Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights

12. Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism (1991)

Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States by Eleanor Flexner has stood for thirty years as the most comprehensive history of American feminism up to the enfranchisement of women in 1920.1 In Century of Struggle, Flexner did what had never been done before: she used the history of the suffrage movement, not as a way for veterans of the movement to congratulate themselves, but as a window on the larger history of American women. A whole generation of historians of American women who came after her profited immensely both from the large historical analyses and the small scholarly details of Century of Struggle. Like The Feminine Mystique, which was published five years later, Century of Struggle anticipated—and helped generate—the subsequent feminist revival. To understand the significance of her accomplishment, Flexner’s work needs to be set in its own historical context. First of all, the postwar years, during which Century of Struggle was conceived and executed, were decidedly inhospitable to the idea and traditions of feminism. To the degree that individual women, such as Eleanor Roosevelt or Helen Keller, were acknowledged for their achievements , they were regarded as exceptions, merely confirming the absence of their sex from the public realm. Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, published in 1947, by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, is an example of the more overt antifeminism of this period. Lundberg and Farnham insisted that modern American women had nothing left to 12 239 Originally published in Gender & History 3 (1991). complain about: adored, enfranchised, surrounded by innumerable household goods, whatever grievances women still had could only be a result of their own individual psychological problems. Not only was the modern feminist either a joke or a madwoman, but even in the past, feminist beliefs had been merely a cover for deep psychological problems . Lundberg and Farnham treated the first feminist in the AngloAmerican tradition, Mary Wollstonecraft, as a classic neurotic, an unhappy woman displacing her personal failures onto a misguided indictment of “society” for “wronging” her sex.2 Thus, when Century of Struggle appeared, it was virtually unique in its bold reassertion of the importance of feminism to women and across the long sweep of American history.3 Despite the hostile environment to feminist activism in post–World War II America, there were resources for the writing of women’s history available to those, like Flexner, who were looking for them. She began her research in Washington, D.C., at the National Archives, the Library of Congress and Howard University. She also worked in her home town of New York City, at the New York Public Library. Then, in Northampton , Massachusetts, she found the Sophia Smith Collection, with its rich resources for exploring the history of women’s rights. Smith College had begun its extraordinary research collection in the history of women in 1942 and a year later Radcliffe established the Schlesinger Library; both collections were offshoots of Mary Beard’s prewar efforts to establish a World Center of Women’s Archives.4 Eventually, Flexner followed her scholarship and moved to Northampton, where she remained for the next three decades. She had, mind you, no formal relation to any of the colleges in the area, and held, all her life, a very mixed attitude to academic historians, whom she aspired to influence but who caused her considerable bitterness when they ignored her contributions. Even after the field of women’s history began to grow within the academy, a development to which her own work was fundamental, she remained an active and important independent scholar, an increasingly rare creature in American intellectual life. After writing Century of Struggle, she helped the Harvard -based editors of a new biographical dictionary of women—Notable American Women—to identify important historical figures; she also 240 | Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism wrote a dozen of the entries, mostly biographies of working class women leaders. Her final project was a major biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, but the book was largely ignored, which grieved her.5 When, beginning in the early 1970s, the field of women’s history began to blossom and grow, she was still in Northampton, where I first met her. About four years ago, her life-companion, Helen Terry, died and her own health failed, and she moved to a retirement community near...