gerda lerner, women's studies pioneer, dies at 92

[niyad]

Gerda Lerner, Women's Studies Pioneer, Dies at 92




In the mid-1960s, armed with a doctorate in history from Columbia University and a dissertation on two abolitionist sisters from South Carolina, Dr. Lerner entered an academic world in which women’s history scarcely existed. The number of historians interested in the subject, she told The New York Times in 1973, “could have fit into a telephone booth.”

“In my courses, the teachers told me about a world in which ostensibly one-half the human race is doing everything significant and the other half doesn’t exist,” Dr. Lerner told The Chicago Tribune in 1993. “I asked myself how this checked against my own life experience. ‘This is garbage; this is not the world in which I have lived,’ I said.”

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Lerner was married to theater director and notable Communist Carl Lerner (d. 1973), with whom she worked to unionize the film industry and in the U.S. civil rights movement.
In 1966, Lerner joined fellow activists Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Aileen Hernandez, and others in founding the National Organization for Women (NOW).

After completing her doctorate, Lerner moved on to Sarah Lawrence College, where she founded the first graduate program in women’s history in 1972. Reportedly, she encouraged her first students to lobby Congress for the creation of Women's History Week, which eventually became a month-long observance.

. . .

All human beings are practicing historians. We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing.—Gerda Lerner, 1920-2013

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/04-5