Suffrage – West Bloomfield

Crystal Eastman

• (1881-1928), spouses Wallace Benedict, Walter Fuller, 2 children
• Was a lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist, leader in fight for women’s suffrage
• Born in Massachusetts, both parents (Samuel and Annis Ford Eastman) became ordained Congregational ministers, serving churches in Canandaigua and East Bloomfield

• She attended the Granger Place School, Vassar College, Columbia University, NY University of Law – graduated 2nd in class of 1907
• Brother was socialist Max Eastman

• In 1913 joined Alice Paul and others in founding the militant Congressional Union which became the National Woman’s Party
• During WWI was one of founders of Woman’s Peace Party, also National Civil Liberties Bureau which became the ACLU
• Delivered the speech, “Now We Can Begin” following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, outlining the work that needed to be done in the political and economic spheres to achieve gender equality
• After passage of the 19th Amendment, Eastman and others wrote the Equal Rights Amendment, introduced in 1923
• “What is the problem of women’s freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity–housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising to have that occupation recognized by the world as
  work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.”
• “Rev. Annis Ford Eastman [mother of Crystal] of West Bloomfield is expected in Geneva Friday, and will speak at the residence of Colonel and Mrs. Miller on “Woman’s Suffrage.” D&C 5/22/1894

Crystal Eastman PDF