What Are We to Make of the Puzzling Lives of Two of the Leading Women in the Progressive Era?

Crystal Eastman and Virginia Gildersleeve

The Progressives and their contemporaries, whom we are inclined to admire, are hard to like, and hard to understand. By our standards they were often racists, fanatics about alcohol, and curiously uninterested in the point of view of the people they were interested in uplifting. Their personal relations also are peculiar: reformers without professions and thus without professional norms, their organizational lives were mixed with their liaisons. Women pose special problems. Social constraints channeled their activities, and limited them—but also provided opportunities for shared action, some of which, notably the great women’s causes of prohibition and suffrage, were highly consequential.

Biography is the normal way to make sense of such conflicts and contradictions. But sometimes the biography makes the puzzles worse. Two important women, Crystal Eastman and Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, lack biographies, despite appearing in a lot of historical writing. There is a connection between them: they shared social science teachers at Columbia, a few years apart. Yet they followed quite different paths, and are puzzling in different ways. Both of them seem to have been curiously free of doubt. Eastman came by it honestly: she was the daughter of two Preachers, originally Congregationalists, and her mother was tremendously successful, well-known, and self-assured.

Eastman went to Vassar, and then to Columbia, for an MA in Social Science, an experience that cured her of academic life, but provided valuable relationships, and got her working at a settlement house. She took a one-year course at NYU law school, moved into the reform world, joining the Pittsburgh Survey to do a volume on work accidents, which she had hoped to make a legal career around. Law offices closed their door to her, but she impressed one of her professors at Vassar enough to intervene on her behalf and get her appointed as the only paid employee on a state commission to write a law on workplace injuries. She gave speeches, and became a visible figure in the reform world, while at the same time managing a number of relationships and entering into the bohemian world of Greenwich Village. By 1910 she was a star.

Virginia Gildersleeve pursued a more prosaic path: Barnard, then a history MA with James Harvey Robinson who she admired (and which would make her at least an honorary “Progressive”), and exposure to the grand figures of Columbia, including Franklin Giddings, who Crystal had also taken a course or two from, and Nicholas Murray Butler, teaching the history of philosophy—a consequential connection. She was given an opportunity to teach English at Barnard, realized that she needed a Ph.D. to advance, received one at Columbia, where she found herself treated with complete equality in relation to the male students, and at long last was appointed as an Assistant Professor in 1910 at Barnard.

The year 1910 was a big year for each of them. Crystal’s volume of the Pittsburgh survey on workplace accidents appeared, and her draft of the New York worker’s compensation legislation was enacted into law. Gildersleeve was appointed Dean at Barnard, a position that had been the source of trouble for much of the decade and was long vacant, shortly after the death of Crystal’s mother Annis, who had been promoted for the job by some Barnard alumni. The job, as offered, was essentially to be an authoritative adult chaperone for Barnard’s girls. Gildersleeve was having none of that—she demanded, and got, academic control. They were young, famous, soon to become more famous—through Crystal’s opposition to the Great War and Gildersleeve’s support of it—and both remained on the world stage the rest of their lives (long for Gildersleeve, tragically short for Eastman).

Crystal went on to marry, move to Wisconsin where she failed in her campaign for women’s suffrage, divorced, returned to New York to take up the anti-war cause, where she created a women’s peace organization. She also founded the predecessor to the ACLU (and arguably the ACLU itself), worked for The Liberator, which proved a bad fit, gave many stirring speeches, continued as a witness to the postwar revolutions (interviewing Gyorgy Lukas during his stint as minister of culture), remarried and moved to England, where she found her way to women’s circles but was not able to make a living off of journalism. She had children, returned to the US, and succumbed to kidney ailments in 1928. She was praised in an obituary in The Nation, for her passion and charisma.

Gildersleeve went on to many positions on New York commissions, fought successfully for the admission of Barnard women and all women to Columbia’s professional schools, reformed conditions for female faculty, spoke out for Al Smith on the radio, created an organization of national university women’s associations, served on boards, took up with Caroline Spurgeon, the first female professor of English in England, spent summers with her and other women in Sussex, became familiar with the Middle East, and worked to make Barnard a national institution, hiring a number of top-rate faculty, providing for such people as Zora Neale Hurston and Mirra Komarovsky. After the Second World War, at retirement age, she was one of five US delegates to the UN founding, and influenced the writing of the preamble. On retirement, she spoke out against the Zionists, and predicted that founding the new state of Israel, which she rejected as an affront to democratic principles, would produce unending conflict.

Neither has a biography, though Gildersleeve has an autobiography and Crystal appears repeatedly in the autobiographical writings of her brother Max. Why are they so puzzling? Perhaps it is the ambiguities. With Crystal Eastman, there is a question of whether what she did had any real consequences, or whether she was largely an energetic bystander with few ideas of her own. Efforts to construct an intellectual genealogy for her do not work: she was not an intellectual, and her positions were neither original nor particularly sophisticated. She was a gender egalitarian, not a theorist of sexism or patriarchy. Her opposition to World War I was, arguably, naïve; her support of constitutional rights was inconsistent with the “advanced” pragmatist view of law of her peers.

Gildersleeve is equally puzzling. She has been dismissed as a mere tool of Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, and accused of anti-Semitism for her support for the Palestinians and for a few remarks on eastern European Jewish applicants to Barnard. She stayed within the organizational machinery of women’s movements, and was devoted to women’s education—both of which became less important with the rise of co-education. The slow work of administration and committee work leaves little in the way of a signature. Yet she was a successful, and able academic warrior, dealing with the difficult Annie Meyer, long serving alumnus and board member of Barnard, navigating the decanal politics of Columbia, and showing her toughness and independence of mind in the judgments she made. What is missing is a sense of what motivated her, intellectually, and where her moral center was.

In Weberian terms, Eastman was a conviction politician who was unconcerned with short term success. Gildersleeve was the consummate follower of the ethic of responsibility, leaving little evidence of her ideals. But in the end, when she was free of the responsibilities of Barnard, she took an unpopular stand—becoming as Weber himself put it, an unwilling Cassandra. Both led frenetic lives of activism. The puzzle is whether there was any depth beneath it, and what was in those depths: a subtle moral standpoint that neither would articulate, or deeper kinds of animus driven by the privileged resentments and sense of moral superiority that were the dark side of Progressivism, and were intertwined throughout?