Women's Suffrage Undefeated

ALL 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 do.

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.

The 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 and international sense.

THE 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:

That success [of the suffragists] did not overcome the remaining obstacles to equality of opportunity, but it did mark a solid historical milestone. Never since then has there been the same measure of agreement among women as to the further goals they desire, or how these can be achieved, and consequently there has never since been the same heroic mustering of effort, except for a nationwide cause. The history of women's efforts on their own behalf since 1920 must be written from the perspective of a later date.

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.

The actual changes in the book, aside from the preface and concluding chapter, are details--clarifications. The changes and additions to the bibliography demonstrate the growth of interest in the women's movement. The number of new sources would not occur if the book were on a different topic.

THE CONCLUDING CHAPTER is the only one which has been entirely rewritten. It is a short chapter designed to chronicle the continuing difficulties and successes women have experienced with jobs, the Equal Rights Amendment and politics. But the chapter is too sketchy to give any real feeling for the events between 1920 and 1975. Anyone reading the book is aware of these changes and for a modern audience the concluding chapter oversimplifies and repeats what is provided in the preface. Flexner's aim is to provide history rather than record modern developments. Nevertheless, it may be valuable to reread the concluding chapter fifteen years from now to see if our perspectives have changed.

SOME OF THE MORE obvious perspective changes in the book come from attitudes women could once laugh off, but now snarl at. A 1915 cartoon by Rollin Kirby, which appeared in the New York World, showed four men around a tavern table drinking and smoking with a newspaper whose headlines read: "Woman's Suffrage Defeated." The caption on the cartoon reads: "Well, boys, we saved the home."

The balanced tone of Flexner's book is evident in the last sentence of her 1975 preface, another seemingly prophetic statement:

In the end all women and all men can only benefit from the more truthful and balanced image of women which will emerge from history where they are shown to have been actively involved in shaping their own destinv and that of this country."

The perspective has changed but the facts haven't. The fight for suffrage was along, arduous one, but acceptance of women's civil rights did not automatically follow. The years from 1920 to the present have proved that. The modern woman has tried waiting, but that hasn't worked. She is now back to fighting.