A girl in Vienna
Gerda Hedwig Kronstein was born in Vienna on April 30, 1920, the elder of two daughters of Robert Kronstein, a pharmacist and businessman, and Ilona (née Neumann), an artist. The family was prosperous, secular and assimilated, and thought of itself as liberal and thoroughly Austrian; its roots ran back through Breslau, Berlin, Bohemia, Moravia and Upper Hungary. Gerda’s relationship with her unconventional mother was strained in childhood; as an adult she came to believe that Ilona had suffered because she could not fit the role expected of a Viennese wife and mother.
Her first act of feminist rebellion, as the Jewish Women’s Archive tells it, came while she was preparing for her bat mitzvah. Keenly aware that women could not take a full part in synagogue services, she decided not to go through with the ceremony, declaring that she did not believe in God. Her Jewishness would remain secular, but it would shape her life profoundly.
Prison and escape
When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Gerda, then a gymnasium student, was already involved with the anti-Nazi underground. Her father escaped to Liechtenstein and later Switzerland. Stormtroopers raided the family apartment, and to force Robert Kronstein to sign over his property, the authorities imprisoned Gerda and her mother. Gerda spent six weeks in a cell with two Christian women held for political reasons, who shared their food with her because Jewish prisoners received reduced rations. She later said that she had not expected to survive, and that having faced death then gave her the courage to face anything afterwards.
In 1939 the family scattered. Her mother went to France, her sister to Palestine, and Gerda, the only member of the family to obtain an American visa, emigrated to New York, sponsored by the family of her fiancé, a young socialist named Bobby Jensen, whom she married on arrival.
Refugee, writer, activist
In New York she learned English while working as a waitress, saleswoman, office clerk and X-ray technician. She wrote fiction about Nazi brutality and the possibility of resisting it; her stories ‘The Prisoners’ (1941) and ‘The Russian Campaign’ (1943) were published while the war still raged. Her first marriage soon failed, and in 1941 she married Carl Lerner, a theatre director and film editor. They lived for some years in Hollywood, where their daughter Stephanie was born in 1945 and their son Daniel in 1947.
The Lerners were active on the left. Both joined the Communist Party USA and worked for trade unions, civil rights and peace causes; in 1946 Gerda helped found the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of American Women, a grassroots women’s organisation regarded by the government as a Communist front. In the McCarthy years they were hurt by the Hollywood blacklist, returned to New York and left the party. Gerda kept writing: a musical, The Singing of Women, with the poet Eve Merriam (1951); an autobiographical novel about Vienna on the eve of the Anschluss, No Farewell (1955); and, with her husband, the screenplay for Black Like Me (1964), the film of John Howard Griffin’s account of travelling through the segregated South disguised as a Black man, which Carl directed.
Becoming a historian
In the late 1950s Lerner began a novel about Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters from a South Carolina slaveholding family who moved north and became leading abolitionists and early champions of women’s rights. Searching for material, she enrolled at the New School for Social Research, an institution built largely by refugees from Nazism, and in 1963, while still an undergraduate in her forties, she taught a course there called ‘Great Women in American History’. It is regarded as one of the first regular college courses in women’s history anywhere.
She went on to Columbia University, earning her master’s degree in 1965 and her Ph.D. in 1966. Her dissertation became The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (1967). She was then entering a profession that was overwhelmingly male and initially met the very idea of women’s history with ridicule; in the words of the Jewish Women’s Archive, the force of her personality made her impervious to it.
Building a field
Lerner taught at Long Island University before joining Sarah Lawrence College in 1968. There she created a master’s programme in women’s history, first offered in 1972, the first graduate degree in the field in the United States. In 1980 she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as Robinson-Edwards Professor of History and founded the nation’s first Ph.D. programme in women’s history. She taught there until she retired in 1991.
Her writing reshaped the discipline. ‘The Lady and the Mill Girl’ (1969) was an early and influential analysis of how class divided women’s experience. Black Women in White America (1972), a documentary history, was one of the first books to put African American women at the centre of the story. The Female Experience (1976) and the essays collected in The Majority Finds Its Past (1979) argued that history written without women was not simply incomplete but distorted, since women were half of humanity. She was a founding member of the National Organization for Women in 1966, and in 1981 she became president of the Organization of American Historians, the first woman to hold the post since 1946.
She also worked to train the next generation of teachers. At Columbia she co-founded the university’s Seminar on Women, and as an educational director for the Organization of American Historians she helped bring women’s history to high-school teachers and the leaders of women’s organisations. At Sarah Lawrence she supported a project to promote African American women’s history, and in 1988 she convened a national conference at which sixty-three scholars from fifty-five institutions assessed how U.S. women’s history was being taught at graduate level.
Women’s History Month
Lerner was determined that women’s history should reach beyond universities. In July 1979 she chaired a fifteen-day summer institute at Sarah Lawrence, co-sponsored with the Women’s Action Alliance and the Smithsonian Institution, for elected leaders of national women’s organisations, from the National Council of Jewish Women and B’nai B’rith to the Girl Scouts and orders of nuns. Hearing of a successful Women’s History Week in Sonoma County, California, the participants resolved to make it national. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the first National Women’s History Week, and the commemoration grew into Women’s History Month, now marked every March across the United States.
The origins of patriarchy
In her later work Lerner turned to the deepest question of all: how did the subordination of women begin? The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) reached back to the ancient Near East, using archaeological, legal, literary and artistic evidence to argue that patriarchy was not natural or eternal but a historical creation, taking shape with the archaic states of the second millennium BCE. It won the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Prize. Its sequel, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), traced how women from the Middle Ages to 1870 struggled to think their way out of a male-defined world, often through religious and visionary writing. She argued that being cut off from their own history was a central reason women had so long been held back.
Her other books include A Death of One’s Own (1978), a memoir of her husband’s death from cancer in 1973; Why History Matters (1997); and Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2002), which covered her life up to 1958.
A Jew, a refugee, an outsider
For many years Lerner did not write about Jewish subjects. But in interviews in the 1990s she spoke of how her experiences as a Jew, a Jewish woman and a refugee shaped her life’s work. The Holocaust, she said, left her with a need to keep memory alive; being an outsider helped her understand women as a group that had been written out of the record. Scholars have since traced how her secular, universalist commitment to social justice runs through everything she wrote.
Austria eventually honoured the girl it had imprisoned. In 1995 she received the Käthe Leichter Prize, which recognises exiled Austrian Jewish intellectuals, and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was among the seventeen institutions that gave her honorary degrees, and a park in Vienna now bears her name.
Legacy
Gerda Lerner died in Madison, Wisconsin, on January 2, 2013, aged ninety-two. When she began, women’s history barely existed as a subject; by the end of her life it was taught in schools and universities across the world, and the Organization of American Historians’ annual Lerner-Scott Prize, named for her and Anne Firor Scott, rewards the best dissertation in U.S. women’s history. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Bruce Catton Prize for lifetime achievement in historical writing and, in 2008, an honorary doctorate from Harvard. Her papers are held at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Every March, when schools and communities celebrate Women’s History Month, they carry forward work she began.
Her life has itself become a subject of study and film: the documentary Why Women Need to Climb Mountains (2016), by Renata Keller, follows her journey from Vienna to Madison, and in 2013 the Radcliffe Institute held a memorial symposium in her honour.
Sources & further reading
Gerda Lerner, Wikipedia · Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Gerda Lerner”, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive · Gerda Lerner, Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, Jewish Women’s Archive · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.