The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner

(Her autobiography, Fireweed, offers a vivid picture of her family and household.) Her father Robert, an ambitious young army officer, married a woman with a substantial dowry, which he used to establish a profitable pharmacy and pharmaceutical factory. Her family was typical of the Jewish bourgeoisie in central Europe but also unconventional, as their class status allowed.

Lerner’s death on January 2, 2013, in Madison, Wisconsin, at age 92, makes this a moment not merely to honor and appreciate her but also to discuss the meaning of her life’s work for all historians.ģ She was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein to a wealthy, secular Jewish family in Vienna in 1920. Social history of all kinds was a low-status practice in the 1950s, and political history confined itself mainly to kings, presidents, courts, and congresses. She was part of the intellectual movement once called “history from the bottom up,” a movement sparked by the African American civil-rights struggle that saw a vast transformation of the whole discipline. The field expanded from Lerner’s development of an MA program at Sarah Lawrence College to the establishment of a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin/Madison to the presence of women’s-history faculty in the great majority of American colleges and universities.Ģ All historians are in her debt. During her lifetime, a field that once encompassed a mere handful of brave and marginalized historians became one with thousands. “Writing history and thinking about women,” she wrote in her collected essays, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), “could lead to transformative politics rooted in both thought and experience.”(xv) She was the single most influential figure in the development of women’s and gender history since the 1960s. She devoted her academic lifetime to showing that women had a history, and that knowing it could alter human consciousness. 1 Gerda Lerner was a historian of remarkable eloquence, insight, and courage, an advocate of the importance of history to the pursuit of social justice.

The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner