Abstract
On a cold New York City February day in 1914, a crowd gathered for a Cooper Union event titled “What Is Feminism?” Crystal Eastman, one of many speakers, had a simple answer, “freedom in work and freedom in play.” She clarified with a flourish, “God meant the whole rich world of work and play and adventure for women as well as men. It is high time for us to enter our heritage—that is my feminist faith” (Aronson, p. 115). Eastman—lawyer, labor activist, and peace campaigner—more than claimed her heritage. More than fifty years later, fellow lawyer, labor activist, and peace campaigner, Bella Abzug, also firmly present in the world of work and play, campaigned to represent New York City’s nineteenth district in the U.S. Congress. Abzug entered Eastman’s “whole rich world” with a critical eye, however, proclaiming, “Our great society is sick, and the major reason is that our priorities are insane” (Zarnow, p. 98). She took on the city block by block, addressing parents’ groups, block associations, peace action committees, and feminist organizations with proposals to cure society’s ills by addressing problems she saw on the city’s streets. Both Eastman and Abzug centered their lives of work and play around the politics of public caretaking—a strategy born in a city that demonstrated daily just how much care was required.
In Battling Bella, Leandra Ruth Zarnow argues that Abzug spearheaded a new movement in 1970s Democratic Party politics. An avowed feminist, she led a persistent campaign to make women more visible in American political life. An antiwar, peace activist, she opposed the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, and as a labor lawyer, Abzug urged the government to support civil liberties and address economic and social inequality. Zarnow traces the ways that Abzug built her tripart political agenda on her early commitment to the Popular Front during the New Deal era.
Although born only a few decades before the congresswoman, Crystal Eastman was barred from political office, and indeed from political representation altogether. Despite these limitations, the National Women’s Party suffragist, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) co-founder, and antiwar internationalist shouldered an outsized share of public responsibilities. Both Abzug and Eastman claimed a tripart political agenda that centered labor, peace, and feminism. In many ways, Eastman’s life reads as antithetical to Abzug’s. Abzug was a celebrity who was the repeated subject of artists like Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, and cartoonist Gary Trudeau. Eastman is little remembered. Indeed, in Crystal Eastman, Amy Aronson puzzles over her historical neglect, claiming that her obscurity lay in her ideology. Eastman was an outsider even a gadfly within the multiple causes she led and supported. She married her quest for women’s suffrage and her antiwar crusade with a socialist critique of capitalism which put her on the outs with more conservative peace crusaders, and she clung too tightly to the notion of feminine difference for her strictly egalitarian suffragist counterparts. Aronson asserts that Eastman “fell through the main planks of historical memory” (Aronson, p. 11).
The women’s differences in historical birthright and remembrance are outweighed by their similarities. Those resemblances illustrate gender historian Judith Bennett’s maxim about the importance of examining historical continuities if we are to understand women in the modern world where “their perceived difference from men has consistently limited their potential.” 1 Examining Zarnow’s and Aronson’s explorations in tandem reveals the ways that twentieth-century American women’s status remained static despite the rapid succession of seismic events they witnessed. Left leaning iconoclasts, both Eastman and Abzug became lawyers who started their careers by targeting big businesses on behalf of working people. Both rallied against war, each tackling, respectively, the two major conflicts that bookended the twentieth century, World War I and Vietnam. And the women shared a feminist disappointment that reverberates today, participating in parallel quests for a constitutional amendment that never materialized. A formative likeness between the two women offers some explanation for their similar trajectories. Their chosen community, New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, shaped their values and habituated them to lives centered around activism and the politics of care.
Crystal Eastman became a part of Greenwich Village as a matter of convenience. She entered law school at the New York University (NYU) and looked for a job nearby. A couple of employment agencies and the local legal aid society directed her to a converted boardinghouse at 26 Jones Street, the Greenwich House Settlement, which was looking for someone to help with evening exercises. Eastman took the job, started the semester, and found a little room on Washington Square right between the university and the settlement house. Her job became her home; she took her meals with locals, mostly from the Jones Street block which hosted 1,400 people who lived in the nine boarding houses and multiple tenements nearby. Along with another settlement, on Henry Street not far away on the Lower East Side, the Greenwich House was a hub for New York City progressive reformers. There, Eastman dined with agitators including photographer Jacob Riis, ethicist Felix Adler, and pioneering social worker Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch. Aronson delights in unweaving a tangle of threads between the people in Eastman’s life to make sense of the encyclopedic list of early twentieth-century labor, peace, and suffrage luminaries who would pop in and out of her acquaintance at the wide Greenwich House table.
Eastman felt “perfectly at home” in her new community and was drawn by the sheer numbers of men, women, and especially children on the block, “thousands of them everywhere, little girls playing and singing games in the middle of the street, and boys running in and out, chasing each other, throwing balls, building fires, fighting, laughing, shouting” (Aronson, p. 63). Although Eastman was not raised in the city, the chaos of the neighborhood was not as jarring to her sensibilities as one might have expected. Her childhood in Elmira, New York, was not a conventional one. Her father was a Congregationalist minister who retired early due to ill-health and Eastman’s mother took his place at the pulpit. Later, Annis Eastman was ordained at Brooklyn’s Park Church by the abolitionist Thomas Beecher and assumed a pastorship in upstate New York.
Eastman’s childhood memories gathered in “Mother-Worship,” her final published work, allow Aronson to shed light on her subject’s conflicted persona. Aronson cleverly compares the finished product with a first draft, vigorously cut by Frieda Kirchway, Eastman’s friend and editor of The Nation. By drawing attention to the paragraphs Kirchway left on the cutting room floor, Aronson reveals Eastman’s two sides—one revealed in private and the other more public facing. According to Aronson, Kirchway cut first draft passages revealing heightened emotion, and thus, a more progressive, feminist version of the article remained. Thus, Aronson sets the stage for her core argument: Eastman was a double-sided character, a lifelong activist for women’s equal rights who confessed her idealized feminine architype, her “gay, sparkling, humorous, intimate, adorable, mother.” Aronson uses Kirchway’s edits to reveal Eastman who “lived her life as a mixture of suffrage successor, rebellious modern, and dutiful daughter, an original compound” (Aronson, p. 35).
By acknowledging Eastman’s conflicted nature, Aronson presents the young law student, toggling between NYU Law School and Greenwich House, as an idealist with telling limits. Eastman wrote her brother Max, famed editor of the Masses and the Liberator, whom she pressed to join her in the city, “I love it so for the people that are there and the thousands of things they do and think about . . . of course, I don’t mean the rich ones that drive up and down Fifth Ave., nor the very poor ones, who merely make me sad” (Aronson, p. 63). At Greenwich House, Eastman found that the circumstances that sustained that division between the unloved rich and poor was foremost in the minds of the “doers and thinkers” she so admired, especially her fellow students. For example, Eastman’s roommate Madeleine Doty infiltrated New York State’s prison compound in Auburn, New York, to investigate and publicize its conditions and went on to become New York State’s first female prison commissioner. Doty and Eastman’s apartment became a social hub for their NYU School of Law classmates. Their circle included the suffragist and poet, Ida Raugh, who later married Eastman’s brother Max, and Inez Mulholland, a labor lawyer and famed beauty on horseback who led the Washington, D.C., suffragist parade in 1913. Law students like Eastman and Doty were rare indeed, but at NYU far less so than at almost anywhere else. Although they might graduate, and even some—at the top of their class—like Eastman, they rarely found work as attorneys at male-dominated firms. Eastman was no exception, and after passing the bar, she could not find work. Instead, she drew on her sociological training and Greenwich House inclinations to start a career in social research and labor reform.
Eastman joined progressive journalist Paul Kellogg, a lifelong friend from Greenwich House, on his abiding project, the Pittsburgh Survey, a sociological study documenting the conditions in the steel town dominated by what Kellogg called, “bad water, bad air, bad houses, and bad hours” (Aronson, p. 71). Aronson provides a riveting account of Eastman’s tenure as an investigator in what “promised to be the most comprehensive study of urban industrial life ever undertaken in American history” (Aronson, p. 72). Eastman investigated industrial accidents and drew from her graduate school training in sociology to research death certificates, conduct interviews, examine machinery, and visit homes. Eastman uncovered a system which created, depended on, and perpetuated a near constant series of threats to workers’ bodies. She reported on massive explosions, detailing their causes—blasts of air, igniting coke, and boiling metal. She dug into the material stuff of accidents: furnaces, dynamite, and cranes with “heavy adjustable chains” grasping impossible loads operated by exhausted overworked men. Eastman also recommended immediate solutions and found ways to legislate change and utilized her legal training to press for compensation for victims through her discovery of an 1855 Pennsylvania wrongful death statute.
While working on the survey, Eastman lived in a cooperative called Bethany which happened to be next door to a Pittsburgh settlement house where lawyer and famed child labor advocate Florence Kelley often visited. Eastman and Kelley eventually developed a working relationship which lasted for decades. Aronson uses this relationship to interrogate the sometimes-contentious discourse between an earlier generation of women reformers like Kelley and a later generation of suffragists, including Eastman. Kelley advocated for women’s labor reform based on the same arguments she used to press for child labor laws—by highlighting their unique vulnerabilities. Kelley maintained that women workers required special protection because of their reproductive capacities and responsibilities. This approach was later targeted by equal rights feminists who called for strictly impartial treatment for women, not as child-bearers but as fully equal citizens.
Shortly after she completed her survey contribution, Eastman failed, once again, to find a position in a law firm. The law, Aronson reminds us, “resisted women’s entry more resolutely than any other major American profession” (Aronson, p. 101). Eastman found an alternative and jumped with both feet into the suffrage fight and represented the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Wisconsin. She found herself caught in a divide between suffragists drawn along the same generational lines separating women labor reformers. Through a clever analysis of Eastman’s speeches on behalf of suffrage, Aronson demonstrates the ways she toed the line between a firm belief in feminine equality and exceptionalism. Eastman argued on behalf of suffrage for women wage earners working “side by side with men” and for “mothers and homemakers to represent their business interests in the home” (Aronson, p. 105). It is easy to see how Eastman’s double vision seemed cloudy to many of her contemporaries, including her fellow National Women’s Party suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.
Eastman’s embrace of feminine equality and exceptionalism was perfectly suited to her next activist campaign: the struggle against American entry into World War I. After leaving Wisconsin with a disappointing result against suffrage in the state election, Eastman returned to New York City, to start the New York City Women’s Peace Party (WPP). In a letter to the group’s new national chair Jane Addams, Eastman stated that peace was a protest particularly suited to women, because they “are mothers or potential mothers and therefore have a more intimate sense of the value of human life” (Aronson, p. 129). Aronson attributes Eastman’s “tussle at the boundary” between equality and difference to a body and mind divide—her private feelings versus her rational commitment to a just politics. During the war, Eastman found a way to blend her conflicted inclinations to build a robust campaign against the war by defending the civil liberties of antiwar advocates in a group she helped to found—the Civil Liberties Bureau which would become the ACLU.
While Aronson ponders Eastman’s abiding obscurity, Leandra Ruth Zarnow does the opposite and interrogates the forces that brought Bella Abzug remarkable fame. In a world where women were routinely overlooked, Zarnow argues, Abzug was determined to be seen. But she did not merely seek attention; she directed her notice outward. Zarnow frames her story around Abzug’s most abiding activist aims—labor, peace, and women’s rights. Much like Eastman, Abzug became engaged with labor issues early in her career. For Eastman, however, necessity opened the door—the Pittsburgh Survey was her only viable option. For Abzug, born a generation later, the path forward, though still narrow, was slightly wider. She attended Columbia University School of Law, one of only nine women to do so. Unlike Eastman, Abzug found a position at a prominent labor law firm but faced a glass ceiling and failed to make partner. In 1948, she struck out on her own and started to advocate for women in the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a progressive bar association for leftists and New Deal Democrats.
Abzug’s first decade with the guild were tough ones for the association. By 1948, as tensions rose between the United States and the Soviet Union, membership in the NLG was becoming dangerous. U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy ordered wiretaps at the group’s headquarters, and Abzug herself was questioned before two grand juries in 1949 and 1951. During those years, Abzug defended Willie McGee, a Black Mississippian accused of rape and sentenced to execution. Abzug traveled south to defend McGee in part because local attorneys, threatened with disbarment and violence, would not take the case. Abzug was not welcomed, and when she arrived in town, the local hotel refused her and she spent the night in the bus station. She framed her defense around the fact that McGee’s relationship with the victim was consensual, echoing reformer Ida B. Well’s argument from decades before that rape law “moved far from its original intent to protect women to become the leading mechanism to police the sexual color line” (Zarnow, p. 31). Abzug’s defense failed. McGee was executed in Laurel, Mississippi, in May 1951. Zarnow asserts that after McGee’s conviction and subsequent death, Abzug lost faith in court fights.
The tragic outcome of the McGee case was not the only factor in Abzug’s loss of faith. She found that like private law firms, the NLG also had a glass ceiling—holding office on its board was unattainable for women. In addition, Abzug found that activism was a quicker path to political change than the slow incrementalism of the court room. In 1961, shortly after its inception, she joined the women’s disarmament group Women Strike for Peace (WSP), to direct its political affairs. The group emerged as a one-day national peace protest which included thousands of women from across the nation. Much like the previous generation’s WPP, the group had branches in multiple cities. And like Eastman’s New York City WPP branch, Abzug’s New York City WSP was a particularly radical satellite. Abzug’s experiences with the peace group are key for Zarnow’s central argument: the popular front politics Abzug practiced during her college years in the 1930s and through her 1950s NLG years coalesced in her peace activism at the WSP. And the peace politics of the WSP was a vital crucible for the New Left of the 1960s. Here, Zarnow builds on the work of peace historian Amy Swerdlow and brings to light the ignored women-led roots that nurtured the anti-Vietnam movement.
The WSP was an unlikely forebear to the male-centered counter cultural protests that followed in its wake. The group featured caretakers who centered motherhood, protested in white gloves, and raised concerns about children’s safety in schools and potentially radioactive milk. Abzug embraced this mission and saw her WSP work as “an extension of her motherly love.” But, Zarnow is careful to point out, Abzug viewed the antinuclear group against a political backdrop as well, and believed that it could “foster a left-liberal partnership” that countered the Cold War ideology that permeated the Democratic party. Abzug’s politics, rooted in the labor of care, are the missing link that connects the New Deal to the New Left (Zarnow, p. 42).
WSP women centered their caretaking roles; they were motivated by the fear that their children would not grow up because of the Cold War. But they were also a coalition of political women. Abzug’s and the WSP’s political aim, that of protecting bodies by preventing nuclear destruction, centered on caretaking—a mission that was closely connected with the older New Deal goal of addressing precarity by offering protection from poverty. By 1961, decades of Cold War politics and its consequent military spending had eroded the Democratic Party’s caretaking commitment. Zarnow deftly points out that, as the WSP’s political director, Abzug discovered a practical way to restore the party’s aims by identifying a missing electorate or a group of potential voters whom the New Deal Democrats left behind: women and minorities. Thus, Abzug opened the door to a “new kind of radical liberalism,” and her New York City apartment became its epicenter.
Abzug carried that radical liberalism she practiced as a lawyer and a peace activist into the U.S. Congress where she served as a representative for three successive terms for two New York City districts. Her career in the Congress from 1971 to 1977 is the heart of Zarnow’s rich political narrative. The key to the story, however, is the antiwar politics that launched it. Zarnow universalizes Abzug’s experience by asserting that “antiwar politics was linked to the legitimacy of women’s politics” (Zarnow, p. 64). Zarnow beckons her readers to pause and grasp her meaning—peace, protection, and care constituted a cultural starting place for women in twentieth-century politics where their roles were defined by motherhood. Abzug’s catalyzing antiwar position would be very easy to ignore given the tsunami of political ideas and aims that Abzug introduced and supported during her congressional tenure. Zarnow does full justice to them in her portrayal.
Abzug opened her congressional career with a firm nod to her peace commitments as well as her feminist principles by reading a resolution to end the war in Vietnam. She urged government leaders to use wealth for life, not death, and to end sexual discrimination. Although Battling Bella includes the familiar picture of Abzug as a speechifying powerhouse in a hat and dress, Zarnow’s textured telling portrays a serious congressmember bent on building coalitions—especially with women, changing congressional procedure, and introducing legislation.
Abzug’s political career reveals the chief difference between Crystal Eastman’s and Bella Abzug’s trajectories. Their diverging paths—Abzug blazed forward as an officially sanctioned federal decision-maker and Eastman trudged along as an activist outsider—were contingent on the twentieth-century decades which separated them. Because national suffrage was not yet law, Eastman and her colleagues’ practical political strategies were limited in ways that Abzug’s strategies were not. Eastman was very much involved in the suffrage campaign that eliminated that barrier, but she did not see herself as an active political player in ways that Abzug did. Even so, the battles they fought were remarkably similar. Both began their careers pressing for legal rights asserting bodily protection. Eastman advocated workers’ safety and compensation, and Abzug defended the right to a fair trial to prevent execution. Eastman and the WPP aimed to protect bodies from military destruction, albeit a less technologically enhanced form of annihilation than offered through the atom bomb which Abzug and her WSP colleagues protested four decades later.
In a telling parallel, which reveals the limits of women’s twentieth-century quest for equal status, both Eastman and Abzug spent their final public years advocating for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The first attempt, drafted by Alice Paul with Eastman’s support and assistance, was introduced to Congress in 1923 but never reached either floor for a vote. The second attempt, supported by Abzug, was passed by both houses in Congress by 1972, but failed to be ratified by the states. Zarnow registers Abzug’s disappointment as published in her final work, Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women, where she and her co-author and long-time political partner Mim Kelber foretold the consequences of the amendment’s defeat: women would be “locked up in an economic ghetto” (Zarnow, p. 296).
In 1924, shortly after the ERA failed to find its floor vote, Eastman launched one of her final activist campaigns, the Women for Congress Campaign (WCC). Her work demonstrated her understanding that women’s equality would only be accomplished by elected women. Eastman, who spent the greatest portion of her life barred from any voting privilege, particularized her 1914 “feminist faith” which called on women to claim their equal heritage “in the whole rich world.” She now proclaimed, “If women want to be in politics, they must be politicians. They must choose their party and play the political game from the ground up” (Aronson, p. 239). By “embrac[ing] her democratic right to speak freely and loudly in public each day of her life,” Abzug certainly answered Eastman’s call (Zarnow, p. 307).