Flexner, Eleanor

FLEXNER, ELEANOR (1908-1995). Writer and activist, Eleanor Flexner was a member of the US Communist Party (CP) from 1936-1956. Although she wrote for the Left press during the Great Depression, Flexner is best-remembered for her path-breaking book on the history of American women, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959). In 1946, at the behest of the CP, she served as executive director of the Congress of American Women, joining other Popular Front activists in shaping its policies. Escaping HUAC, she went on research and write about American women, particularly the history of working-class and African American women.

Flexner was born in Georgetown, Kentucky, to a prominent and accomplished German Jewish family. Her father, Abraham Flexner, published in 1910 a major survey of medical education in the United States, commonly referred to as “The Flexner Report.” Her mother, Anne Crawford Flexner, was a successful playwright who encouraged her younger daughter’s writing ambitions. After graduating with honors from Swarthmore College in 1930 and a post-graduate year at Oxford University, Flexner settled for a time in New York City where she became a Left activist, helping to organize clerical workers and Black nurses. She also embarked on her career as a writer and joined the League of American Writers. In part a tribute to her mother, she published her first book, American Playwrights,1918-1938 (1938).

During the years during and after World War II, Flexner began to research deeply into the history of American women, focusing on the struggle for woman suffrage and the role of working-class and Black women. Her research included an interview with the aged Left activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson. Flexner submited a draft to Harper & Brothers, and the editors there advised her to delete the sections on Black women, contending that this material lacked sufficient general interest to warrant commercial publication. Later, Harvard University Press published her book, which became a landmark in US women’s history.

In 1957, Flexner moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, to join her life-partner Helen Terry, who worked at Smith College. In 1972, she published her heavily-researched biography of British woman’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, which was nominated for a National Book Award in biography.

Bonner, Thomas Neville. Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. “Eleanor Flexner: A Pioneering Feminist When Feminism was ‘at Its Core, a Deep Illness.’” New York Times, October 19, 2020, P. A26.

Weigand, Kate. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Eleanor Flexner Papers. Collection Overview. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

Harvard University. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5365