Crystal Eastman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Family Balance ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union

Crystal Eastman was a central figure in many of the defining social movements of the twentieth century—labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. She drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Eastman worked side by side with national and international suffrage leaders, renowned Progressive reformers and legislators, birth control advocates, civil rights champions, and revolutionary writers and artists. She traveled with a transatlantic crowd of boundary breakers and innovators. And in virtually every arena she entered, she was one of the most memorable women known to her allies and adversaries alike. Yet today, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This first full-length biography recovers the revealing story of a woman who attained rare political influence and left a thought-provoking legacy in ongoing struggles. The social justice issues she cared about—gender equality and human rights, nationalism and globalization, political censorship and media control, worker benefits and family balance, and the monumental questions of war, sovereignty, force, and freedom—remain some of the most consequential questions of our own time.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Primary Identification ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union ◽  
Compensation Law ◽  
International League

Crystal Eastman drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet today, her legacy is ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. Why? Eastman was an intersectional thinker and activist, who bridged social movements, linking shared experiences of inequality under one emancipatory rubric. Yet politics and interpersonal alliances kept asking her to choose: one issue, one organization, one primary identification. Expansive, straddling, disquieting to dominant perspectives and institutional rank, Eastman fell through the main planks of historical memory.

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

Constitutional Orphan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
African American Women ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Perceived Need ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
National League ◽  
Voter Suppression

This book explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters (NLWV), and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth Amendment, and connects that with the NWP’s perceived need for southern congressional votes for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election. And it evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA; and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth Amendment could be used today to expand gender equality.

When the Old Left Was Young … and Went to Washington

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Consumer Rights ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
Old Left ◽  
National Woman's Party

This chapter introduces a group of young radicals, male and female, who ascended with surprising rapidity in the Roosevelt administration. Many of the younger group advocated women's sexual emancipation and conducted their personal lives accordingly. Women in the younger cohort were less likely to make “maternalist” arguments that stressed women's innate differences from men, and they identified less exclusively with women-only organizations. These women did not call themselves “left feminists,” but the term usefully distinguishes them from nonfeminist leftists and from the “pure” feminists of the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment antagonized advocates of wage and hour laws for women. However, not all women in government were left feminists. Those who were gained force from the fact that they often knew one another, through shared interests in labor, poverty, housing, public health and health insurance, consumer rights, and international peace—interdependent causes that in their vision had a feminist subtext.

From Protest to Dissent: Wartime Activism and the Founding of the ACLU

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Global Democracy ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union

In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, suspending basic civil liberties in the name of wartime national security. Suddenly, peace work seemed dangerously untenable, even to some in movement leadership. Nevertheless, the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) voted to test the new wartime laws, campaigning to prevent a draft and devising a new category of military exemption based on conscience. But continuing tensions threatened to rupture the AUAM from the inside. Lillian Wald and Paul Kellogg wanted to resign. Eastman proposed an eleventh-hour solution: create a single, separate legal bureau for the maintenance of fundamental rights in wartime—free press, free speech, freedom of assembly, and liberty of conscience. The new bureau became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). However, Eastman’s hopes to shape and oversee that work, keeping it focused on internationalism and global democracy, were not to be. The birth of her child sidelined her while Roger Baldwin, arriving at a critical time for the country and the organization, took charge and made the bureau his own.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
The Right ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This epilogue shows that Hague v. CIO had a legacy more complex than its reputation as a speech rights victory for workers and others over dictatorial city boss Frank Hague under the Bill of Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) immediately split over the decision’s ramifications. Moreover, while the ruling enlarged constitutional protection for the right of public assembly to the benefit of Jehovah’s Witnesses, civil rights demonstrators, and others, it did little to enhance picketing and other “labor speech,” or to shield union organizers from police harassment. And while the decision freed the CIO to organize in Jersey City, it did not destroy Mayor Hague, who accommodated CIO unions and was ousted later due to city politics.

The Social Impact of Sport

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-121
Author(s):  
Joseph Cornelius Spears, Jr. ◽  
Sean T. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
International Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social

The COVID-19 pandemic assumed an international health threat, and in turn, spotlighted the distinct disparities in civil rights, opportunity, and inclusion witnessed by lived experiences of African Americans. Although these harsh disparities have existed through the United States of America's history, the age of technology and mass media in the 21st century allows for a deeper and broader look into the violation of African Americans civil liberties in virtual real time. Also, historically, the sports world has been instrumental in fighting for the civil rights of African Americans; athletes such as Jesse Owens and Muhammed Ali led by example. This chapter will showcase how the sports world continues to support social justice overall and specifically during this international pandemic. The authors will examine contemporary events like the transition in support for Colin Kaepernick's protest against police brutality and the NBA play-off (Bubble) protest in 2020.

Human and Civil Rights and Freedoms in a State of Natural Disaster and Epidemic Emergency

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
Robert Socha ◽  
António Tavares
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
The State ◽  
World Health ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
States Of Emergency ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic

On 11th March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a state of pandemic. In turn, on 21 March 2020, the Minister of Health, by way of a regulation, declared a state of epidemic in the territory of the Republic of Poland. At the same time, the decision resulted in the introduction of many restrictions concerning, inter alia, freedom of movement, assembly and trade. At the same time, discussions started on the constitutionality of the introduced restrictions on civil liberties. Having the above in mind, the aim of this article is to present the correlation in the sphere of limiting or suspending civil liberties in a state of emergency, such as a state of natural disaster, and in “non-emergency” states, such as a state of epidemic threat and a state of pandemic. Although the word “state” appears in the three mentioned legal situations, the state of natural disaster, as one of the three constitutional states of emergency, creates a different legal and socio-political situation than the state of epidemic threat or the state of pandemic. A common feature of the above-mentioned events, however, is that they became a fundamental disruption of the social context of individual and group functioning in connection with the occurrence of a human infectious disease.

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