Pages in the History of Elmira


Crystal Eastman:  Founded the ACLU


Crystal Eastman was an advocate of Women's RightsThe Eastmans lived in Elmira between 1894 and 1898. They then moved to a farm at Glenora. While in Elmira they resided for two years in Park Church in what later became the Sunday School rooms. Next, they lived on West Water Street and then at 118 East Chemung Place.

In Crystal's own writings, published in Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, edited by Blanche Wiesen Cook, she states her foundation in feminism started when she was young and was "the story of my background and of my mother."

Crystal's mother Annis is said to have been the first woman ordained in New York State according to a December 1971 article entitled "Elmira's Apostles of Women's Lib" in the Chemung Historical Journal.

(Of interesting note, Annis Eastman prepared Mark Twain's funeral sermon. However, due to illness, her husband delivered it, according to an article in Notable American Women.)

At the tender age of 15, Crystal was already proclaiming her feminist views. She read a paper called "Women" at a summer symposium organized by her mother. In it she wrote, "... because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster."

Crystal's father also encouraged and supported her ideas. She writes, "Once when I was 12 and very tall, a deputation of ladies from her church called on my mother and gently suggested that my skirts ought to be longer. My mother, who was not without consciousness of the neighbors" opinions, thought she must do something. But my father said, 'No, let her wear them short. She likes to run, and she can't run so well in long skirts.'"

Crystal left Elmira and attended Vassar, graduating in 1903. Then, after teaching for a short time at Elmira Free Academy, Crystal received a Master's Degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University, and was second in the class of 1907 at New York University School of Law.

Following law school, Paul Kellogg hired Crystal to help investigate working conditions in Pittsburgh. Her resulting report, Work Accidents And The Law (1910), led Governor Charles Evans Hughes to appoint her as the first woman on New York State's Commission on Employers' Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor. While on the Commission from 1909-1911, Crystal drafted the nation's first workers' compensation law. During Woodrow Wilson's presidency, she served as investigating attorney for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations.

In 1913 she joined with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to form the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage. They organized demonstrations and daily picketing of the White House. Over the next couple of years the police arrested nearly 500 women for loitering and jailed 168 for "obstructing traffic."

Crystal divorced her first husband in 1915. She refused to accept alimony, criticizing the concept as nothing less than an admission of financial dependency on men.

In 1915 Crystal wrote, "The Effect of Industrial Fatalities Upon the Home," which spoke about how the deaths of husbands on the job left wives and children in poverty. She worked with Emma Goldman on the behalf of birth control, legalizing prostitution, and free speech during war times. From 1917 to 1921 Crystal edited the radical journal, the Liberator. This time overlapped with the Red Scare of 1919 to 1921 when Jane Addams and Crystal Eastman, once the "nation's conscience," became enemies of America. They came under surveillance from the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation, their speeches were recorded, and journals banned from the mail. Crystal and many other prominent women were blacklisted.

Eastman was a crusader and conscientious objectorAs an advocate of civil liberties in wartime and the rights of dissenters and conscientious objectors, she helped establish the National Civil Liberties Bureau in April 1917. (It later became the American Civil Liberties Union.) In 1919, Crystal organized the First Feminist Congress. She founded the U.S. Woman's Peace Party, heading the radical New York branch while Jane Addams served as national president. In 1921, the party was renamed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which is today the nation's oldest women's peace organization. Crystal was one of the Equal Rights Amendment's four authors when it was introduced in 1923. She said of the ERA's significance, "This is a fight worth fighting even if it takes ten years."

Crystal Eastman died on July 8, 1928 in Erie, Pa. An obituary in The Nation pointed out "She was for thousands a symbol of what the free woman might be."

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