a biography of the day--gerda lerner
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.
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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. [3] [4] 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. [5] 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.
[edit] 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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerda_Lerner
an interview with gerda lerner
Gerda Lerner
Fireweed
A Political Autobiography
Gerda Lerner
Making History Her Story, Too
By Felicia R. Lee for The New York Times 20 July 2002
As a historian, Gerda Lerner has learned to take the long view. It is a perspective that applies equally to her work and her life. At 82, Dr. Lerner is considered a godmother of women's history. Yet she certainly did not arrive on the scene as a full-blown feminist historian. As she recently set her table for lunch in her small brown house surrounded by trees here, she recalled years of contradictory realities: of being a housewife and a scholar, a victim of anti-Semitism and a powerful women's rights advocate, at times prosperous and at times poor.
"I wanted to show people that whatever contributions I could make as a historian and a theoretician of women's history and women's studies came out of my practical life experiences," Dr. Lerner said, tucking into a salad of sliced eggs and anchovies. "When you get older, you have a desire to look at your whole life, not just the end result and not just a particular point."
Dr. Lerner, who is a professor of history emerita at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has just published her memoir, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University Press). The title comes from the fireweed plant, which grows on disturbed soil by roadsides and in fire clearings in the forest—a flowering survivor, like Dr. Lerner. It is a "political autobiography," she explained, because she views her personal and her political selves as inseparable.
Fireweed begins in the 1920's in Vienna, where Dr. Lerner was born Gerda Kronstein, the first child of Ilona and Robert Kronstein, an affluent Jewish couple. Her father was a pharmacist, her mother a frustrated artist. The memoir details Dr. Lerner's evolution as a political activist as she faced the Nazis in Vienna and joined the Communist Party in the United States, and it examines her personal relationships that both bloomed and withered against the backdrop of sweeping historical events.
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http://www.temple.edu/tempress/authors/1635_qa3.html
