Do you follow The New York Times Overlooked project?
It’s a regularly-updated section of obituaries of individuals whose deaths originally went unreported by the Times. Many of them are obituaries of women.
Eleanor Flexner, who died in 1995, is the subject of a recent obituary. I found her inclusion fascinating because not only had Flexner herself been overlooked, but her seminal work – the one highlighted in her obituary – was her scholarship of activist women whose narratives have been largely left out of histories of the suffrage movement in the United States. Layers of ghosting!
Flexner’s book “Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States,” included ground-breaking scholarship on the contributions of black women and women in the labor movement to the suffrage struggle.
From the beginning of her research on “Century of Struggle,” the Times notes, “Flexner knew that she wanted to highlight African-American women, whose presence and contributions to securing women’s rights were almost entirely absent from earlier accounts.” Flexner was supported in this research by two black librarians, Dorothy Porter of the Negro Collection of Howard University and Jean Blackwell Hutson of the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library.
Flexner was also an activist, serving at one point as executive director of the Congress of American Women.
For more on the role of black women in the suffrage movement:
Stream the 2020 PBS documentary “The Vote” (American Experience)
Read “How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect” (The National Endowment for the Humanities)
And: Read these books.
Sheer Ghosts 