Gerda Lerner revived the abolitionist Grimké sisters

Person: Gerda Lerner
Lived: 1920–2013
Field: Women’s history
From: Austrian-American

The story

Sarah and Angelina Grimké grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, daughters of a judge who owned plantations and hundreds of enslaved people. Sarah turned against slavery as a child, and the sisters became Quakers and moved north to Philadelphia. They were among the first American-born women to give public speaking tours, became featured speakers of the antislavery movement and, as the Jewish Women's Archive puts it, ignited the explosion of women's rights within abolitionism. Sarah's pamphlet The Equality of the Sexes has been called the first serious discussion of women's rights by an American woman.

Gerda Lerner, a Jewish refugee from Vienna living in New York, first set out to write a novel about them in the late 1950s. Seeking more information, she enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where her fascination with the subject led her to teach one of the first courses in women's history. After her BA in 1963, she went on to Columbia University, where she earned an MA in 1965 and a PhD in 1966.

Her doctoral dissertation was published in 1967 as The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery. It traced how two daughters of the slaveholding South broke with their family and region, faced hostile crowds, and argued in speech and print that the rights of enslaved people and the rights of women were bound together. Among the stories it told was how the sisters, on learning that their late brother had three mixed-race sons with an enslaved woman, helped pay for the education of the two eldest. One, Francis Grimké, became a prominent minister, and another, Archibald, a lawyer and diplomat.

The Grimkés had shown how the fight against slavery led women to demand their own rights, a link that became central to Lerner's later work on how gender, race and class intersect. Lerner returned to the subject three decades later with The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, published in 1997.

The book launched her career as a historian. From there she went on to build the first graduate programmes in women's history, at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.