A century ago, Crystal Eastman was among the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America.  Suffragist, labor lawyer, anti-militarist, feminist, internationalist and free-speech advocate, she was a multi-movement activist once called “the most dangerous woman in America.” Eastman was a founder of the ACLU, the National Woman’s Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; she drafted America’s first serious Workers’ Compensation Law and is credited with co-authoring the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet today, she is almost entirely lost to historical memory.  In this first biography of a woman at the center of the social justice movements that defined the twentieth century, Aronson argues that Eastman’s legacy became obscure because she attempted to bridge multiple movements as well as link them to the politics of private life, to home, family, and motherhood.  

Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor at Fordham University, in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and the American Studies Program.  Academically trained at Princeton and Columbia, she was also a magazine editor for several years and is an editor of the international quarterly Media History.  

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest and the George Washington University History Department for their support.

Selected Quotes

Amy Aronson

"I believe it was Eastman’s intersectionality, and by that I mean her multiple movement identifications, that destabilized her image and her status. It complicated her connection to what scholars identify as the mainstays on which historical recognition and remembrance are built.”

“However compatible Eastman’s intersectional perspective was with her political hopes, in practice it redoubled definitional dilemmas by almost everywhere, challenging sympathetic and hostile boundaries alike. Her intersectional vision persistently troubled consensus and opened quandaries over priorities, over policies, over tactics, even among her allies…In the end, the very clarity of Eastman’s intersectional goals vexed her position within the array of social change organizations that she saw as her collective political home.”

“As she tried to balance multiple movement contexts and agendas, surging by turns as a dynamic champion and a challenging voice, she complicated the political positions and interpersonal alliances from which historical recognition is built. The tandem she was driving at the dawn of her career ultimately came apart beneath her feet. She fell through the essential building blocks of historical memory.”

“I would say virtually all progressive women had lots of associations and were invested in lots of different organizations and movements, but most of them eventually…settled on one thing, and certainly the histories that have been written about them and the studies that have been done about them tend to focus on…a singular association, or at least prioritize their organizational associations. Eastman flatly refused to ever associate herself with any one organization. Everywhere she went, she tried to bring along the others to recombine them and to kind of make coherent connections between them”

“I think one of the most important things about her is to look at the ways and the reasons that she wasn’t able to be effective because she insisted on these intersectional dimensions within movements. That is a lesson and a kind of clarion call for us to begin to finally confront those questions, not only as kind of political activists or citizens, but also as scholars.”

“I think her story raises the question of ‘how might we as scholars and as citizens begin to confront those issues without losing our effectiveness with each other and in communicating with the public about what our goals are, about what our stories are.’”