After graduating from Swarthmore College with high honors in English and history in 1930, she attended Somerville College at Oxford University for one year. 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. In 1938 she published a book of dramatic criticism entitled American Playwrights, 1918-1938.

• American Playwrights, 1918-1938: The Theatre Retreats from Reality, (1938, 1966; reprinted in 1969 with a new preface by Eleanor Flexnor).
• Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States, (1959, expanded edition 1975; enlarged edition 1996 co-authored with Ellen Fitzpatrick, who also wrote a biographically valuable foreword).
• Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (1972).

• Thomas Neville Bonner, Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
• Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (Chapter 12: “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism”). New York University Press, 1998.
• Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Reconfiguring American Political History). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

American Playwrights, 1918-1938

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. The last Spanish Republican resistance to Franco was crumbling, and the Japanese had only recently invaded China.

But the gap between that time and today is even wider and deeper than these news items might suggest. My generation spent its early adult years looking for work when there were no jobs ... quite simply no jobs at all, either for them or for their elders. Millions of people who had known ten or twenty years of security were suddenly reduced to joblessness. Nor were there any cushions against acute need, such as unemployment insurance or social security Establishing such minimal bulwarks against hunger and homelessness as trade unions and social insurance were the elemental concerns of a generation of American workers

Social concern was one of the principal yardsticks against which I measured the work of the leading playwrights of the twenties and thirties.

Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States

There is a timelessness about [Century of Struggle] that transcends the historical forces that shaped its construction as a work of history [I]t endures not just as a penetrating and learned study but as a work that contributed to the continued effort to enlarge the scope and deepen the foundation of history. [Century of Struggle] offers readers not only a detailed and compelling account of the women’s rights crusade but also an overview of women’s historical experience from the Colonial period onward.

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography