reproduction. This is an echo of attitudes from the earliest days of the birth control movement, when even such leaders as Margaret Sanger approved compulsory sterilization for "unfit" persons such as "morons,mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends". By 1932, 26 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws. Thus the idea of birth control, which would benefit all women, was perverted into the racist and classist strategy of population control. No wonder so few Black women are in evidence in the modern birth control movement.

Another area in which white feminists have historically been and continue to be ignorant is that of domestic service. After emancipation, most Black women who did not continue to toil in the fields became domestic servants, and even today Black women are unable to escape such work in any significant numbers. Racist attitudes about the occupa tional potential of Blacks have carried over for more than a century," and Black women continue to be caught in a classic convergence of racism and sexism: domestic service is considered degrading because it is disproportionately performed by Black women, who in turn are viewed as "inept" because that is all they do, and "promiscuous" to boot because of their vulnerability to sexual oppression by the white man of the house. But feminists continue to be blind to the concerns of domestic workers.

Perhaps the most controversial essay in Davis'' book is "Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black

Rapist". Davis points out that one reason why Black women are few in the contemporary anti-rape movement is that the frame-up charge of rape has too often been used as an incitement to racial violence, including lynchings. Between 1865 and 1895, over 10,000 lynchings took place in the U.S. Immediately after the Civil War, lynchings were rationalized as a political measure to deter newly freed Blacks from rising up in revolt against whites. By 1872, however, when the threatened mass insurrections had never materialized, a new justification had to be found: that new charge was rape. It is noteworthy that during the entire Civil War, when white southern men were away fighting and women were left "unprotected," not a single Black man was accused of raping a white woman; if Black men truly possessed the universal animalistic urge to rape later ascribed to them, it surely would have been evident then.

The repercussions of the Black rape mythology were enormous; not only was opposition to individual lynchings stilled, but white support for the cause of Black equality in general began to wane. Black women founded anti-lynching campaigns as early as 1892, but not until the formation in 1930 of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching did white women respond in any significant numbers to the pleas for help of their Black sisters.

Davis does not in any way dispute the epidemic proportions of historical or present-day sexual assault against women, seeing the prevalence of rape

Politics of Crystal Eastman

pensation law, which became a model for numerous other states.

Crystal's greatest interest, however, was in women's rights. At the age of 29, she married and moved to Wisconsin where she became campaign manager for the state suffrage movement. The marriage soon ended and she returned to New York in 1911, where she joined the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Bogged down in internal rifts, the party was making little headway. In 1912, Crystal and Alice Paul set up an offshoot of NAWSA, called the Congressional Union, in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress. One of its more dramatic actions was a march by 5,000 women in Washington on the eve of Wilson's inauguration in 1913.

With the declaration of war, Crystal, along with many other Village feminists, turned her attention to

Crystal Eastman, 1923. Annis Young Collection organizing women for peace. She was afraid that if the United States entered the war, all worker reforms and other social progress would be lost. She became the major spokesperson and activist for the feministpacifist position. She believed, as did many feminists of her era, in the naive notion that if women won the

vote they could rid the world of war. In 1914, she founded the Woman's Peace Party of New York, and in 1915 helped Jane Addams establish the National Woman's Peace Party (WPP) in Chicago.

Relations between the New York party and the national party became strained as the New York WPP took a more radical turn. In addition to its peace efforts, the party handed out birth control literature on street corners, organized strike committees, enthusiastically supported the Bolsheviks, and put on the controversial War Against War exhibit in New York, a free exhibit featuring the war machine of Wall Street and militant speakers. Party members were occasionally arrested and their meetings broken up by violent patriots.

New political divisions arose during the 1916 presidential campaign, which put feminist pacifists in the untenable position of having to choose between peace and suffrage. Wilson ran on an anti-war campaign but would not support suffrage, whereas Hughes was pro-suffrage and pro-U.S. involvement. Crystal supported Wilson, while many of her feminist friends supported Hughes.

This split only foreshadowed more serious divisions once the U.S. declared war. Varjous women's parties, including the Woman's Suffrage Party, pledged their support to the war effort, and Jane Addams and others, to Crystal's dismay, held registration programs in their settlement houses. The New York WPP, through its publication Four Lights, continued its strong pacifist stance, as well as its support of the new communist Russia. Four Lights managed to publish only four issues before it was suppressed by the government for being "proGerman". Discouraged with the peace movement, which had done as much to divide women as unite them, Crystal resigned from the New York WPP in 1919 and devoted most of her time to writing.

With the end of the war, women faced a new challenge. Those who had entered the workforce during the war were forced back into the home to make way for the returning soldiers. In Cleveland, for example, 150 woman street car conductors were laid off after the men struck to have them eliminated. And such hard-won protective labor laws as that forbid-

4

as a dysfunction of capitalist society. As she acknowledges, most women at some time in their lives have been victims of attempted or accomplished sexual harassment and assault. But Davis does take serious issue with the racist ideas which pervade many of the arguments of contemporary anti-rape authors such as Susan Brownmiller and Jean MacKellar, accusing them of deliberate distortion. MacKellar, for instance, in her book Rape: The Bait and the Trap, states that 90 percent of all reported rapes in the U.S. are committed by Black men, while the FBI's corresponding figure is 47 percent. Brownmiller's book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, while an outstanding and scholarly work, distorts such historical cases as the Scottsboro Nine and Emmett Till to dissipate any sympathy for Black men who are the victims of fraudulent rape charges, choosing to take sides with white women regardless of the circumstances. Thus false racist ideas, deliberately disseminated a century ago by white oppressors, continue to influence our thinking to the present day.

Davis' book is well written, exhaustively documented and thoroughly fascinating. Its exposure of the clay feet of many of white feminists' heroes is shocking, but hopefully will provoke some serious thought in the current women's movement. If we are to flourish, we must not repeat the mistakes of our foremothers. White feminists must abolish racism and classism in the women's movement, and embrace the concerns of all women.

ding night shifts for women were used to bar women from jobs.

The women's movement, however, had lost much of its momentum. Having won the vote in 1920, many activists retired to enjoy their victory. Many of the women in the NAWSA regrouped to become the League of Women Voters, and the Woman's Peace Party joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. to continue as a pacifist organization. Of the activists who remained, most focused their efforts on the Equal Rights Amendment.

The radical feminists of the Village had lost much of their audience and organizational framework. Crystal, in an effort to revive the broader goals of feminism, proposed a feminist program, described in her essay, "Now We Can Begin". It included "freedom of choice in occupation and individual economic independence of women,...a revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls,...voluntary motherhood,...and motherhood endowment" (or what we call wages for housework). She presented her program to Alice Paul, who had since become leader of the National Woman's Party. Paul, however, was more interested in the ERA.

The ERA did not prove to have the widespread appeal of suffrage. Organized labor and social reform humanitarians bitterly attacked its proponents as enemies of the workers. They were afraid that the ERA would undermine the protective rights of working women.

Crystal spent the last few years of her life in England writing essays on feminism and watching the debate over the ERA with growing dismay. The movement, torn in war and again in peace, was to lay nearly dormant for the next 40 years. It was not until the 60's that women as a political force would examine and embellish the feminist vision of Crystal Eastman and the other Village feminists.

Sources:

Cook, Blanche Weisen, ed. Crystal Eastmen on Women and Revolution. Oxford Univ. Press, 1978. Sochen, Jane. The New Woman in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920. The N.Y. Times Book Co., 1972.