, 1919, in The Liberator, May 1919, in Cook, 49-51.
[31] CE, "Alice Paul's Convention," The Liberator, April 1921, in Cook, 57-63.
[32] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83; Cook, 29.
[33] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[34] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[35] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[36] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[37] CE, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923, in Cook, 76-83.
[38] CE, "Aeroplanes and Jails," The Liberator, November 1918, in Cook, 294-295 [Cook mistakenly places it in the November issue]; CE, "The Socialist Vote," The Liberator, December 1918, in Cook, 293-294.
[39] CE, introduction to "The Farmers' Crusade," The Liberator, October 1918, 5-6. This is not in either of Cook's anthologies.
[40] CE, introduction to "The Farmers' Crusade," The Liberator, October 1918, 5-6. This is not in either of Cook's anthologies.
[41] CE, "The Mooney Congress," The Liberator, March 1919, in Cook, 302-315.
[42] CE, "British Labor is Moving", The Liberator, September 1919, in Cook, 328-335.
[43] CE, "In Communist Hungary," The Liberator, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[44] CE, "In Communist Hungary," The Liberator, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[45] CE, "In Communist Hungary," The Liberator, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[46] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[47] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[48] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356. She used the phrase "ignorant foreigner" perhaps with irony: the foreigner, she implied, would recognize, as SP officials did not, that his lack of freedom was a permanent condition, not a wartime aberration.
[49] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[50] CE, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[51] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[52] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[53] CE, "A Matter of Emphasis," Time and Tide, June 5, 1925, in Cook, 136-139.
[54] CE, "Now We Can Begin," The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57; CE, "Birth Control in the Feminist Program," Birth Control Review, January 1918, in Cook, 46-49.
[55] For example, in "Now We Can Begin," (The Liberator, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57, she asserts both that raising children "naturally falls" upon the mother and that most mothers want to raise or superintend the raising of their children to the extent that makes any other full-time job impossible for ten or fifteen years. However, in that same article she also demands that husbands do their equal part in home-making. In "Bed-Makers and Bosses," (Time and Tide, October 12, 1923, in Cook, 83-85, strongly denies any biological basis for the sexual division of labor.
[56] CE, "An Acid Test for Suffragists," London Daily Herald, Mary 1925, in Cook, 154-156; CE, Letter to the Editor, Time and Tide, March 18, 1927, in Cook, 223-225; CE, "Feminists Must Fight," The Nation, November 12, 1924, in Cook, 160-161.
[57] Cook, 1, 21, 22, 29.
[58] Cook, 33; CE, "Alice Paul's Convention," The Liberator, April 1921, in Cook, 57-63.
[59] CE, "Socialist Women of Eighteen Countries Meet at Marseilles", Equal Rights, September 26, 1925, in Cook, 146-153; CE, "A Matter of Emphasis," Time and Tide, June 5, 1925, in Cook, 136-139.
[60] CE, "Equality or Protection?," Equal Rights, March 15, 1924, in Cook, 156-159.
[61] CE, "Women, Rights, and Privileges," The Outlook (London), February 5, 1927, in Cook, 220-223.
[62] CE, "Equality or Protection?", Equal Rights, March 15, 1924, in Cook, 156-159; CE, "Protective Legislation in England," Equal Rights, October 3, 1925, in Cook, 170-172; CE, "Egalitarian v. Reformer," Equal Rights, June 4, 1927, in Cook, 225-231.
[63] CE, "Women, Rights, and Privileges," The Outlook (London), February 5, 1927, in Cook, 220-223.
[64] See Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History With Documents, ed. Nancy Woloch, Bedford/St. Martins, ------.
[65] CE, "Personalities and Powers: Alice Paul," Time and Tide, July 20, 1923, in Cook, 63-66.
[66] CE, "Woman's Party Accepts Paris Congress Repulse as Spur to a World-Wide Feminist Movement," The World, June 27, 1926, in Cook, 186-195. The International Suffrage Alliance cited a host of reasons for denying the NWP's application for affiliation, but Eastman convincingly argues that the NWP's position on protective legislation underlay its rejection. Eastman claimed that the NWP was rejected precisely because so ISA many member-organizations agreed with the NWP's position that the ISA leaders feared that the NWP's agitation would split the ISA.
[67] CE, "The Great Rejection: Part III," Equal Rights, July 3, 1926, in Cook, 207-211.
[68] Cook, 10-11.
[69] Cook, 28.
[70] Cook, 28.
[71] Cook, 27, 29-30.
[72] Cook, 33.
[73] Cook claims it was the magazine's tenth anniversary celebration; but The Nation was founded in 1865.
[74] Cook, 34.
[75] Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (Compass Press edition, 1959 [original edition 1934]), 246-288, especially 246-247.