
Gerda Lerner
women's history pioneer
Gerda Lerner was a writer, educator and activist who founded the field of women's history. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Austria, she didn't expect to make it out alive after Nazi occupation. After her release, she went to the US where she quickly became involved with the Communist Party. This affiliation hurt her husband's Hollywood career and forced their family to move to NYC...but didn't dampen Gerda's ardor for social justice.
When Gerda introduced women's history into the college curriculum, she met considerable resistance. Despite professors' discouragement, she went on to found the first official program in 1972 at Sarah Lawrence ~ creating an institute that helped lobby for the national recognition that put Women's History Week on the map.
academic innovation | established the study of women's history as a respected discipline
a lifetime of writing | a musical, a novel, screenplays {with her husband adapted, "Black Like Me"} + 11 history books
pioneering feminism | founding member of National Organization for Women {NOW}
early communism party membership | survived Hollywood blacklist + McCarthyism ~ activities focused on nuclear disarmament, peace, racial justice + women's rights
three big moments + 1
1939 | Imprisoned by Nazis; escaped to the US from Austria
1963 | taught first women's history course at the New School in New York
1972 | started the first graduate program in women's history at Sarah Lawrence and published her first documentary history ~ Black Women in White America
1980 | created first PhD program in women's history at University of Wisconsin in Madison
from | to
dissident imprisoned by the Nazis | keeper of history for women
born on
April 30, 1920
born in
Vienna, Austria
birth name
Gerda Hedwig Kronstein
citizen of
United States of America
daughter of
Robert Kronstein
~ pharmacist ~
Ilonna Neumann
~ a bohemian artist ~
~ seeing her struggles as a "victim of social restrictions" sparked Gerda's feminism ~
sister of
a younger sister | Nora
educated at
New School for Social Research
~ New York | AB in History | 1963 ~
Columbia University
~ New York | MA in History | 1965 ~
Columbia University
~ New York | PhD in History | 1966 ~
loved studying
women's history
divorced from
Bernard Jensen
~ socialist who helped her escape Austria to America | married 1939-1940 ~
married to
Carl Lerner
~ a film producer | married 1941 to his death in 1973 ~
mother of
a daughter | Stephanie
~ a psychotherapist ~
a son | Dan
~ a film director ~
grandmother of
4 grandchildren
influenced by
Mary Beard
~ although they never met considered her principal mentor for her work on Women's History ~
worked alongside
Renaissance historian Joan Kelly ~ at Sarah Lawrence College
in her spare time
hiked through her 70s
died
January 2, 2013
collapse bio bits"The past must be retraced in order to survive the present. The pieces must be joined together with patient, often blind fingers out of the memories, the ashes of destruction..."
A Death of One's Own | 1978
"I have tried to look straight at death and to let myself experience it fully. To know it, to feel it. Dying is part of living, part of my life, part of reentry . . . Acceptance of death is the key to life."
A Death of One's Own | 1978
"Women's history is women's right—an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision."
National Women's History Week Statement by the President | february 1980
"Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin 'helping' them. Such a world does not exist—never has."
Gerda Lerner on the Future of Our Past | september 1981
"Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most 'unfeminine' quality of all—that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The Hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male-system builders."
The Creation of the Patriarchy | 1986
"The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone."
Why History Matters | 1998
"I was a full-time mother. I have always felt that feminists have to understand more about that experience. Whenever you want to make any change in the community, from getting a stoplight at a school crossing to putting in a park, the people who make the change are your stay-at-home housewives all over the country, all over the world."
Making History Her Story, Too | july 2002
"Every life has losses. I think I have long taken mine too seriously, with a heaviness inappropriate to actuality."
Fireweed: A Political Autobiography | august 2003
"One cannot survive alone. In order to survive, one must foster courage, accept help and help others."
Gerda Lerner: Life of Learning | 2005
"Emphasis on the 'great man' omits women, minorities, many of the actual agents of social change. In so doing, it gives a partial, often erroneous picture of how social change was actually achieved in the past, and thereby fosters apathy and confusion about how social change can be made in the present."
Living with History/Making Social Change | march 2009
"When I started working on women's history thirty years ago, the field did not exist. It was not recognized. People didn't think women had a history worth knowing."
Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove - Gerda Lerner | august 2010
"The only heroine that women of my generation grew up with was Joan of Arc—and we all knew what end she came to."
Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove - Gerda Lerner | august 2010
"Men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are—and that's not a good way to become a human being."
Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove ~ Gerda Lerner | august 2010
"No one 'gave us' anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me—it took 72 years of unbroken, grassroots effort to get women's suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law. It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in social policy."
Gerda Lerner on Why Understanding History is So Important | january 2013
curated with care by Kathleen Murray {march 2015}
Gerda Lerner with landmark sign
Gerda took time off from scholarly work to raise her two children before she began her campaign to initiate women's history as a discipline. While most universities now have Women's Studies departments, it was an uphill battle when Gerda started in the 70s. In one famous anecdote, Gerda was introduced for a lecture she was giving at Harvard by a senior male faculty member who said she had written "some books," none of which he had read, but he did know that she had two children. Gerda took the podium, thanked him, and said ~ "“For the record, my husband and I have two children. And I have written nine books.”
Gerda Lerner | Jewish Women's Archive | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Gerda Lerner in 1981
This is Gerda's faculty portrait from her time at the University of Wisconsin ~ where she started the nation's first PhD program in Women's History.
UW Madison Archives | CC BY 3.0