- Person
- Gerda Lerner
- Lived
- 1920–2013
- Field
- Women’s history
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Gerda Lerner came to the United States from Vienna in 1939 as a Jewish refugee and spent years working at odd jobs before returning to education in her late thirties. She taught one of the first college courses in women's history at the New School in 1963, earned a doctorate at Columbia in 1966, and taught at Long Island University in Brooklyn.
She received her first academic appointment at Sarah Lawrence College in 1968. At the time women's history was barely recognised, and the male-dominated historical profession often greeted the idea with ridicule. The Jewish Women's Archive notes that the force of her personality and her belief in the subject made her impervious to that scorn.
Lerner set out to build the field anyway. She developed a Master of Arts programme in women's history, which Sarah Lawrence began offering in 1972. It was the first graduate degree in the field in the United States, and she later became its director. A landmark sign now marks Sarah Lawrence as the home of the first graduate programme in women's history.
At Sarah Lawrence she also fostered projects showing the relevance of women's history to women's lives, including the promotion of African American women's history. In 1979 she chaired a summer institute there for leaders of national women's organisations, whose participants went on to campaign for a National Women's History Week, the forerunner of Women's History Month.
She taught at Sarah Lawrence until 1979, combining teaching with summer institutes and a vigorous speaking schedule to advance women and women's history in American culture and in the historical profession. A new generation of women who entered the profession between 1967 and 1972, many drawn to women's history, amplified her efforts. In 1980 she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she founded the nation's first PhD programme in the field, completing the path from a single course to the highest level of academic training.
Why it matters
The Sarah Lawrence programme trained some of the first professional historians of women and showed other universities how the field could be taught.
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 documented Black women's historyGerda Lerner's 1972 anthology Black Women in White America chronicled 350 years of Black women's contributions and was one of the first books of its kind.
- 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
- Gerda Lerner, Women's History Month Jewish Women's Archive
- Women's History Month Wikipedia
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