Flexner, Eleanor, 1908-1995

Flexner was the younger of two highly intelligent daughters of well-known parents. Her mother, Anne Crawford Flexner (1874-1955), a successful playwright and children's author, organized professional playwrights into an association that later became the Dramatists Guild of the Author's League of America.

Eleanor's father, Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), was a leader in several fields including, with his brother Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute, the reform of early 20th-century medical education and medical research in the United States and Canada. Abraham founded and served as first director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Encouragement and financial assistance from her parents carried Flexner through the Great Depression and gave her the means to experiment as a playwright and social organizer. Her mother at her death left Eleanor a lifetime income. Both Anne and Abraham Flexner were feminists who supported passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and both marched in the 1915 New York woman suffrage parade.

Eleanor Flexner was born in Georgetown, Kentucky, but spent her youth in New York City. A biographical statement in the Schlesinger Library Archives at Harvard University outlines Flexner's early career:

After graduating from Swarthmore College with high honors in English and history in 1930, she attended Somerville College at Oxford University for one year. Back in the United States, she held a series of promotional and editorial positions in the theater and with the Institute of Propaganda Analysis, the Foreign Policy Association, and Hadassah. In 1938 she published a book of dramatic criticism entitled American Playwrights, 1918-1938.

During this period of her life Flexner found her way into New York's radical left. She joined the Communist Party in 1936 and spent several years writing CP articles and pamphlets, under pseudonyms, and working for various social and political causes. As a member of the League of American Writers, she served on its Keep America Out of War Committee in January 1940 during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. She worked alongside the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. In 1946, she became the executive director of the Congress of American Women This activist background allowed Flexner to appreciate the disappointments, triumphs, and bracing camaraderie experienced by the 19th- and early 20th-century women whom she later described in Century of Struggle.

In the 1940s, Flexner began researching the 19th-century labor struggles of American women but found that few historians had touched on the subject. She was by that time already planning to write a history of the American woman suffrage movement and gradually became convinced that a comprehensive treatment must deal with the experiences of working class women and politically active women of color. Flexner worked on the manuscript that was to become Century of Struggle through most of the 1950s. Her original publisher, Harper, refused to publish it unless she removed the parts about women of color. Fortunately, when she showed the completed book to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, he recognized its value and urged her to offer it to Harvard University Press, which readily accepted it for publication. It was published in 1959.

Many of the concepts that inform Century of Struggle were developed by a small group of Marxist women — including, in addition to Flexner, Susan B. Anthony II, Gerda Lerner, and Eve Merriam. It was only in 1982, however, that Flexner publicly acknowledged her past membership in the Communist Party.

In 1957, Flexner moved from New York to Northampton, Massachusetts, where her life partner, Helen Terry, was on the faculty of Smith College. Flexner completed Century of Struggle and wrote her last book, Mary Wollstonecraft, in this setting.