Crystal Eastman ; A Revolutionary Life

Amy Aronson
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C R Y S TA L E A S T M A N
CRYSTAL EASTMAN
A Revolutionary Life

Amy Aronson

1
1
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© Oxford University Press 2020

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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Aronson, Amy, author.
Title: Crystal Eastman : a revolutionary life /​Amy Aronson.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019017396 | ISBN 9780199948734 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780199948741 (updf ) | ISBN 9780190912857 (epub) | ISBN 9780190912864 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Eastman, Crystal, 1881–​1928. | Feminists—​United States—​Biography. |
Labor leaders—​United States—​Biography. | Suffragists—​United States—​Biography. |
Pacifists—​United States—​Biography. | Civil rights—​United States—​History—​20th century. |
United States—​Social conditions—​1865–​1918. | United States—​Social conditions—​1918–​1932.
Classification: LCC HQ1413.E A77 2019 | DDC 305.42092 [B]—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2019017396

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

In loving memory of my mother, Winnie Aronson, who always spoke up.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Searching for Crystal Eastman 1
1. Origins 17
2. Discovering Crystal 41
3. Embarking: The Pittsburgh Survey, Workers’ Compensation,
and the First Blush of Fame 69
4. The Federal Case for Women’s Suffrage 97
5. Radical Pacifist 120
6. Agonizing Dilemmas and the March toward War 151
7. From Protest to Dissent: Wartime Activism and the Founding
of the ACLU 163
8. Regrouping: The Liberator Years 193
9. Passages: Feminism, Journalism, and the Transatlantic Twenties 223
10. “Marriage under Two Roofs”: Feminism and Family Life 243
11. Coming Home 269
Epilogue 279

Notes 281
Bibliography 345
Index 369
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first encountered Crystal Eastman more than twenty years ago, when I came
across some of her feminist journalism. I was twenty-​six years old, and, like her
at the very same age, I was finishing my last graduate degree and preparing to
embark on an adult life in the world. Discovering Crystal only through excerpts
and flashes, still I was struck by what seemed to be a voice calling ahead of itself, a
woman trying to live a life she was also trying to usher into possibility. What she
envisioned, what she demanded and took steps to design, I felt, was a world for
women much closer to mine than to her own.
Over the years since, that voice has stayed with me. Her restlessness with
single-​issue politics spoke to me, and still does; her effort to bring people and
movements together, to organize for common cause, inspires me now more than
ever. With so much left unfinished, her thirst and urgency, her marbled idealism
and deep humanity, would not let me go.
It has been a very long journey with her, but never a lonely one. So many
people have helped and supported me over the years of work on this project that
it has been a challenge to my aging brain to recapture all their names! I will begin
at the beginning, with Professor Robert Ferguson of Columbia University, my
dissertation adviser and first champion, who wrote more recommendations for
me than I can count and convinced me with his steady confidence and endless
support to believe that I could someday write this book.
When I finally got serious about trying to tackle it, I was fortunate to be able
to meet with Blanche Cook, who not only introduced us all to Eastman but also
continued to love her enough to give my project her blessing and to support me
with letters and two sit-​down interviews along the way.
Several other scholars have been incredibly supportive, each one offering
me creative and substantive suggestions, a generous sounding board, and cru-
cial feedback that shaped and improved this book. First, I must thank Peter
Winnington, Walter Fuller’s biographer, for the exceptionally generous input he
gave me; I literally could not have finished this book without his willingness to
x • Acknowledgments

share resources, as well as his insightful impressions and his knowledge of the
wider Fuller family and the British context of the period. I am also grateful to
Lucy Knight for many conversations, and to Martha Wheelock for a week of
thought-​provoking discussions about Crystal while filming some key sites from
her life in New York City. I would also like to thank Michael Kazin for the input
and encouragement he so helpfully offered me.
A silent partner in this project has been the late Carl Wedekind, an honored
civil libertarian who served on the board of directors of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) in Kentucky and authored two books on the death
penalty. He wrote an unpublished manuscript about Eastman prior to his death
in 2011, and I am so grateful to his daughter, Annie Wedekind, for giving me his
work in hopes of it helping my own. I am fortunate to have had the chance to
consult and incorporate his insights where I could, a charge made easy by the fact
that we often saw Eastman so similarly. I wish I had had the chance to meet and
talk with him more about her.
The Eastman-​Fuller descendants have opened their lives and family memories
to me with limitless generosity. I treasure the friendships that we’ve developed
over these years. Thank you for everything, Rebecca Young, Charles Young, Anne
Fuller, Cordelia Fuller, and Reuben Fuller. And thank you, Phil Wingard, for
finding me on the internet to offer your friendship and family photos, not to
mention your intrepid family research.
This project was supported by a number of institutions as well. I am so grateful
for the Faculty Fellowship I received from Fordham University, and for two of
the university’s faculty research grants. I am also thankful to my department for
repeated annual support through the Faculty Research Expense Program. This
book was further supported financially by two external research awards. I would
like to thank the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa
State University for the Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics in 2010,
and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, for the
research grant the same year.
I am also grateful for the generous assistance I received from archivists and
research librarians at many institutions across the country and abroad, begin-
ning with the wonderful staff at the Schlesinger. A special thank you as well to
Charlotte Labbe at Fordham University and Laura Street at the Vassar College
Libraries. I have also benefited from the experience and help of archivists at the
Swarthmore College Peace Collection at Swarthmore College; the Lilly Library
at Indiana University Bloomington; the Manuscript and Archives divisions
of the New York Public Library; the Kheel Center for Labor-​Management
Documentation and Archives at Cornell University; the Seeley G. Mudd
Manuscript Library at Princeton University; the Tamiment Labor Archives at
 Acknowledgments • xi

New York University; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Center for
Oral History at Columbia University; and the Women of Protest Collection at
the US Library of Congress.
So many friends have given me their support and kept the faith, no matter how
long this book took for me to finish. I am grateful to Bill and Zelda Gamson for
their kind hospitality while I did research on Martha’s Vineyard. I would like to
thank some wonderful colleagues, and all the loving friends whom I simply could
not live without: Tamar Datan, Josh Gamson, Shanny Peer, Chloe Angyl, Marty
Duberman, Michael Kaufman, Michael Sheran, Eric Stewart, Louis Bayard, Don
Montuori, Mitchell Tunick, Pam Hatchfield, Perry Tunick-​Hatchfield, Kathryn
Glass, Jon Hochman, Elizabeth Dabney, Lou Lopez, Mary Morris, Larry
O’Connor, Kate Morris, Linda Stein, Helen Hardacre, Michal Hershkovitz,
Jackie Reich, Jennifer Clark, Margaret Schwartz, Claudia Rivera, Gwenyth
Jackaway, Brian Rose, Father Michael Tueth, Micki McGee, James Van Oosting,
Dawn Williams, Abby Goldstein, Patricia Belen, Fred Wertz, Greg Kenny, Maria
Sanabria Kenny, and Lisa Eldridge. A heartfelt thank you to my mother-​in-​law,
Barbara Diamond, and my sister-​and brother-​in-​law, Sandi Kimmel and Patrick
Murphy, for their constant encouragement, and to Madeline Aronson.
This book benefited so much from the input of my editor, Nancy Toff. I am
also grateful for the work of her helpful assistants, Lena Rubin and Elizabeth
Vaziri. My thanks as well to my patient and supportive production manager, Julia
Turner.
My deepest thanks to Joy Harris, who has always understood me like almost
nobody else.
I am forever thankful for the time I had with my sister, Nancy Aronson
(1960–​2012), and my mother, Winnie Aronson (1934–​2018), who passed away
while I was finishing this book. Their memory will always inspire me and give me
strength.
And to my boys, Michael and Zachary, who fill me every day with gratitude
that approaches awe. I love you with all my heart.
All of these people and more have helped carry me to today. Having tracked
down Eastman’s extant works and utterances in disparate archives over many
years—​having found all I can of her remains—​this book, at the end, can lay her
to rest. I hope this project will encourage new scholarship well beyond my own.
I hope it can spark thinking and inquiry that can carry us closer to the under-
standing and the answers we are still seeking that Eastman was unable to find.
I offer this book as a start, an invitation to scholars and students, to readers in
many disciplines and areas of concern—​to all those who might have otherwise
encountered glimpses and whispers of her in so many texts and contexts, and
wished for more.
INTRODUCTION

Searching for Crystal Eastman

Given the distance traveled, it is surprising there was no nameplate, no

marker, no badge. And the surviving records from the A. P. Burton &
Sons Funeral Home only amplify the mystery. They show that Crystal
Eastman’s remains were sent from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Buffalo,
New York, on July 28, 1928, the same day she passed away. The train
departed at 5:30 p.m., rush hour, en route to the busiest transport hub
in the Northeast. But it was a Saturday, so a rare quiet marked her
passage.
Only two scant documents accompanied her. A registrar’s permit
granted transport across state lines. Then there was a funeral slip,
with spaces for information that might have begun to convey her life
to memory. Of the seventy-​eight lines on the slip, though, most are
blank. And of the twenty-​six spaces on which something is written,
half record only perfunctory details—​name, age, occupation, marital
status. “Catherine Crystal Eastman Fuller.” Her name is the longest
entry. But she always knew herself by just the two identifiers at the
heart of it, the name her mother designated for her: Crystal Eastman.
“Marital Status: Widowed (Walter Fuller)”—​factually true, but it
overlooks the feminist revolution she fomented in marriage and the
family, a significant part of her unending effort to live a woman’s life
on her own terms. “Occupation: Editor.” Perhaps that was the simplest
job to name, but it misconstrues her life’s work: she was an activist and
initiator, a leader and champion who left her mark on many of the
great social justice movements that defined the twentieth century—​
labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace.
After that, almost all the requested information is missing entirely.
“Kind of Grave”—​blank. “Cemetery”—​blank. There are scattered
spaces that have been filled in, with capital letters, but the words read
like emphatic refusals that only seem to barricade the way to Crystal
Eastman’s story. “Date of Funeral: NONE.” “Notices: NONE.”
2 • C r y s t a l Eastman

And then, at Buffalo, she disappears. The records show that another funeral
home, E. L. Brady & Sons, was to take possession of her casket at the railroad
depot and carry it, by the Spartan Silver handles that were its only distinctive
trait, to some destination that is now unknown. In 1928, the train terminus in
Buffalo connected thirteen different railway lines and the vast shipping networks
of the Great Lakes. From a nerve center like that, hundreds of destinations were
within reach.
Where might she have gone from that junction? Where would her brothers,
Anstice and Max, both present when she died, have chosen to lay her to rest?
Where was her truest home?
Traced from Buffalo, the locations that composed Crystal Eastman’s life map
like a comet across the expanse of New York State. Following its path, one comes
first to Glenora, New York, where in the spring of 1898 the Eastman family
purchased one hundred acres of farmland on Lake Seneca and a summer cot-
tage they named Cherith, after the brook where God sent Elijah to learn the
value of the hidden life. Crystal adored Glenora, the only place the family could
be together for a time each year; she visited there with friends and colleagues,
boyfriends and future husbands, partly appraising their place in her life by the
degree to which they loved it too.
Or she may rest thirty-​three miles south, in her hometown of Elmira, where
she grew up the only daughter of an extraordinary American family. Eastman’s
rural childhood was steeped in nineteenth-​century reformism led primarily by
her unconventional mother, Annis Ford Eastman. The family matriarch was
an ordained Congregational minister who succeeded the abolitionist Thomas
Beecher to become pastor of the prominent Park Church and lead a flock that
included Mark Twain’s family. Indeed, Annis Eastman wrote Twain’s eulogy.
Then again, her final resting place could be Greenwich Village in lower
Manhattan, where Crystal came of age. In the stirring first years of the twentieth
century, as nineteenth-​century notions of liberalism and genteel social reform
lost momentum, this downtown “bohemia” became the wellspring of a new
era. In Eastman’s time there, old-​world ways in arenas from international rela-
tions to interpersonal morality were giving way to new conceptions of society,
new freedoms, new artistic directions, new ways of life. American urban life in
general, and New York’s in particular, seemed rife with transformative energies
and opportunities.1 The defining sensibility in Crystal’s world—​“noble, crazy,
glorious,” as Max Eastman would remember it—​was that everything could be dif-
ferent.2 It was a feeling she never fully outgrew or let go.
Or she could rest on Mt. Airy Road in Croton-​on-​Hudson, then a country
swath in Westchester County, where she owned a simple, yellow clapboard house
at the slope of a grassy hill. Eastman lived there with her young family among a
 Searching for Crystal Eastman • 3

small group of radical friends and fellow travelers. Her brother Max, always her
most intimate companion, had been first to buy a house in Croton in 1915; she
arranged to live very near him, as she would throughout her adult life whenever
she possibly could.
Croton seems to have been the home where Eastman’s children wanted to re-
member and keep their mother. The only other relevant document, a letter held
by the family, reveals that four years after her death, her then-​teenage son, Jeffrey
Fuller, planned a memorial plate to be mounted at Croton. The plaque was to be
installed over Thanksgiving, 1931, but by November 10 it was clear the project
could not be finished in time. In fact, it may not yet have been started. A severely
limited budget, always an insistent problem for the family going back to Crystal’s
own childhood, had stalled the purchase of the necessary tools. Margaret Lane,
Eastman’s longtime friend and ally in several organizations, urged Jeff to post-
pone his trip from Manhattan up to Croton until Christmas, or maybe after the
first of the year. In the meantime, Lane wrote him, he “could be designing . . . ”—​
but there the letter breaks off. It’s a fragment, and no further mention of the plan
or the plaque has survived.3
Today, none of Crystal’s four surviving grandchildren knows where she is
buried, and nothing, as far as they know, marks the ground where she rests. In
both personal and public contexts, her place remains obscure, her imprint too
easy to overlook, misunderstand, or miss almost entirely.

* * *

In the early twentieth century, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspic-
uous Progressive reformers in America. Her militant suffragism, insistent
antimilitarism, gregarious internationalism, support of the Russian Revolution,
and uncompromising feminism led some in the press to brand her notorious. Yet
more than a century later, none of these paths to recognition has carried her to
significant historical remembrance. Today, she is less known than might be ex-
pected, especially given the rarity of a woman with such wide political influence
and her continuing institutional legacy in so many high-​profile struggles.
Eastman drafted the nation’s first serious workers’ compensation law, and
it became a model for many other states. She helped found the Congressional
Union, later to become the National Woman’s Party, the world’s first women’s
political party and the group whose unyielding pressure politics finally lever-
aged universal suffrage in America. And after the vote was won, Eastman has
been widely credited as a coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the
party’s signature next-​wave goal. As the world hurtled toward its first global war,
Eastman’s integral roles in two major peace organizations made her the most
4 • C r y s t a l Eastman

important organizer of the radical internationalist movement in the United

States.4 She facilitated the founding of the Woman’s Peace Party, today the
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), initiating the
recruitment of a reluctant Jane Addams to head the national organization while
she formed and led the more audacious New York branch. At the same time, she
served as executive secretary of the American Union against Militarism, where
she shaped and often catalyzed the only American peace group ever to demon-
strate that citizen diplomacy could avert war. The democratic action that ac-
complished that feat? It was Eastman’s brainchild. Then, beginning in 1918, she
copublished the Liberator, the magazine that became the intellectual rallying
point and postwar paper of record for revolutionary movements worldwide.
And all this occurred after she had engineered the founding of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Yet even all these achievements are only parts of the story. Eastman advocated
a politics of private life as far-​reaching as her public agenda. Divorced in 1916
after learning of her husband’s infidelity, she refused alimony, telling newspapers
at the time that “no self-​respecting feminist would accept alimony—​it would be
her admission that she can’t take care of herself.”5 When she remarried, to the
English pacifist and publicist Walter Fuller, who would become the father of her
two children, she expanded her search for feasible solutions to feminist dilemmas
in marriage and family life. Her practical experiments in egalitarian marriage and
work-​family balance accompanied her writing in this area, advancing cultural
and feminist conversations on subjects still pressing today: reproductive rights,
paid parental leave, economic partnership within marriage, wages for housework,
single motherhood by choice, and even the silenced longing of married mothers
for substantive work outside the home, a yearning that almost exactly iterates
Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”—​nearly half a century before the
breakthrough of The Feminine Mystique (1963).
In her comparatively short life, Eastman attained wide influence and unusual
access. Her aspiration for social justice took her into the heart of progressivism,
the final triumph of universal suffrage, the opening battle for birth control, the
cataclysm of World War I, the passion and muscle of revolutionary feeling in
Europe as it grew. She saw the rise of big media and celebrity culture, the popular-
ization of Freud, the ascendance of the corporation in American life.
Eastman worked side by side with many of the most acclaimed reformers of
her time: national and international suffrage leaders including Anna Howard
Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns, as well as Progressive
champions such as Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement and the
Visiting Nurse Service of New York; Florence Kelley, social worker, attorney,
and general secretary of the National Consumers League; and Jane Addams, the
 Searching for Crystal Eastman • 5

eminent public philosopher, pioneer in the American settlement house move-

ment, and internationally esteemed champion of women’s suffrage and world
peace. She also worked closely with important men, including Paul Kellogg,
the Progressive journalist and urban reformer; John Reed, the revolutionary
writer and activist; and Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the New York Evening Post and later The
Nation, the man who sketched the blueprint for the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and then financed it.6
Eastman’s letters and surviving phone book document the range of her in-
volvement with giants and icons: Charlotte Perkins Gilman—​for many, the pre-
eminent theorist of twentieth-​century feminism; Inez Milholland, remembered
as the symbol and ultimately the martyr of the battle for the vote. Eastman knew
the muckrakers William Hard, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, and Ray Stannard
Baker, and millionaire reformers such as Mrs. Malcolm J. Forbes and Henry Ford.
She worked with prominent politicians including the anticorporate Progressive
Wisconsin governor and US senator Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette; his for-
midable wife, Belle Case LaFollette; and Victor Berger, the first Socialist elected
to the US House of Representatives. Her close colleagues included institution
builders such as Stanford’s first president David Starr Jordan; Morris Hillquit,
a founder of the Socialist Party of America; and the Zionist leader and reform
rabbi Stephen S. Wise. And across her life and career, she traveled in the company
of a transatlantic crew of boundary breakers and innovators, including Charlie
Chaplin, Helen Keller, Ida B. Wells-​Barnett, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey,
Frances Perkins, Louis Brandeis, Jeannette Rankin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudolph
Valentino, Rebecca West, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Sir Norman Angell,
George Bernard Shaw, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
In all these circles, Eastman seems to have made an impression on everyone she
met. She loved to laugh and was nearly six feet tall; athletic on land, court, water,
and horseback; and ebullient in verbal style. She “always reminds you of hill-​tops
and open spaces,” her sister-​in-​law Dorothy Fuller commented in 1916. “She has a
fine vivid character. . . . Bright colors suit her well.”7 While newspaper photos do
not typically show devastatingly good looks, reporters who interviewed Eastman
were frequently taken by her beauty. She was “one of the leading spellbinders,”
according to the Washington Herald, “the suffragette who proves there is beauty
as well as brains among the American women who seek the ballot,” said the Mail
Tribune.8 She possessed “a trinity of virtues,” according to Pearson’s magazine,
“beauty, brains and a monstrous faith in humanity.”9 Colleagues and comrades
also often found her dazzling. The Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet Claude
McKay, whom Eastman discovered and brought to the Liberator when he was
working on the railroad as a Pullman porter, called her “the most beautiful white
6 • C r y s t a l Eastman

woman I ever knew.”10 Her civil liberties colleague Roger Baldwin remembered
her warmth coupled with an electric energy. “Crystal was a very beautiful woman
in a very arresting sort of a way. A photograph wouldn’t show it . . . because it
was largely manner, and expression, and the quickness of her response. Her eyes
flashed. She had a very pretty smile. Dimples at the corners. A very endearing way
of looking at you. She was very responsive. A very mobile face.”11
Those closest to her often sensed something powerful in her “magnificent
presence,” as McKay put it. She seemed to carry meaning with her, to signify some
cherished promise or hope. McKay, who for years carried a note from Eastman
in his breast pocket, saw her “embodying in her personality that daring freedom
of thought and action—​all that was fundamentally fine, noble and genuine in
American democracy.”12 She “sails into a room with her head high,” the sculptor
Clare Sheridan commented in her diary, “and the face of a triumphant Victory.”13
To her husband Walter, this “strange, wonderful dazzling creature is a much finer
woman than I am a man.”14 Her friend Jeannette Lowe marveled simply, “You
wouldn’t believe how free she was.”15
In virtually every arena she entered, Crystal Eastman stood for something.
“Outspoken (often tactless), determined . . . and courageous,” as Baldwin
remembered, she was often controversial, but she always declared herself.16
Whether addressing government officials, capacity crowds, or the most influential
papers of the American press; whether confronting colleagues in internal debates
or organizing in opposition to adversative policies, institutions, or groups, she did
not demur from speaking out—​some would say to a fault. But whether celebrated
or criticized, her presence was palpable and difficult to ignore. “When she spoke
to people—​whether it was to a small committee or a swarming crowd—​hearts
beat faster and nerves tightened as she talked,” the famed Nation editor Freda
Kirchwey recalled in her obituary.17
Eastman radiated an unmistakable vitality and dynamism, striking yet hard
to pin down. A decade before her death, she called herself a “militant idealist,” a
handle that suggests the organizing idea of her life.18 Her wholehearted ideal was
to bring together all the great social movements of her era into a grand campaign
for global equality and justice. Direct action militancy, both spectacular and
bold, was her method and her mantra; she applied it at the highest levels, without
equivocation or reserve. Fierce yet deeply kind, as affectionate as she was uncom-
promising, Eastman was one of the most resounding women known to her allies
and adversaries alike. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall
of Fame, yet today she is still commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most
neglected feminist leaders in US history.19
What accounts for this paradox? Why would a feminist star so visible to so
many in her time have become so difficult to recognize in our own? As it turns
 Searching for Crystal Eastman • 7

out, the question of Eastman’s peculiar obscurity yields distinct insights about
why she merits remembering today.
Part of the explanation is methodological. Eastman left a patchy record of
personal papers behind. The only collection of her letters is mainly concentrated
in her adolescent and college years, tapering off during graduate work to almost
nothing by the time she began her first job. This dwindling of personal correspond-
ence is largely the result of her relative proximity to the main correspondents of
her life, her mother and brother. In 1907, Max Eastman followed his big sister to
New York City, where they lived and worked together much of the time. Then, in
1911, their mother passed away. Crystal largely discontinued letter writing at that
point, depriving the historical record of her personal accounts of the activities
and ideas that occupied much of her adult professional life. Information about
her most pivotal years must therefore be gleaned second-​hand, from the memoirs
and recollections of those she knew, or from the archives of others—​the organi-
zations with which she was involved or affiliated and the papers of her colleagues,
allies, and political foes. While this dispersion of material attests to the range and
variety of her work, it also diffuses her political voice, eroding our ability to rec-
ognize the salience of her contributions.
But this scattered archival record evokes a subtle yet more indicative phenom-
enon. Since the 1970s, when the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook anthologized
important selections of her writing, Eastman has actually surfaced in scholarship
many times.20 In fact, her arguments often flash into narratives as some of the
most bracing and memorable moments in relevant biographies and histories. Yet
she typically appears for just moments, as a cameo in stories in which she ac-
tually played a more meaningful part. Such intermittent visibility has rendered
Eastman both familiar and elusive. Glimpsed as a walk-​on, she can seem almost
out of context in the very organizations and movements she helped to found and
to lead. At times, she even seems to arise as a problematic or desultory figure,
errant within the very arenas where her input was significant. She becomes a
walking ambiguity—​conspicuous yet obscure, principal yet somehow peripheral
to the main plot and players.
Cook has explained Eastman’s position as a nearly direct result of her radical
politics and militancy. She rightly described Eastman as an exceptionally bold
and assertive woman, and suggested her leftist revolt against the political and eco-
nomic power structure all but ensured her exile from history. As Cook succinctly
put it, “History tends to bury what it seeks to reject.”21
Cook situated Eastman as an early precursor to what second-​wave feminists
dubbed “Socialist feminism”—​a type of feminism that married women’s rights
to a critique of capitalism and the social problems associated with it. This was
contrasted to “liberal feminism,” which cast women’s equality almost entirely in
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