- Person
- Gerda Lerner
- Lived
- 1920–2013
- Field
- Women’s history
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Gerda Lerner, born in Vienna in 1920, fled Nazi persecution as a teenager and reached New York in 1939. She came to academic history late, earning her doctorate at Columbia in 1966, but within a few years she had taught one of the first college courses in women's history and built the first master's programme in the field at Sarah Lawrence College.
In 1980 she was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she taught until retiring in 1991. There she founded the country's first doctoral programme in women's history, carrying the field to the highest level of academic training. Only about two decades earlier, the male-dominated profession had greeted the very idea of women's history with ridicule. In 1981 she also became president of the Organization of American Historians, the first woman to lead it since 1946.
Her interest in graduate teaching extended beyond her own campus. In 1988 she led a national conference at which sixty-three scholars from fifty-five institutions evaluated graduate teaching in US women's history.
At Wisconsin she also wrote her two-volume Women and History: The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), which won the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Prize, and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993). She followed them with Why History Matters (1997), The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké (1997) and her autobiography, Fireweed (2002).
In 1992 the Organization of American Historians created the Lerner-Scott Prize, named for her and the historian Anne Firor Scott. It is awarded each year for the best doctoral dissertation in US women's history, so that every year a new scholar trained in the field she created is recognised in her name.
Lerner died in Madison on 2 January 2013, aged 92. The university held a three-hour programme celebrating her life and work, and a memorial symposium was held at the Radcliffe Institute.
Why it matters
Lerner's doctoral programme trained new generations of historians and helped establish women's history as a full academic discipline.
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 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 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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