Crystal Eastman and the Right to Vote: "Now We Can Begin"

Crystal Eastman

“Freedom is a large word,” said Crystal Eastman, feminist lawyer and social reformer, in her groundbreaking speech, “Now We Can Begin.”

She published a text of her speech in December 1920 after ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the equal right to vote. 

Her views, considered radical at the time, polarized her audience in sometimes bitter language. Stating seemingly radical values with stark word choice and isocolonic sentence structure, that is, using a balance and contrast formula like “there is this, and there is that.” Eastman accentuated two opposing viewpoints. Never one to be satisfied with mere victory, she said this ratification per se was no accomplishment at all, but merely a time to begin the real work.

She immediately polarized the response between presumably conservative men and enthusiastic women:

“Men are saying perhaps, ‘Thank God, this everlasting woman’s fight is over!’ But women, if I know them, are saying, ‘Now at last we can begin.’ Most women will agree that August 23, the day when the Tennessee legislature finally enacted the Federal suffrage amendment, is a day to begin with, not a day to end with.”

The balance-and-contrast language presented two opposing poles: “Men are saying...but women ... are saying.” She offered no middle ground, supported no status quo!

So, instead of seeking moderation, Eastman reminded women that getting the vote meant nothing more than the chance to vote for their own independence, opportunity, and freedom. She polarized the issues into opposing concepts. Freedom versus subservience. Men versus women. Freedom versus an oppressive economic system. Tradition versus progress.

The idea behind polarization is not to gain majority support for one’s opinions, but rather to force people into opposing attitudes, thus motivating one’s supporters. Radical speakers don’t expect to get a majority, nor do they look to gain milquetoast support from milquetoast supporters. Instead, they seek dedicated workers who commit themselves to the cause. A polarizing speaker does not mind offending people. She does, however, mind very much if an apathetic crowd stumbles out of the lecture hall, bored to a stupor.

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Turning to policy, Eastman equated women’s rights with the liberation of poverty-stricken countries:

“What they [women] are after, in common with all the rest of the struggling world, is freedom.” [italics added]

Eastman’s dramatic phrase “struggling world” sharply identified American women with the world’s oppressed people. “Struggling world” implied that American women were not living in the more advanced world that American men inhabited. Then, as it would now, to equate American women with the suffering poor of impoverished nations must have shocked people.

Yet, paradoxically, Eastman did not totally assume that American men were thriving. Consistent with her era’s version of socialism, she decried wage labor as tantamount to slavery:

“The vast majority of women as well as men are without property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves.” [italics added]

“Slaves’ was obvious hyperbole, further encouraging polarization.

Next, pounding on issues that only voting might cure, Eastman decried laws and social customs that

1920 Poster

suppressed women and blocked their self-advancement. She attacked social norms that barred women from seeking success. Emphasizing that the vote, and only the vote, could achieve her goals, Eastman proposed particular solutions:

“How shall we approach this next feminist objective? First, by breaking down all remaining barriers, actual as well as legal, which make it difficult for women to enter or succeed in the various professions, to go into and get on in business, to learn trades and practice them, to join trades unions.” [italics added]

By this point, Eastman was speaking for social reform, not just legal changes: “actual as well as legal.”

We must recall that United States was industrializing rapidly in the early 20th century. The country was transforming from a farming society into an industrial nation. As factories sprang up, young people often sought the economic security that farm life no longer offered. In that changing economy, Eastman insisted that women could participate in the changing world only when traditional barriers were removed. In that light, her pro-women goals included legalizing birth control, equalizing education, and removing artificial barriers that blocked women’s progress:

“With all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed,… with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing.” [italics added]

“All special barriers” emphasized that women suffered, not because they were inferior, but because men had passed laws and adopted social customs that prevented women from advancing. The term “special” highlighted the division, the polarization, between men’s rights of men and women’s rights.

Industrial development had, inevitably, left many people behind. Old legal structures blocked women from entering the new economy. That is why Eastman insisted that only the right to vote could accomplish that goal.

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Eastman’s policies were shockingly liberal by her era’s standards. Yes, women had by 1920 advanced past the horrors of an Anne Brontë novel, but there was still much progress to make, and Eastman never hesitated to display her bitterness toward injustices. She knew that her opponents often derided women as inherently inferior. Indeed, only this year did Virgina fully legalize birth control. Abortion is often still forbidden, even when medically required. In my youth in the 1950s, the word spread around my school in conservative Virginia that the only professions available to women were nursing, teaching, and secretarial work. Furthermore, as late as the 1970s, women still sometimes had trouble getting credit from banks, buying a house in their own names, or even opening checking accounts.

For such considerations, Eastman used the two-pronged tactic of polarization. She identified problems, proposed solutions, and expressed outrage. Yes, a speech like hers would surely offend middle of the road people. So what? She was not talking to middle-of-the-road people. Instead, she energized people who would contend, work, and struggle for massive social and legal changes. Eastman’s forcefulness, sarcasm, and, let us be frank, bitterness coalesced to create her persuasive strategy.

Throughout this speech, Eastman ignored slanders against women, seeking their economic and moral advancement instead of giving moral reproach, until, seemingly out of nowhere, she reached her speech’s sudden, startlingly caustic, final words about women:

“It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”

by William D. Harpine 

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Historical Note: Eastman published her speech in The Liberator, a left-wing political magazine that she and her brother co-founded. Eastman also co-authored an early version of the Equal Rights [for women] Amendment that the United States has often debated but never ratified. Does that mean that Eastman’s rhetoric ranged too far, in too radical a direction? Or does it mean that her work is, a century later, still incomplete? Worse, does it mean that we are still too polarized to act?

Eastman co-founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which evolved into the American Civil Liberties Union.

Copyright ©2026 by William D. Harpine

Image of Crystal Eastman, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of voting poster, public domain, via Wikimedia Common