Family
Flexner was the younger of two highly intelligent daughters of well-known parents. Her mother, Anne Crawford Flexner (1874-1955), a successful playwright and children’s author, organized professional playwrights into an association that later became the Dramatists Guild of the Author’s League of America.
Eleanor’s father, Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), was a leader in several fields including, with his brother Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute, the reform of early 20th-century medical education and medical research in the United States and Canada. Abraham founded and served as first director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His ideas for the structure and purpose of the institute so appealed to theoretical physicist Albert Einstein that Einstein chose it over competing university appointments when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1933.
Eleanor’s sister, Jean Flexner, became one of the first employees of the Division of Labor Standards in Washington, DC.
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. Her mother at her death left Eleanor a lifetime income. 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.
Read more about this topic: Eleanor Flexner
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“Diamonds may have been a girl’s best friend in an era when a woman’s only hope of having a high family income was to marry a man who was well-off, but today, marketable skills that will enable a woman to command a good income over her lifetime are a better investment.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“I duly acknowledge that I have gone through a long life, with fewer circumstances of affliction than are the lot of most men. Uninterrupted health, a competence for every reasonable want, usefulness to my fellow-citizens, a good portion of their esteem, no complaint against the world which has sufficiently honored me, and above all, a family which has blessed me by their affections, and never by their conduct given me a moment’s pain.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)