Crystal Eastman

Crystal Catherine Eastman (June 25, 1881 – July 28, 1928) was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She was a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Crystal Eastman was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on June 25, 1881, the third of four children. Her oldest brother, Morgan, was born in 1878 and died in 1884. The second brother, Anstice Ford Eastman, who became a general surgeon, was born in 1878 and died in 1937. Max was the youngest, born in 1883.

In 1883, their parents, Samuel Elijah Eastman and Annis Bertha Ford, moved the family to Canandaigua, New York. In 1889, their mother became one of the first women ordained as a Protestant minister in America when she became a minister of the Congregational church. Her father was also a Congregational minister, and the two served as pastors at the church of Thomas K. Beecher near Elmira. Mark Twain's family also attended the church and it was this shared association that young Crystal also became acquainted with him.

This part of New York was in the so-called "Burnt Over District." During the Second Great Awakening earlier in the 19th century, its frontier had been a center of evangelizing and much religious excitement, which resulted in the founding of such beliefs as Millerism and Mormonism. During the antebellum period, some were inspired by religious ideals to support such progressive social causes as abolitionism and the Underground Railroad.^{[citation needed]}

This humanitarian tradition influenced Crystal and her brother Max Eastman. He became a socialist activist early on, and Crystal had several common causes with him. They were close throughout her life, even after he had become more conservative.

The siblings lived together on 11th Street in New York City's Greenwich Village among other radical activists for several years. The group, including Ida Rauh, Inez Milholland, Floyd Dell, and Doris Stevens, also spent summers and weekends in Croton-on-Hudson, where Max bought a house in 1916.

Eastman graduated from Vassar College in 1903 and received a Master of Arts degree in sociology (then a relatively new field) from Columbia University in 1904. She then attended New York University Law School, graduating in 1907 as the second in her class. While pursuing her graduate degree, Eastman worked nights as a recreation leader at the Greenwich House Settlement, where she encountered Paul Underwood Kellogg.

Social work pioneer and journal editor Paul Kellogg offered Eastman her first job: investigating labor conditions for The Pittsburgh Survey. Her report, Work Accidents and the Law (1910), became a crucial tool in the fight for occupation health and safety and an early weapon in the ongoing battle. In 1909, Justice Hughes, who at the time was governor of New York, appointed Eastman to the New York State Commission of Employee's Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor. The first woman to be appointed a commission member, she drafted the inaugural workers' compensation law. This model became the standard for the U.S. During Woodrow Wilson's presidency, she continued to campaign for occupational safety and health while working as an investigating attorney for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations from 1913 to 1914. She advocated for "motherhood endowments" whereby mothers of young children would receive monetary benefits. She argued it would reduce forced dependence of mothers on men, as well as economically empower women.