Crystal Eastman was a lawyer, journalist, feminist and socialist. She was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts in 1881. Her parents were both Congregational Church clergy and were the pastors at a church near Elmira, New York. Her brother was Max Eastman, editor of THE MASSES.
She graduated from Vassar College in 1903, received an MA in Sociology from Columbia University in 1904 and graduated second in her class from New York University Law School in 1907.
Miss Eastman’s first job was to investigate labor conditions for the Pittsburgh Survey sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Her report “Work Accidents and the Law” became a classic and resulted in the adoption of the first workmen’s compensation statue in the United States. She worked as an investigating attorney for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations during the Wilson administration.
She married Wallace Benedict and settled in Milwaukee. While there she managed an unsuccessful 1912 Wisconsin suffrage battle. Her marriage ended in divorce and she returned to New York where she helped to found the militant Congressional Union which eventually became the National Women’s Party. After the passage of the landmark 19th Amendment in 1920 which gave the right to vote to women, she and three others wrote the Equal Rights Amendment first introduced in 1923.
Eastman was a strong anti-militarist and was one of the founders of the Women’s Peace Party which is now the oldest women’s peace organization—The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She argued against America’s going to war against Mexico in 1916, campaigned against the draft, and lobbied against American participation in World War 1. When the U.S. entered the First World War she and Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas organized the National Civil Liberties Bureau to protect conscientious objectors. This organization would become the A.C.L.U.
In 1916 she married Walter Fuller, an English editor and anti-war activist. They lived at 71 Mt. Airy Road and had two children, Jeffrey and Annis.
She was a contributor to THE MASSES and after it stopped publication in 1917 she and her brother Max co-owned and published The Liberator, a radical journal of politics, art and literature.
At the close of World War 1 her husband, Walter Fuller, returned to England to seek work. For the next several years Crystal and her family would live part of the time in England and the rest in New York where she was blacklisted and rendered unemployable during the red scare of 1919-1920. During the following years her only paid work was for the feminist journals Time and Tide and Equal Rights.
Suffering from painful nephritis for many years, Crystal Eastman died in 1928.
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vent
i'm at a major cross roads in my life and all my options seem terrible, i have no idea what to do. i'm just going to vent and ramble about it here to get all this shit out of my head
the past 2 years i've been attending university attempting to get my bachelor's degree, i am still ~1.5 years out from graduating and until last semester i was doing fairly well. this past spring i failed two out of my six classes, both of which was because i have completely run out of motivation to do anything. one class was an accelerated online course which i just did literally nothing for and the other was an in-person class that i just didn't turn in the final project. i was hoping i could just power through this, i was already enrolled in summer courses so i decided to keep going but now i am failing my first summer class for the same reason, i just have no motivation, no will, no energy, no nothing.
i don't know if i can get going to university
i can barely get up out of bed and shower most days, i basically spent all my time dicking around doing nothing of real substance before i can just go back to bed. i barely remember the past like 2-3 weeks because i've been sleeping ~12 hours a day and have been intoxicated for the remaining 12 hours. i have recently started going to therapy but it is so fucking useless, the advice my therapist gives me is just pointless. my anxiety has spiked again to the point where i can only leave the house like 1-2 times a week, what was her advice for this? aromatherapy. that's right, aromatherapy, i can't function as a person from my depression and anxiety but if i just sniff some candles it'll be all alright i guess. she also suggested that whenever i feel anxious i should "count the corners of the room", like look at one corner, then the next, then the next, and just cycle through them. which, to my absolute shock, did jack shit to make me feel better, who could have guessed
i get financial support from my parents on the condition that i'm going to college, but if i stop going they'll stop paying for my food and rent and shit. not instantaneously, but 100% for sure before the end of the year. how can i get a job and support myself if i can't even manage school? i can't manage one measly class so how can i possibly do something much harder
i just don't know what to do and it feels like there's no way out
in addition to therapy i am also going to see a psychologist to get prescribed medication, my first appointment is this week. i've been on antidepressants before years ago and it did jack shit to help me. if this doesn't help this time i have no idea what to do
but i guess i'm just talking about and trying to treat the symptoms and not the causes of all this. a huge root cause of all of this shit is gender dysphoria. i'm 2 years into transition and i actually pass significantly less often than i did pre-hrt. i used to be thin and kind of androgynous looking but gaining a shit ton of weight (from alcoholism and stress eating) has made me look so much more masc. i'm pretty sure my body has further masculinized over the years despite being on hrt.
inb4 "passing isn't everything!", for some people they can be happy transitioning and being visibly trans, and i desperately wish that could be me. i wish i could be okay with this, i wish i could be happy like that, but i've tried, and i can't. passing is everything to me, and that's not good, that's not how it should be, and that's not how it is for everyone, but it is how it is for me. i want nothing more to pass and be stealth, i would give up anything in the world to have that
i hate being stared at in public. i hate being unable to blend into a crowd, i hate being unable to relate to cis people, i hate looking in the mirror and seeing myself
this is such a huge cause of my depression and anxiety. i get anxious out in public over this shit every time i go outside. it's not the only cause, i still had really bad anxiety before finding out i was trans and i get incredibly anxious about things completely unrelated to gender, but it is a huge contributor to it
i feel trapped, my therapist doesn't really seem to want to hear me talk about my transition and i know she won't have anything useful to say even if she did. i should probably get a new one but it was already hard enough to get the motivation and energy to find this one
i don't know what to do to make things better, i don't know if they can be better. i don't know if i should drop out of college, i don't know if i should stay in, i don't know if i should just try and find a job and work instead, i don't know
god i haven't even touched on the fact that i hate being stuck where i live, i hate this place and want to flee as soon as i can but i'm stuck here
i'm stuck in a body i don't want to be in, in a state i don't want to be in, in a world i don't want to be in
i highly doubt anyone is going to read all of this, i just wanted to get all my thoughts out of my head. i don't even know if any advice could be helpful, but thanks for reading it all if anyone did get here
Talk to your parents. Maybe they'll be fine with you taking some time off school to get your shit together if you explain to them that you are having a hard time.
Your therapist seems like they suck at their job. It sucks that you're kinda far into academics for this, but and I know this is pretty common advice, but if you can switch to learning a trade, maybe do that. Learn to install drywall good or whatever, it makes pretty damn good money all things considered and you just kinda go from ace to place doing a task you already know well. Jobs can be stressful, but most of them you don't have to take home with you like with academia. Office shit has projects and deadlines, I have no idea what the hell an office project is btw, I always assume it's making little diorama of business or something and other bullshit that follows you home. Other work, you can wipe from your mind from when you clock out to when you clock in the next day. Plus most of the jobs are a bit of a workout and will have you on your feet most of the day and despite my legs feeling like concrete right now (just finished a 7 day week), I'm certain sitting at a desk all day would deplete me faster. Also, depends on what kinda degree your working towards and what classes you've taken relevant coursework can often be transferred or if the trade school is also part of a community college or whatever that makes you do courses not directly related to what you're pursuing, they could count towards that. If you took like, a semester or year off and just worked a whatever job for a bit and planned to return, would your parents keep helping out through that? You'd be pulling in money but probably not enough, but if they're already covering everything, them only covering some things for a while so you can get your head back above water and yknow, perform well academically somethings gotta give. If you pitch it that way, do you think you'd get anywhere?