Eleanor Flexner

Eleanor Flexner (October 4, 1908 – March 25, 1995) was an American independent scholar and pioneer in what was to become the field of women's studies. Her book Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, originally published in 1959, relates women's work for the vote to other 19th- and early 20th-century social, labor, and reform movements, most importantly the push for equal education, the abolition of slavery, and temperance laws.

Family Flexner was the younger of two 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), with his brother Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute, worked on 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.

Eleanor's sister, Jean Flexner, became one of the first employees of the Division of Labor Standards in Washington, DC.

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.

She died of a stroke on March 25, 1995, at age 86. She worked alongside the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. In 1946, she became the executive director of the Congress of American Women It became a point of departure for generations of historians who built the field of women's history. Professor Ellen Carol DuBois (UCLA) wrote in 1991 that Century of Struggle "has stood for thirty years as the most comprehensive history of American feminism up to the enfranchisement of women in 1920." Ellen Fitzpatrick (University of New Hampshire), another leading scholar and co-author of the 1996 enlarged edition, wrote:

The book covers the woman's rights movement from Anne Hutchinson in the 17th century through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which ensured women's right to vote. and from Ellen Fitspatrick's foreword to Century of Struggle.