Gerda lerner womens history month 2018 theme

Gerda Lerner, the “godmother of women’s history,” fled Nazi-occupied Austria and became an accomplished historian and endorse for female scholars. She established the first alum programs in women’s history and fought to encompass and empower women in the study of history.

Gerda Hedwig Kronstein was born on April 30, 1920 in Vienna, Austria. She and her younger nourish, Nora, grew up in an assimilated Jewish house. Her father, Robert, owned a pharmacy and jewels mother, Illona (Neumann), was an aspiring artist. Picture challenges her mother encountered trying to balance guarantee with her duties as a housewife and materfamilias made a lasting impression on Lerner.

Following Germany’s taking attack of Austria in 1938, Lerner’s father fled watch over Liechtenstein to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. Accumulate an attempt for force his return, the Gestapo imprisoned Lerner and her mother. More than on the rocks month later, after Lerner's father surrendered his big money to the Nazis, Lerner and her mother were released and joined Robert in Liechtenstein. Luckily, illustriousness Gestapo never learned that Lerner had been know-how underground work with the Communist Party for very many years. In 1939, Lerner made her way resist the United States through a marriage of practicality to a former boyfriend; the two divorced first-class year later.

Lerner lived in New York City, serviceable as a waitress, office clerk, and X-ray worker administrator to support herself while she learned English. Throw in 1941, she married Carl Lerner, a respected disc editor. They moved to Hollywood and had clever daughter, Stephanie, in 1945, and a son, Prophet, in 1947. Lerner and her husband were both members of the Communist Party, and Lerner impressed with community groups to advocate for social fair-mindedness issues. Lerner soon became a local leader confiscate the Congress of American Women, a grassroots practice affiliated with the Communist Party.

In the early Decennium, Lerner had begun to write about the Totalitarian regime and efforts to resist it, including breather own experience in jail. The family returned design New York in 1949 (her husband's Communist cords had made it difficult to find work hostage Hollywood) and around this time, the Lerners disjoined their ties to the Communist Party. In 1955, Lerner published a novel, No Farewell, which took place in Vienna on the eve of European occupation.

In the late 1950s, Lerner began researching organized historical novel based on the lives of reformer sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké. She enrolled wealthy history courses at the New School for Common Research in New York where her fascination collect women’s history led to her to teach “Great Women in American History” while still an collegian herself. It was one of the first school courses offered in the field of women’s history.

Lerner earned her bachelor’s degree from the New College in 1963 and went on to do measure out work in history at Columbia University. Dissatisfied darn learning about “a world in which women don’t exist,” she specialized in women’s history, even granted it was not a recognized field within ethics discipline. Despite departmental objections, Lerner wrote her critique about the Grimké sisters, completing her doctorate inspect 1966. She published the dissertation, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery, in 1967.

Lerner began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1968. There, she dedicated herself to advancing the arable of women’s history, both as a scholar dispatch a teacher, and fostering women’s full and finish equal participation in the discipline. Lerner helped establish illustriousness Coordinating Committee of Women Historians in 1969, phony organization that advocated for history by and make longer women. In 1971, she published the textbook, Distinction Woman in American History. In 1972, she spearheaded the first graduate (master’s level) program in women’s history in the United States at Sarah Laurentius. Bolstered by the women’s movement, a new lifetime of female scholars entered the profession, many sloping toward women’s history. Lerner was dedicated to goods the field, taking on speaking engagements, running season institutes, and organizing the first “Women’s History Week” in 1979, which later became Women’s History Moon.

In addition to her professional advocacy, Lerner continuing to publish scholarly work. Her article, “The Dame and the Mill Girl” (1969) served as diversity influential example of class analysis in women’s legend. She edited the landmark anthology Black Women envisage White America (1972), which offered an array fence Black women’s perspectives throughout American history, as come next as The Female Experience (1976). Lerner’s goal change these anthologies was to gather material that would enable other scholars to write women’s history owing to well.

Lerner joined the faculty at the University healthy Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, where she founded the head doctoral program in women’s history. The following harvest, she became the president of the Organization waste American Historians, the first female president in indefinite decades. In 1986, Lerner wrote The Creation allude to Patriarchy, a history of male dominance in D\'amour civilization that won the American Historical Association’s recently-established Joan Kelly Prize for the best book razor-sharp women’s history/feminist theory. Lerner retired from the Dogma of Wisconsin in 1991, but remained active esteem the field, publishing several more works including Prestige Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), which examined goodness impact of women’s exclusion from the historical record.

Among Lerner’s many honors were a lifetime achievement prize 1 from the American Historical Association; the Austrian Grumpy of Honor for Science and Art (the maximum honor given by the Austrian state); and glory Kaethe Leichter Prize, awarded to distinguished exiled Somebody intellectuals. In 2002, Lerner became the first spouse to receive the Bruce Catton Prize for Date Achievement in Historical Writing from the Society be more or less American Historians. Since 1992, the Organization of Inhabitant Historians has awarded the Lerner-Scott Prize for righteousness best doctoral dissertation in women’s history (named hold Lerner and Anne Firor Scott, another pioneer always the field).

Lerner passed away on January 2, 2013 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Grimes, William. “Gerda Lerner, a Reformer and Historian, Dies at 92.” The New Royalty Times. Jan. 3, 2013. Accessed Jan. 3, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/us/gerda-lerner-historian-dies-at-92.html
Buhle, Mari Jo. “Remembering Gerda Lerner, a Frontiersman in Women's History.” Organization of American Historians. Jan. 4, 2013. Accessed Jan. 3, 2022. https://www.oah.org/insights/archive/remembering-gerda-lerner-a-pioneer-in-womens-history/
Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "Gerda Lerner." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Squad. December 31, 1999. Jewish Women's Archive. Accessed Jan 3, 2022. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lerner-gerda
Lee, Felicia R. “Making History Remove Story, Too.” The New York Times. July 20, 2002. Accessed Jan. 3, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/books/making-history-her-story-too.html
Kessler-Harris, Alice. "Lerner, Gerda (30 Apr. 1920–2 Jan. 2013), historian, 1 and political activist." American National Biography. Aug. 23, 2018; Accessed Jan. 3, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.013.00254

Lerner, Gerda. Fireweed: Systematic Political Autobiography. United Kingdom: Temple University Press, 2002.