Century of Struggle: Women's Rights Movement in the United States [Hardcover]

Eleanor Flexner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 1975

The book you are about to read tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women's voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics...It is difficult to imagine now a time when women were largely removed by custom, practice, and law from the formal political rights and responsibilities that supported and sustained the nation's young democracy...For sheer drama the suffrage movement has few equals in modern American political history.

--From the Preface by Ellen Fitzpatrick

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Miss Flexner's well-documented text is brightened by vignettes of...stout and colorful personalities ...Her book has depth and amplitude. (New York Times Book Review )

Never before...has a book done more to relate the women's rights movement in the United States to the centuries-old struggle of the individual to attain his (or her) full stature in society. Woman's fight for the franchise is here presented, not as a separate shred torn from history, but as part of the warp and woof of national progress ... Miss Flexner admirably refrains from idealizing her subjects, rightly judging that the facts need no gilding to show in true proportions the stature of these valiant women. (Christian Science Monitor )

A book to be read by every student in this country...This account will help us to maintain a truer image of ourselves as we try to finish up the struggle first launched so long ago.
--Betty Friedan --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

A book to be read by every student in this country...This account will help us to maintain a truer image of ourselves as we try to finish up the struggle first launched so long ago.
--Betty Friedan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 423 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; 2nd edition (October 31, 1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674106512
• ISBN-13: 978-0674106512
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The single best history of the US suffrage movement, March 21, 1998

By 

Jane W. Elioseff (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, Enlarged Edition (Paperback)

This recent paperback edition of Century of Struggle, Eleanor Flexner's classic history of women's suffrage and the work to expand women's rights, has a splendid new introduction by her friend and collaborator Ellen Fitzpatrick, who relates the major events in Flexner's own life to Flexner's deep understanding of the complex social and political problem confronting 19th- and early 20th-century American suffragists. There is no better account than Flexner's of the dogged determination of US women to achieve their political aims, or of the genius of their political inventiveness in a time in which both law and custom were against women's full participation in civic life. The achievement of the vote for women was extraordinarily difficult, infinitely more so than most people realize. In her own preface to Century of Struggle, Eleanor Flexner quotes from Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Schuler: "Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links in that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended . . . It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women before the end was allowed in America."

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading, December 5, 2002

By 

Nathaniel Levin (Rye, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, Enlarged Edition (Paperback)

I agree fully with Jane Eliosoff's review and just wish to add that this wonderful book should be required reading in high schools and colleges. One of its best features is that it is truly multicultural in its treatment of the "first wave" of the women's rights movement, even though this book was written before the word "multicultural" was coined.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great history of American Women, December 2, 2009

By 

Sol Y Luna "Viento Y Lluvia" (Somewhere rainy) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, Enlarged Edition (Paperback)

This new edition of Flexner's Century of Struggle is excellent. She covers American woman's history since the beginning of American colonization up until the 1970s. She touches on the development of woman's education, job occupation, and political awareness through their activities in abolition. I recommend this book to every American. This book covers many missing holes in our male dominated histories.