- Person
- Gerda Lerner
- Lived
- 1920–2013
- Field
- Women’s history
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Gerda Lerner arrived in New York in 1939 as a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Long before she became a historian, she was an activist. In the 1940s and 1950s she worked with progressive women's groups on economic and consumer issues and actively supported civil rights for African Americans.
With her husband, the film-maker Carl Lerner, she co-wrote the screenplay of Black Like Me (1964), which Carl directed. It was based on the book by the white journalist John Howard Griffin, who had spent six weeks travelling through the towns and cities of the Deep South while passing as a Black man.
When Lerner turned to history, she believed women's history had to include women of every race and class. Her 1969 article The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, published in the journal American Studies, was an early and influential study of class in women's history, and she was among the first historians to bring a consciously feminist lens to the past. In 1972 she edited Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, a collection of primary sources chronicling 350 years of Black women's contributions to American history, despite centuries in which many had been enslaved and treated as property.
It was one of the first books to detail the contributions of Black women in history. The Jewish Women's Archive notes that it demonstrated the importance of African American women within women's history. It was followed by other documentary collections, including The Female Experience (1976), and by her essays in The Majority Finds Its Past (1979).
Lerner's commitment to the subject went beyond the book. At Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught from 1968 to 1979 and built the first graduate programme in women's history, she fostered a project to promote African American women's history. Throughout her later work she continued to examine how gender, race and class shaped one another.
Why it matters
Lerner's anthology helped open the study of Black women's history and remains a key source for students and teachers.
About Gerda Lerner
Viennese refugee who became the ‘godmother of women’s history’, teaching one of its first college courses and helping create Women’s History Month.
More about Gerda Lerner
- Gerda Lerner founded the first women's history MAAt Sarah Lawrence College Gerda Lerner developed a master's program in women's history, first offered in 1972, the first American graduate degree in the field.
- Gerda Lerner created the first PhD in women's historyAfter moving to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1980, Gerda Lerner established the nation's first PhD program in women's history.
- Gerda Lerner revived the abolitionist Grimké sistersGerda Lerner's 1967 book The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery restored two pioneering abolitionist and women's rights campaigners to history.
- Gerda Lerner helped launch Women's History MonthIn 1979 Gerda Lerner chaired a Sarah Lawrence institute whose participants campaigned for a National Women's History Week, which grew into Women's History Month.
- Gerda Lerner taught the first women's history courseIn 1963, while still an undergraduate at the New School, Gerda Lerner taught Great Women in American History, considered the first regular college course in women's history.
Sources
- Gerda Lerner Wikipedia
- Gerda Lerner, by Kathryn Kish Sklar Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia
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