Gerda Lerner

Gerda Lerner (born April 30, 1920) is a historian, author and teacher. She is a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University.

Lerner is one of the founders of the field of women's history, and is a former president of the Organization of American Historians. Lerner played a key role in the development of women’s history curricula. She taught what is considered to be the first women’s history course in the world at the New School for Social Research in 1963. She was also involved in the development of similar programs at Long Island University (1965–1967), at Sarah Lawrence College from 1968 to 1979 (where she established the nation's first Women's History graduate program), at Columbia University (where she was a co-founder of the Seminar on Women), and since 1980 as Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

She also wrote the screenplay for her husband Carl Lerner’s film Black Like Me in 1966.

Early Life

Lerner was born Gerda Kronstein in Vienna, Austria on April 30, 1920, the first child of Ilona and Robert Kronstein, an affluent Jewish couple. Her father was a pharmacist, her mother an artist. Following the Anschluss, Kronstein joined the anti-Nazi resistance, and spent six weeks, including her eighteenth birthday, in an Austrian jail. Her family was able to escape from Austria and persecution by the Nazis; Kronstein, with the help of a young socialist lover, Bobby Jensen, immigrated to the United States in 1939.

Career

When Lerner first moved to New York, she worked as a waitress, salesperson, office clerk, and x-ray technician, all the while writing fiction and poetry; she published two short stories providing a first-person account of the horrors of Nazi occupation. After her divorce with Jensen, she met and married Carl Lerner, a young theatre director who was active with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In the 1940s she was active in the Congress of American Women (CAW, a women's group concerned with economic and social issues), helping to found the Los Angeles chapter in 1946. In 1951, she collaborated with poet Eve Merriam on a musical, The Singing of Women. Her novel, No Farewell, appeared in 1955; with her husband, she wrote the script for Black Like Me. Committed Communists, the Lerners were involved in numerous grassroots activities involving trade unionism, civil rights, and anti-militarism; they struggled against McCarthyism, especially the Hollywood blacklist.

Lerner returned to school in the late 1950s, while in her 40s, earning an A.B. from the New School for Social Research in 1963 and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1965 and 1966 respectively; her dissertation became her first publication, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967). In 1966 Lerner became a founding member of the National Organization for Women; she was a local and national leader in the organization for a short period. In 1968 she became a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. While there, in 1972 she started the first program to offer a graduate degree in women's history (it was a master's degree program.) She also taught at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Lerner published numerous books and articles to help further the recognition of women's history as a field of study. Her article "The Lady and the Mill Girl" (1969) was an early and influential example of class analysis in women's history. In 1980, Lerner created the nation's first Ph.D. program in women's history, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she later became professor emerita. From 1981 to 1982 Lerner served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the largest society devoted to the study of American history. As an educational director for the organization, she helped make women's history accessible to many, including leaders of women's organizations and high school teachers. The Organization of American Historians named the Gerda Lerner-Ann Scott Prize for the best women's history dissertation in her honor. In 1986 Lerner won the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Prize in recognition of her work on the roots of women's oppression.

Lerner was among the first to bring a consciously feminist lens to the study of history, producing enormously influential essays and books. Among her most important works are the documentary anthologies, Black Women in White America (1972) and The Female Experience (1976), the essay collections, The Majority Finds Its Past (1979) and Why History Matters (1997), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993). She published Fireweed: A Political Autobiography in 2002.

Selected works

Black Women in White America: A Documentary History was published in 1972. It chronicles 350 years of black women being treated as property and describes the long range effects of the slave past. It was one of the first books to detail the contributions of black women in women's history. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness was published in 1993. The book traces the roots of patriarchal dominance back to two millennia. In The Creation of Patriarchy, volume one of Women and History, Lerner ventures into prehistory, attempting to trace the roots of patriarchal dominance. Lerner provides historical, archeological, literary, and artistic evidence for the idea that patriarchy is a cultural construct. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 is the second volume of Women and History. In this book, Lerner reviews European culture from the seventh century through the nineteenth century, showing the limitations imposed by a male-dominated culture and the sporadic attempt to resist that domination. She examines in detail the educational deprivation of women, their isolation from many of the traditions of their societies, and the expressive outlet many women have found through writing. Fireweed: A Political Autobiography was published in 2003. It captures the life story of Gerda Lerner personally and politically. She writes about her time in Vienna where she suffered suffered anti-Semitism, imprisonment, deportation, immigration, and McCarthyism along with her strained relationship with her mother. Fireweed: A Political Autobiography is Lerner's detailed documentation of her years from childhood to 1958 when she first began her studies at the New School for Social Research in New York. She recalls in Beginnings starvation and imprisonment in Austria and her family's survival, due in part to the fact that her father had opened a branch of the family business in Liechtenstein, where he stayed. Her mother moved to France, and Lerner's sister relocated to Israel. Lerner came to the United States at the age of eighteen under the sponsorship of the family of the young man she would marry. The marriage failed, and Lerner survived as a typical immigrant, working for minimum wage. She met Carl, and they both obtained divorces in Reno so that they could marry each other, then moved from New York to Hollywood, where Carl's career in film blossomed. For her works Lerner has received many awards including the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing of the Society of American Historians, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Special Book Award.

Other works

Musical

• Singing of Women (1951, with Eve Merriam)

Screenplays

• Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom (1957)
• Black Like Me (1964)
• Home for Easter (n.d.)

Books

• No Farewell (1955) an autobiographical novel
• The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Authority (1967)
• The Woman in American History [ed.] (1971)
• The Female Experience: An American Documentary (1976)
• A Death of One's Own (1978/2006)
• The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979)
• Teaching Women's History (1981)
• Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982)
• The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)
• Scholarship in Women's History Rediscovered & New (1994)
• Why History Matters (1997)

References

• Ransby, Barbabra. A Historian Who Takes Sides. The Progressive. September 2002.
• Lerner, Gerda. A Life of Learning. Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 2005.
• Lerner, Gerda. Fireweed: A Political Autobiography. Temple University Press, 2003.
• MacLean, Nancy. Rethinking the Second wave. The Nation. October 14, 2002.

Further reading

American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary, Jennifer Scanlon and Shaaron Cosner. Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1996. (Pages 144-146.)

Fifty Jewish Women Who Changed the World, Deborah G. Felder and Diana Rosen. New York: Citadel Press (Kensington Publishing), 2003. (Pages 216-220.)

Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation, Kate Weigand. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. (Multiple references, indexed.)

External links

• Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution from the Jewish Women's Archive
• Gerda Lerner - Corporatizing Higher Education