Gerda Lerner taught the first women's history course

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

The story

Gerda Lerner grew up in a Jewish family in Vienna and was imprisoned by the Nazis for six weeks as a teenager after the 1938 annexation of Austria. She came to New York in 1939 as a refugee, the only member of her family to obtain an American visa, and spent years supporting herself as a waitress, salesgirl, office clerk and X-ray technician while she learned English and wrote fiction. She married the film-maker Carl Lerner, raised two children, and worked as a political activist and writer.

In the late 1950s she began a novel about Sarah and Angelina Grimké, abolitionist sisters from South Carolina, and in 1958 enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York to learn more.

Her fascination with the subject led her to teach. In 1963, while still an undergraduate, she offered a course called Great Women in American History. It is considered the first regular college course on women's history offered anywhere, at a time when the subject had no standing as a field of study and the historical profession was dominated by men.

Lerner later wrote that her own experience made her think about people who had no voice in telling their own stories. That insight drove her decision to earn a doctorate in history and to help establish women's history as a standard academic discipline. She completed her BA in 1963, then an MA and PhD at Columbia by 1966, publishing her dissertation as The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery, and went on to found the first master's programme in women's history at Sarah Lawrence College and the first doctoral programme at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 1979 she chaired the summer institute that helped launch what became Women's History Month. A course begun by a middle-aged undergraduate in New York grew into a field now taught in universities around the world.