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Crystal Eastman Quotes
1881–1928 United States
Crystal Catherine Eastman (June 25, 1881 – July 28, 1928) was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She is best remembered as a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, as a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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15 quotes
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.
It takes an exceedingly large-minded liberal to fight for the right of another man to say exactly what he himself does not want said.
If the feminist program goes to pieces at the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless.
The question of woman suffrage is not one that should be cluttering up twentieth century affairs. It belongs back in the eighteenth century.
Seriously, does anyone suppose that love-making has gone out of fashion in California, or marriage fallen off in Wyoming, or the birth rate decreased in Colorado as a result of woman suffrage?
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.
After all these centuries of retirement women need more than an ‘equal opportunity’ to show what’s in them, they need a generous shove into positions of responsibility.
The first thing brought home to me was that working people do not have the ‘luxury of grief.’ The daily tyranny of hard work in their lives leaves little time for pondering the unanswerable ‘Why’ of sorrow.
Feminists are not nuns, that first must be established. We want to love and be loved, and most of us want children, one or two at least. But we want our love to be joyous and free – not clouded with ignorance and fear.
No narrow, nationalistic spirit made the [Russian] revolution…You held out your hands to every people, allied and enemy, and asked them to join you. And you will teach many things to America. You will teach America that there can be no real democracy with the women left out.
The ingenuity and ability which the wife and mother has to exercise in order to buy food and clothing for the family and run the home efficiently should be recognized as productive work… Too many men have the notion that they support their wives.
fundamentally it is a problem of education, of early training-we must bring up feminist sons.
Speech (1920)
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.
For two years the whole Western world has been talking about freedom and democracy. Now that the war is over and it is possible to think calmly once more, we must examine the popular abstractions, and consider (especially here in the America where the boasting has been the loudest) – how much freedom and democracy we actually have.
The fact that warring nations met and discussed the war problems sanely and in friendship while all their male relatives were out shooting each other is to my mind a great and significant event in history…
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