Washington Lawyer - May 2020 - 49

SPECIAL SEC TION
as long as she invested
herself infinitely, without
reserve, and refused to ever
forsake her ideals.

Oxford University Press

Was Eastman a pioneer
on the work-life balance
front, too?
Crystal fell in love with British
editor and antiwar activist
Walter Fuller in 1916 while
working together on a huge,
immersive, traveling protest
exhibition against World War
I. It was exhilarating, successful, and one of the most
fulfilling experiences either
of them would have in their
professional lives.
As they navigated their
romance, both Walter and
Crystal wanted an egalitarian relationship free of convention and the many compulsory elements
they believed deadly to an authentic love-partnership. But Crystal also
longed for a family. Deeply. She wrote in an unpublished manuscript
I found that she wanted children more than anything else life could bring
- more, she wrote, "than love or fame or fortune, and more than all
together." Their first child was conceived in the midst of the exhibition
tour in the summer of 1916 and born six months after their quiet
marriage.
In any case, having a family magnified the difficulties and negotiations
involved in bringing feminism into family life and creating an egalitarian
balance.
At first, everything seemed to work. They had one child, and both were
steadily employed in stimulating and flexible jobs: Crystal as the managing
editor of The Liberator, and Walter as editor of a pacifist magazine called The
World Tomorrow. They could afford childcare and household help. They
enjoyed equal measures of time together as a family, time as a couple, time
with mutual friends, and, importantly, time in their independent lives. But
a second child changed the dynamics, especially since their daughter was
born at the end of Crystal's time at The Liberator, which was the only
anchored venue for her life and her work that she ever had.
Moving to London, Walter's home turf, they tried "marriage under two
roofs" - that is, living as a married couple but in separate households, near
each other and sharing financial responsibilities for their children. Marriage
under two roofs did not mean children under two roofs. Crystal insisted the
children live with her, but that meant in most respects she functioned as a
single parent. Walter's rent and board were chronically in arrears.
In Crystal's experience, her two-roof arrangement created an à la carte
menu of family participation for her husband that often amounted to a
daily buffet requiring her to shop, plan, cook, and clean up.
Ultimately, Walter and Crystal's love could not conquer all this. Crystal continued to innovate and question and search all her life for ways to realize
feminism in both the public and the private sphere. Some of her best

writing and later activism focused on this quest, which remains compelling
to this day.
Eastman and Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment nearly a
century ago. This year Virginia became the 38th state to approve the
ERA, and the amendment faces more legislative hurdles. What do
you suppose Eastman would've made of this? Was she an optimist?
Eastman would have been frustrated that the ERA took this long to achieve
approval by the required three-fourths of the states, but she would not
have been surprised by the contemporary controversy. In fact, the legal
debate would have sounded somewhat familiar to her.
When the ERA was introduced into Congress in December 1923, it was a
strategic policy response. The National Woman's Party (NWP) had spent
two long years in intensive state-by-state lobbying to remove individual,
sex-specific discriminations in the law, only to achieve very modest results.
The amendment articulated a single yet comprehensive goal, a new "Great
Demand" much like the suffrage amendment had been: "Equality of rights
under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any
state on account of sex."
Elegant as this all-encompassing simplicity may have seemed inside the
NWP, the ERA splintered coalitions in the women's movement. It alienated
a whole network of political groups with which the NWP had been either
partly or largely aligned. Particularly, it divided NWP feminists from labor
women, progressives, some international labor unionists, and many other
suffragists who for years had successfully championed protective legislation
for women - laws to keep women legally barred from the most dangerous industrial jobs, to guarantee them distinctive contract conditions
such as a 48-hour workweek, and to eradicate child labor. Many allied activists saw the ERA as a threat to social welfare legislation they had struggled
for two decades to see enacted.
But as Eastman saw it, feminists advocating for the ERA were not opposed
to laws improving the labor conditions; they merely claimed these workplace protections should apply equally to men and women alike. She and
the NWP believed that any gender-based distinctions under law were ultimately a threat to all women in all areas of their lives. As long as women
could be the objects of special legislation along any line, they argued,
women could be targeted for special restriction along any other.
Today, the ERA debate involves the timeline of its passage and also a similar
theme about the best way to eradicate gender discrimination and ensure
equal protection. Some leading legal scholars today find that in the
decades since 1982, the original deadline for ratification, the United States
has developed a "de facto" ERA. They argue that equal protection doctrine
prohibiting sex discrimination has successfully been forged in the law in the
wake of the ERA's defeat.
But even in the context of these clear gains, some feminist activists contend
what Eastman and the NWP did in the years following the ERA's introduction
into Congress nearly a century ago: that legislation can be repealed or circumvented, that legal decisions can be overturned. The strongest way to prohibit
sex discrimination and ensure equal protection is to ratify the ERA, they argue,
safeguarding gender equality under law as a constitutional principle.

Tracy Schorn is a writer based in Washington, D.C.

MAY 2020

WASHINGTON LAWYER 49

Washington Lawyer - May 2020

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