By Edward Shanahan

At trip to the Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N. Y., last fall nudged back into my mind the figure of Eleanor Flexner, an authentic eccentric and activist from the 1970s, when we first came Northampton.

Flexner lived on Arlington Street with her partner Helen Terry, who worked at Smith College. Flexner harbored a somewhat negative attitude toward the college, which she believed did not acknowledge or take advantage of her own scholarly work in the field of women's history.

After all, Flexner was the author of the ground-breaking work on the women's rights movement, ''Century of Struggle'' published by the Harvard University Press in 1959 and continuously in print in English and half a dozen other languages since.

Flexner's second major work, ''Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography'' was published in 1972 and nominated, the following year, for the National Book Award for biography.

While I recall great activity and turmoil as the feminist movement, embodied locally by the Valley Women's Center, gained momentum, Eleanor Flexner's contributions and role were largely ignored. She was the pioneer who blazes the trail, only to be shouldered out of the way by the crush of newly-converted or recently come-of-age partisans.

The image that sticks in my mind is seeing Flexner driving around town with only the very tip of her head visible through the driver's side window. She often popped into the newspaper office to submit articles or hand in publicity she had prepared about activities at the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary, or to suggest stories concerning political events in which she was interested.

We developed something of a friendship, not close, but we valued each other's work.

Sometime after Helen Terry died and Eleanor Flexner's health declined, she moved away from the area and I lost touch with her.

Later on, I learned she had donated her professional papers - which must have been a rich archive of feminist material - to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, rather than to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith, a sad and final severing of her Northampton ties, but appropriate in light of the way she felt she had been treated by the country's largest women's college.

She died in 1995 in a nursing home in Westboro, and her passing went more or less unnoticed in this area.

But her contribution surely lives in Seneca Falls, the home of suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the site of the first women's rights convention in 1848. As a result of Flexner's carefully documented history of the movement and her consistent advocacy for landmark status for the structure where the first convention took place, the Seneca Falls National Historic Park was recognized in 1980. That has since been expanded on and now includes the Seneca Falls National Park and the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Feelings of being an outsider present at something beyond my own experience were frequent during a weekend visit to Seneca Falls last fall.

I had accompanied my wife Ann to Seneca Falls because among those women to be inducted into the Hall of Fame was Sophia Smith, the somewhat reclusive Hatfield resident who was founder and benefactor of Smith College. Ann's work at the college dictated that she be on hand; I came along for the ride.

There have been similar weekends in Seneca Falls going back to 1969 when the practice of honoring a number of outstanding women, most of them pioneers, past and present, began. It was in Seneca Falls that the women's rights movement made history with passage of a resolution declaring that ... "it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." Yet, it took until August, 1920, for the women's suffrage amendment to receive final state ratification.

Standing on the sidewalk in the gathering darkness on a comfortable October evening, I was impressed by the energy of the crowd of 200 to 300, as the names of the new inductees into the National Women's Hall of Fame were called out and a candle was lit in front of a photographic image of each of 19 women who were being honored.

Equal parts sober vigil and boisterous political convention, the candle-light gathering seemed so singular in purpose that all I could do was imagine what depths of feeling must be at its root. These were feelings that I could not share because I am not a woman and thus can never fully comprehend why this night and this weekend were so special for so many women from such varied backgrounds and regions of the country.

Meanwhile, if I had vague feelings of emotional distance during the Friday night celebration, my response during the three-hour program on Saturday was one of gratitude that I could be on hand to listen to the anecdotal history of the women's struggle as related by about those who were being honored in absentia and by those inductees on the front lines still.

In some ways, we have witnessed in the last couple of decades a rise and fall in public consciousness of what the women's movement was all about. My sense is that today we are in a slough when it comes to appreciating what was at stake 150 years ago and how long it has taken to make tiny gains and win incremental rights.

Most of us - including young women - take their rights for granted in the same way that most workers believe their employers pay them generously and provide decent benefits because of their intrinsic personal merit and the employers inherent decency. Most workers barely acknowledge there ever was something called the labor movement or trade unions, which faced great dangers to secure equity and safe conditions for workers.

I found it invigorating to peel back history with those who spoke passionately about their own experiences and those of the honored women, long since dead, like Mary Barret Dyer, who was hung on Boston Common in 1660 because of her commitment to Quakerism, which was regarded then as heresy.

The afternoon was a spirited seminar in long-forgotten American history, both because it underscored the collective social cruelty to women and the courage that it inspired.

While we were there because of the contributions that the estimable Sophia Smith made in bringing about the founding of Smith College, her story in some ways paled in comparison to that of many other brave pioneers such as Mary Edward Walker, one of the first women to become a doctor and who was initially prevented from battlefield service in the Civil War, only to prevail; or Kate Mullany, an Irish immigrant who founded the Collar Laundry Union in Troy, N.Y. ,in 1864; or Emma Smith DeVoe, a leading suffragist, or Frances Willard, best known as founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, but less well appreciated for her fight and that of her army of followers for such social reforms as the eight-hour day, protection of abused women and children, and workplace safety.

An interesting thread that runs through the fabric of the women's rights movement - beyond securing the right to vote - is a overarching commitment to free speech, social justice, world peace, or what might generally be called a left, progressive political perspective, which is sadly out of favor in today's consumer society.

The rhetorical high point came with the comments of Bishop Leontine Kelly, a black minister who took as her text what had been called the Negro National Anthem, "Lift Every voice and Sing."

While the program went on longer than most of us had expected, the stories were so powerful that I felt I was privileged to be allowed to participate because I possessed none of the requisite credentials for understanding how significant this afternoon was.

As speaker after speaker was applauded and as feelings of pride and honor and a sense of achievement washed over the audience, I tried to think of a comparable experience that I had as a man and I came up empty. Over the centuries men had fought wars, won crucial athletic contests, wrested control of enormous economic and political power, but those achievements could not match the feelings of unity, solidarity, and togetherness evident on this day. It was odd to feel so empty, so deprived, when the day had been so full, so rich. That, of course, was the point, it was not my day at all.

When I got back to Northampton, it occurred to me that no one more deserves to join the Hall of Fame than Eleanor Flexner, whose path-breaking historical work on behalf of women has been slighted for too long, not only here in Northampton, but on the larger stage.

Interestingly enough, in the wake of the Sophia Smith induction, Smith's women's history archive, the Sophia Smith Collection, has sent to the Women's Hall of Fame nomination papers for Eleanor Flexner.

Perhaps there will occasion for another trip to Seneca Falls.