Century of Struggle, Decades of Revision: A Retrospective on Eleanor Flexner's Suffrage History

Abstract

1963, before the slightest ripple even hinted at the possibility for a 'second wave of feminism, Betty Friedan declared that American women lost themselves in the feminine mystique at least in part because of their ignorance of their past. To remedy this defect, she recommended Eleanor Flexnor's Century of Struggle, calling the 'definitive history of the woman's rights movement in the United States. In my opinion, she continued, it should be required reading for every girl admitted to a U.S. college.' Today, a scholarly and linguistic generation later, Century of Struggle is required reading for students in women's history and women's studies classes throughout North America and abroad. Academics and activists who cut their feminist teeth on this landmark volume now offer for the nourishment of their intellectual progeny. Proof of its ongoing popularity can be found in its publishing history: a paperback of the original 1959 edition appeared in 1968, and a slightly revised edition was issued in 1975. It has become the classic and essential text on the wave of American feminism, the nineteenthcentury woman's rights movement. The enduring popularity of Century of Struggle derives from both its simple elegance and its scholarly reliability. form is a straightforward, wellcrafted, brisk narrative. After a summary chapter on women's lives, work, and legal rights in the colonial period, the first major section of the book details the emergence of a self-defined woman's rights movement in the years before the Civil War. Flexner stressed the emergence of gender consciousness from efforts made by women to organize themselves. Accutely aware of the significance of race, class, and place of residence in the lives and attitudes of antebellum American women, she carefully noted not only the efforts of women reformers, particularly within the antislavery movement, to claim for themselves the rights to speak and act but also the achievements of women workers fighting for better conditions of employment in the textile factories of early New England, and of black women seeking to elevate both their race and their sex. The middle third of the volume illuminates the late nineteenth century, charting the ebb and flow of efforts to broaden women's opportunities in education, trade unions, clubs, and, of course politics. Flexner details