Crystal Eastman Quotes

Women’s freedom, in the feminist sense, can be fought for and conceivably won before the gates open into industrial democracy. On the other hand, woman’s freedom, in the feminist sense, is not inherent in the communist ideal. All feminists are familiar with the revolutionary leader who ‘can’t see’ the woman’s movement…ʽMy wife’s all right,’ he says. And his wife, one usually finds, is raising his children in a Bronx flat or a dreary suburb, to which he returns occasionally for food and sleep when all possible excitement and stimulus have been wrung from the fight. If we should graduate into communism tomorrow this man’s attitude to his wife would not be changed.

Many feminists are socialists, many are communists, not a few are active leaders in these movements. But the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, sees the woman's battle as distinct in its objects and different in its methods from the workers' battle for industrial freedom. She knows, of course, that the vast majority of women as well as men are without property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a system of society which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few, and she counts herself a loyal soldier in the working-class army that is marching to overthrow that system. But as a feminist she also knows that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.

Indifference is harder to fight than hostility, and there is nothing that kills an agitation more than having everyone admit that it is fundamentally right.

The current legal system is vicious when it comes to labor because it does not provide relief when it is most needed, because it lays too heavy a burden on the claimant and allows the corporation to escape liability by carrying the case from court to court, because it encourages dishonesty on the part of the claims agent and the ambulance chaser, and because…the greater portion of the damages paid by employers goes out in attorneys’ fees.

If this Congress adjourns without taking action on the woman suffrage amendment…every woman voter will know this…and we have faith that the woman voter will stand by us. We are ready to go into this struggle if you force us to, but we are not eager for it. Gentlemen, why turn us into enemies. Why not keep us as friends?

To blot out of every law book in the land, to sweep out of every dusty courtroom, to erase from every judge’s mind that centuries-old precedent as to woman’s inferiority and dependence and need for protection, to substitute for it at one blow the simple new precedent of equality, that is a fight worth making if it takes ten years.

Feminists need a program that works not just for women judges and women lawyers alone…It is the great masses of women of this country who are still in slavery that we must rouse – the women who have to ask their husbands for a new hat, and cannot say whether they will have children or not, or when.

There is nothing new since Ezekiel’s time in their terror and declaration that the enemy is upon us. They are saying to Congress, ‘Never mind the death of democracy, nor our foreign policies, whether they be just or unjust, but prepare!’ In the face of this, we say to Congress, ‘Gentlemen, wait; go slow. We are not afraid.’

The question of woman suffrage is not one that should be cluttering up twentieth century affairs. It belongs back in the eighteenth century.

Please picture me now as one of these circus-chariot-ladies, with one hand driving an exciting tandem, — arts and law—and with the other hand holding aloft two streaming banners, —love and liberty.

Everyone is out. Mothers and father and babies line the doorsteps. Girls with their beaux, standing in the shadows, or gathered in laughing groups on the corners. And children, thousands of them everywhere, little girls playing singing games in the middle of the street, and boys running in and out, chasing each other, throwing balls, building fires, fighting, laughing, shouting. Oh it is wonderful, – this human nature with its infinite capacity, and unending desire, for joy…

There is no doubt that I am the world's worst interviewer. I go with the sincere intention of sitting quietly, pencil in hand, and speaking only to "draw out" the famous man or the celebrated lady, as the case may be. But the affair always ends in a free-for-all discussion, a search for essential truth and justice, during which I become quite as much interested in what I say to the victim as in what he or she says to me.

It seems that the only way we can keep mothers free, at least in a capitalist society, is by the establishment of a principle that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a service to society and the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle is accepted.

Most women will agree that August 23, the day when the Tennessee legislature finally enacted the Federal suffrage amendment, is a day to begin with, not a day to end with. Men are saying perhaps "Thank God, this everlasting woman's fight is over!" But women, if I know them, are saying, "Now at last we can begin." In fighting for the right to vote most women have tried to be either non-committal or thoroughly respectable on every other subject. Now they can say what they are really after; and what they are after, in common with all the rest of the struggling world, freedom.

The highest hope I have…is the beginning of a kind of international enthusiasm based on a warm, real knowledge of other races and their contribution to the world’s values – a delight in the culture of other nations as well as our own – and eagerness to see it survive. Out of this must spring a wide tolerance which will make the needs, the grievances, the problems of one nation quite naturally a matter of world interest, the subject of a just and kindly deliberation of a world court.