[citation needed] 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.
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.
Back in the United States, she held a series of promotional and editorial positions in the theater and with the Institute of Propaganda Analysis, the Foreign Policy Association, and Hadassah.
[2] Fortunately, when she showed the completed book to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, he recognized its value and urged her to offer it to Harvard University Press, which readily accepted it for publication.
[citation needed] Many of the concepts that inform Century of Struggle were developed by a small group of Marxist women — including, in addition to Flexner, Susan B. Anthony II, Gerda Lerner, and Eve Merriam.
[citation needed] From Flexner's 1969 preface: When this book was first published the world thought it had escaped a second great war by the agreement at Munich, which recognized Adolf Hitler's conquest of Czechoslovakia.
Flexner regrets in her 1969 preface to the book that she did not include Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman among the playwrights singled out for special notice.
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."
She opposed the eminent Edmund Burke's views concerning the French Revolution in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and was present in Paris in 1793 when England and France declared war.
Thomas Neville Bonner's Iconoclast and Ellen Fitzpatrick's foreword to the 1996 edition of Century of Struggle were the major sources of information about the Flexner family.
Information about Flexner's work history and the development of her ideas comes variously from Kate Weigand's Red Feminism, from the Schlesinger Library Archives, Harvard University,[4] and from Ellen Fitspatrick's foreword to Century of Struggle.