11 Facts About Eleanor Flexner

Eleanor Flexner was an American independent scholar and pioneer in what was to become the field of women's studies.

Eleanor Flexner was born in Georgetown, Kentucky, but spent her youth in New York City.

Eleanor Flexner 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.

Eleanor Flexner 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 Eleanor 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.

Eleanor Flexner 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.

Eleanor Flexner worked on the manuscript that was to become Century of Struggle through most of the 1950s.

In 1957, Eleanor Flexner moved from New York to Northampton, Massachusetts, where her life partner, Helen Terry, was on the faculty of Smith College.

Eleanor Flexner completed Century of Struggle and wrote her last book, Mary Wollstonecraft, in this setting.

Eleanor Flexner opposed the eminent Edmund Burke's views concerning the French Revolution in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men and was present in Paris in 1793 when England and France declared war.

Eleanor Flexner describes Wollstonecraft's crushing self-doubt and unstable temperament, as well as her capacity for hard work even in times of significant adversity.