"If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it's false and useless"
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Motherhood is the stress test of any claim to female equality. Crystal Eastman, a radical lawyer, labor reformer, and cofounder of the ACLU, knew that winning the vote in 1920 was only the beginning. Writing at the crest of that victory, she pressed feminism to move from abstract rights to the material conditions that determine whether women can actually live free lives. Her challenge targets a movement that celebrates public achievement but leaves intact the private arrangements that send women home the moment a child arrives.
The line exposes a double standard: a society that lauds motherhood while structuring work, wages, and domestic life so that mothers must exit the public sphere. Eastman argued that political equality without economic independence is a mirage. The program must include paid maternity leave, shorter hours, decent wages, birth control and reproductive autonomy, and, crucially, a redistribution of labor in the home. She wanted fathers to share child care and housework and the state to treat care as a public good rather than a private burden. Otherwise, promises of opportunity evaporate at the first collision with biology and custom.
Her critique also cuts across class lines. Professional women with resources might improvise solutions, but working-class mothers face the sharpest edge of policy failure. A feminism that works only for the childless or the affluent is, in her terms, false and useless because it mistakes a privileged exception for a universal path.
The provocation remains current. Debates over paid leave, affordable child care, flexible schedules, and the wage penalty for mothers still ask whether society expects women to absorb the cost of reproduction alone. Eastman makes the measure plain: not slogans, not symbolic firsts, but whether a woman who has a baby can remain economically secure, politically active, and personally autonomous without heroic sacrifice. If not, the work of feminism is unfinished, because equality has not reached the place where life actually happens.
The line exposes a double standard: a society that lauds motherhood while structuring work, wages, and domestic life so that mothers must exit the public sphere. Eastman argued that political equality without economic independence is a mirage. The program must include paid maternity leave, shorter hours, decent wages, birth control and reproductive autonomy, and, crucially, a redistribution of labor in the home. She wanted fathers to share child care and housework and the state to treat care as a public good rather than a private burden. Otherwise, promises of opportunity evaporate at the first collision with biology and custom.
Her critique also cuts across class lines. Professional women with resources might improvise solutions, but working-class mothers face the sharpest edge of policy failure. A feminism that works only for the childless or the affluent is, in her terms, false and useless because it mistakes a privileged exception for a universal path.
The provocation remains current. Debates over paid leave, affordable child care, flexible schedules, and the wage penalty for mothers still ask whether society expects women to absorb the cost of reproduction alone. Eastman makes the measure plain: not slogans, not symbolic firsts, but whether a woman who has a baby can remain economically secure, politically active, and personally autonomous without heroic sacrifice. If not, the work of feminism is unfinished, because equality has not reached the place where life actually happens.
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| Topic | Mother |
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