If the feminist program goes to pieces at the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless. - Crystal Eastman

Women must have work of their own, first because no one who has to depend on another person for his living is really grown up; and second, because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. Children can die or grow up, husbands can leave you. No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe from disaster.

I am perfectly sure I could never say I believe in the vigorous prosecution of the war. War offends my common sense and my regard for human life too much. I cannot feel any faith in good coming out of it, even now that we are in it; and besides that, even if I admit that good may come out of it, I could not encourage other people to die for a cause I am not ready to die for myself.

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.