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.

Steve Bannon's Polarizing Value Voters Summit Speech

 
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.

Susan B. Anthony's Famous Speech about the Right to Vote

Sojourner Truth's Speech on Women's Rights

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

Sojourner Truth in 1867: Keep the Thing Stirring!

Sojourner Truth

“I feel,” said Sojourner Truth, “that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man.”

On May 9, 1867, Sojourner Truth, a former slave and famous abolitionist speaker, pressed for women’s economic rights in a metaphor-filled speech. She was speaking at the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, held at the Church of the Puritans in New York City. She spoke in metaphors to accentuate women's rights.

As she spoke, such metaphors as weeding the garden, riding horses, and healing a knife wound expressed the path toward economic equality. Metaphors, which link seemingly unrelated concepts, strike to our deepest feelings. Sojourner Truth’s speech about justice for women surely seemed radical in 1867. Yet, the problems of justice and freedom that she described in 1867 still plague the United States, indeed the world, even to this day. Indeed, just last year, the Pew Foundation found that, “even as women have continued to outpace men in educational attainment, the pay gap has been stuck in a holding pattern since 2002, ranging from 80 to 85 cents to the dollar.”

As she began, standing to applause, Sojourner Truth compared the oppression of women to the recent abolition of slavery:

“My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field—the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed.”

That was a metaphor.  Any gardener, then or now, knows that it is never enough to pull the leaves. Only when the weed has been destroyed, as Sojourner Truth said, “root and branch,” do we know that it will never grow back. Now that chattel slavery had been abolished, Sojourner Truth argued that it was time to push for women’s rights. She made her next point with a metaphor about ice fishing. A New Yorker, she knew that ice fishing requires one not only to break the ice, but to keep stirring to prevent the pond from freezing over again:

“I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.”

Church of the Pilgrims

The speaker had already warned that the audience might not be happy about everything he had to say. The end of the Civil War and the destruction of legalized slavery was a massive blow for freedom. It was, she said, not enough: not until women achieved the same rights as men. 

And, she said, it was not enough to talk about men’s rights:

“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women,” Sojourner Truth stated as she pushed for women’s rights. 

“Stir” continued the idea of “stirring” the ice. As a true agitator, Sojourner Truth sought to continue agitation until women, including freed women, had the same rights as men. Otherwise, she pointed out, women’s lot will not have improved at all:

“… and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Progressive Traditionalist. Will We Live up to Our Values?

Frederick Douglass’ 1852 Fourth of July Speech and the Christian Right

A master, of course, demands work without pay. That is not only a moral fault, but also an economic incentive. That is why it made sense when Sojourner Truth recounted the metaphorical chains that still held women to unequal pay for equal work:

“I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do, I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain. I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay; so with the German women.”

That is, just like a modern feminist, Sojourner Truth pointed out that women “did not get as much pay.” The problem that she alleged was that while, people viewed the end of slavery as a great triumph, they felt content—too content—to rest without fighting all injustice. Still comparing the oppression of women to slavery, she said:

“You [presumably speaking to men in the audience] have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.”

It will feel all the better? Sojourner Truth harshly told the nation to get over their pain, to understand that everything would be better if the nation could heal: again, the speaker’s metaphor drove home a deeper reality. Yes, it hurts to give up power, but, yes again, a nation that heals will be better off. “It will feel all the better,” she said.

Finally, noting that nobody at the conference had been singing, Sojourner Truth said:

“I am going to talk several times while I am here; so now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here.”

After singing the old standard, “We Are Going Home,” she reminded the audience that, before they get to heaven, “first do all we have to do here.”

As the audience listened to her sing, Sojourner Truth had already compared the unequal treatment of women to chattel slavery, spoken against the bonds that unjustly restrict women, and propounded metaphors about everyday life: cracking the ice, breaking chains, turning loose of the reins of injustice, and healing the cuts. She reduced the problem to basic economics: equal pay for equal work. Anything less was trickle-down slavery. And she sang.

The ultimate evil of slavery, of course, is that masters force enslaved Americans to work under conditions of unfathomable cruelty, with no control over their destiny, and without compensation. The institution of slavery continued for centuries because masters gained such a huge economic advantage from unpaid labor. Slavery’s wickedness was a moral failing, but economic gain was its obvious cause. 

In her 1867 speech, Sojourner Truth pointed out the continuing injustice that occurred when women are oppressed economically. Her metaphors brought the injustice to life.

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Research note:

1. It is often surprisingly hard to get accurate texts of even the most famous speeches. Sojourner Truth’s 1851 Akron, Ohio speech, “Aren’t I a Woman?” is more famous. However, communication scholars have known for many years that the published text of “Aren’t I a Woman?” is not accurate. Sojourner Truth’s 1867 speech, which I discuss in this blog post, was recorded by a shorthand reporter, and so the text probably comes reasonably close to what she said and gives us a better idea of her actual speaking style.

2. Scholars have given many excellent discussions of the role of metaphors in rhetoric. In his ground-breaking book, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, I. A. Richards argues that all language is basically metaphorical. For example, when we talk about “the leg of the table,” we know perfectly well that tables don’t really have legs. It’s a metaphor. Richards showed that metaphors can carry literal and emotional meaning. Anyway, for people who want to learn more about metaphors and rhetoric, Richards’ book is probably a good place to start. 

by William D. Harpine

Copyright © 2024, William D. Harpine

Image of Sojourner Truth, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of the The Church of the Pilgrims, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons