She lived thereafter in a room “marked off from the rest of the apartment. African American history was a growing field, but nothing about black women was available. “From 1980 on, the celebration of Women's History Week, and later, Women's History Month, spread to every state, every county, and most communities in the U.S.A.” – Gerda Lerner, This Week in History: Pioneering women's history summer institute, Copyright © 1998–2020, Jewish Women's Archive. In Memoriam
African American history was a rapidly growing field by then, but neither books nor articles focused on black women were available. McCarthyism hit the Lerners hard. Twelve years later she won a professorship at the University of Wisconsin, over significant opposition, where she built the country’s first PhD program in women’s history. The cause of death was not disclosed. —Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University, Tags:
As 2013 dawns, Women’s Studies and Women’s History are standard, credible, degree-producing disciplines. Could traditional historians take her sweeping sentences seriously? https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gerda-Lerner, Jewish Women's Archive - Biography of Gerda Lerner. Becoming an historian did not disrupt Lerner’s identity as a writer. Please read our commenting and letters policy before submitting. She began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1968 and worked to establish, with Joan Kelly, an MA program there, which still continues. Listen to clips from Gerda Lerner’s oral history available from the UW Madison Oral History Program: “University of the Air.” Wisconsin Public Radio, April 4, 2010. http://www.wpr.org/shows/university-air-show-04042010″. She knew she wanted to explore the history of women and she did so with a single-minded energy that led her from a biography of the Grimké sisters to a pathbreaking collection of documents entitled Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). She was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920. During the Institute, we created a feminist community free of competition, status-consciousness, private ambition, and prejudice. She became determined to “save” her granddaughters from Ilona’s influence. She lectured widely on the importance of women’s history, often in an inspirational rather than an academic vein, understanding this work as political organizing. She arrived to the US in 1939, a young radical traveling alone, met by the boyfriend from Vienna, Bernard Jensen, who sponsored her as his fiancée. http://www.oah.org/donate/pdf/2012oahdonate.pdf, http://history.wisc.edu/alumniandfriends/supporting.htm. She collaborated with her good friend Eve Merriam on a musical, The Singing of Women, produced off-Broadway in 1951. To do this massive study she left modern American history for anthropology, archeology, mythology and early modern Europe, and read widely in German as well as English-language scholarship. Deported, stateless, she made her way to the United States. So Lerner’s book was a political act, an eye-opener. It proved that African American women’s history could be written. She and Nora often met in Europe for spa vacations. When the massive demonstrations in defense of labor unions erupted in Madison, Wisconsin, in the fall of 2011, she was ecstatic, and had her son Dan take her there, only regretting that she was too frail to be there everyday. (She learned about it by striking up a conversation on a train with a woman reading the Daily Worker.) Gerda Lerner was a pioneer in the field of women’s history. While at Columbia, Lerner joined fellow activists and helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW). No one has put this better than Natalie Zemon Davis, who has commented on "her unflagging struggle for gender and racial equality, and her courageous effort to think big about patriarchal turns in human history. She volunteered for Red Aid, a system of getting help to the families of those arrested and exiled. One of the most influential feminist historians, Lerner is often credited with being the first to offer college courses in women's history. Gerda Lerner, past president of the Organization of American Historians (1981-1982), and pioneer in women's and gender history, passed away on January 2, 2013 at the age of 92. She wrote a number of pivotal works, including The Woman in American History (1971), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), and a collection of essays, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979); in addition, she compiled the essential sourcebooks Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972) and The Female Experience: An American Documentary (1977). “Gerda Lerner (1920-2013).” National Women’s History Museum. At age ten she was enrolled in a gymnasium for girls, where she thrived on the academically demanding environment. Omissions? with a double major in Spanish and in theatre arts from Ripon College. This Wisconsin poet was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. They had two children, Stephanie, now a psychotherapist, and Dan, now a film director. No historian was more identified with the field of women’s history. The same understanding also formed the ground of both her scholarship and her advocacy. Gerda Lerner was the single most influential figure in the development of women’s and gender history since the 1960s. Forty-three women, each an elected official of her organization, represented a full spectrum of women’s organizations, among them National Council of Jewish Women, B’nai Brith, YMCA, Girl Scouts, American Association of University Women, Women Religious (nuns), and many smaller groups. Ilona was miserable in this house, and it is hard to tell how much due to her mother-in-law and how much with her husband, who was far more rigid and upright than she was. She soon met Carl Lerner, a Communist theater director, fell in love, and in 1941 married him. They organized regular women’s history lectures aimed at a broad public and developed a project for bringing women’s history into the public schools: producing several slide shows with scripts—this was well before the days of Powerpoint—at both high-school and elementary-school levels on women’s work, women in sports, and women’s activism which they then presented in public school classes.