Word: flexner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HISTORY alternately feeds and eats off perspective. Historians spend their lives putting events into perspective and giving the proper perspective to past events. They are recording society and the basis of their perspective is that society. The events of 1959 did not intrude upon Eleanor Flexner's recording of a century, but the events of the sixties and seventies...
...Flexner's Century of Struggle, which depicted the women's rights movement from 1820 to 1920, is a sterling example of a work which was relatively unknown, although respected in small circles, and which has suddenly shot into vogue. First published in 1959, the work immediately became the textbook of the suffrage movement for women's history scholars. There was no radical feminism, as it is known today, to support or influence the writing of the book...
...reason for the revision of the 1959 text is readily apparent. The bibliographical notes are filled with works written within the last fifteen years. And as Flexner herself says: "Nothing could be more dissimilar than the situation of women then and now." Yet the text shows few changes in ideology or essential research, in spite of the fact that the thinking of women and about women has undergone incredible changes in the last fifteen years. Suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are no longer names in a book of social history; they are heroines in a national...
...PREFACE to the original edition of Flexner's book ended on a rather curious note, not quite comprehensible in today's frame of reference and unwittingly prophetic...
Between 1920 and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, there was a fairly dormant period in the woman's rights movement. The relative quiet of this period makes the publication of Flexner's book not only important for its topic, but also for its scholarly, balanced tone. Winning converts often requires propaganda; scholarly respect and general acceptance requires a thoughtful presentation of the facts...