Star-Gazette (Elmira, New York), July 27, 2006, Thursday

Remembering Eastman
Elmiran donates her collection about women's rights pioneer to Cornell.
By Ray Finger mailto:Fingerrfinger@stargazette.com
Star-Gazette July 27, 2006
http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060727/NEWS01/607270333


A collection of items related to Crystal Eastman, a pioneering civil liberties and labor attorney from Elmira, were donated to a library at Cornell University this week by another local pioneer.Faith Hallock of Elmira donated her Eastman collection Monday to the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University. Hallock received the Crystal Eastman Award earlier this year from the Chemung-Schuyler Labor Assembly to honor her lifelong fight to improve working conditions for families.Hallock said the items she donated included a large portrait of Eastman, programs from and newspaper accounts of Eastman's induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, and a couple of books, Hallock said."It wasn't much," she said, adding there were no artifacts of Eastman in Elmira because she did not come back here to live after college. Eastman earned a bachelor's degree at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, a master's degree at Columbia University in New York City and a law degree at New York University.The Kheel Center has records of 500 prominent people in labor and industrial relations and the history of management, said Richard Strassberg, the center's director."The desire of the donor is essentially to make sure that this material doesn't get lost," he said of the items donated by Hallock. "We're happy to have them, and we're happy that we were thought of in this regard."Born in 1881, Eastman was the daughter of co-pastors at The Park Church and attended Elmira schools. Among her achievements, she drafted the country's first workers' compensation law, co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union and co-wrote the Equal Rights Amendment that gave women the right to vote. She died in 1928.When Hallock was president of the Chemung County Council of Women, she started the movement to get Eastman named to the women's hall of fame. "We worked awful hard," she said. "It took a long time, but we did it."Hallock, admitted to the civilian pilot's training program in 1939 at Middlebury College in Vermont, is a pioneer herself."Faith Hallock, much like Crystal Eastman, has spent a lifetime promoting rights for workers and women throughout New York state. I could go on for hours about the many campaigns and committees of which she has been a part," said Peggy Costello, president of the Chemung Schuyler Labor Assembly, who was in Ithaca for Hallock's donation."She continues to inspire us every day to keep fighting for workers' rights and the community," Costello said.