LERNER, Gerda 1920-

PERSONAL: Born April 30, 1920, in Vienna, Austria; immigrated to United States, 1939; naturalized U.S. citizen, 1943; daughter of Robert and Ilona (Neumann) Kronstein; married Carl Lerner (a filmmaker), 1941 (died, 1973); children: Stephanie, Daniel. Education: New School for Social Research, B.A., 1963; Columbia University, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1966. Hobbies and other interests: Music, gardening, backpacking.

ADDRESSES: Home—6005 Hammersley Rd., Madison, WI 53711-3113. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Temple University Press, 1601 North Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19122.

CAREER: Professional writer and translator, 1941—; New School for Social Research, New York, NY, lecturer and historian, 1963-65; Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, assistant professor, 1965-67, associate professor of American history, 1967-68; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, member of history faculty, 1968-80, director of graduate program in women's history, 1972-76, 1978-79; University of Wisconsin, Madison, Robinson-Edwards Professor of history, beginning 1980, director and codirector of graduate program in women's history, 1981-90, Robinson-Edwards Professor of History Emerita. Member of Columbia University Seminar on American Civilization, and Seminar on Women and Society, 1972. FIPSE grant for Promoting Black Women's History, codirector, 1980-83; Sarah Lawrence College, educational director of summer institutes in women's history, 1976 and 1979; project director for "Documenting the Midwest Origins of Twentieth-Century Feminism," 1990-93.

MEMBER: National Organization for Women (founding member), Organization of American Historians (president, 1981-82), American Historical Association, American Association of University Women, American Studies Association, Authors League of America, Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters (fellow), American Academy of Arts.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Association of University Women fellow, 1968-69; Social Science Research Council research fellow, 1970-71; Robert H. Lord Award, Emmanuel College, 1974; Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1975, 77, 91, grantee, 1972-76; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1976; Ford Foundation fellow, 1978-79; Lilly Foundation fellow, 1979; Special Book award, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, 1980, for The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History; Guggenheim fellow, 1980-81; Organization of American Historians grant, 1980-83; Senior Distinguished Research Professor, University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, 1984-1990; Educational Foundation Achievement Award, American Association of University Women, 1986; Joan Kelly Award, American Historical Association, 1986, for best book in women's history, for Women and History; Lucretia Mott Award, 1988; award for scholarly distinction, American Historical Association, 1992; Kathe Leichter-Preis, Austrian State Prize for Women's History and the History of the Labor Movement, both 1995; Austrian Cross for Science and Art, 1996; recipient of ten honorary degrees.

WRITINGS:

No Farewell (novel), Associated Authors (New York, NY), 1955.

(With husband, Carl Lerner) Black Like Me (screen-play; based on book of same title by John Howard Griffin), Walter Reade Distributors, 1964.

The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1967, published as The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman's Rights and Abolition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998, revised and expanded edition, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004.

The Woman in American History (textbook), Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1971.

(Editor) Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1972.

Women Are History: A Bibliography in the History of American Women, Sarah Lawrence College (New York, NY), 1975, 4th revised edition (with Marie Laberge), University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1986.

(Editor) The Female Experience: An American Documentary, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1976.

A Death of One's Own, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1978.

The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1979.

Teaching Women's History, American Historical Association (Washington, DC), 1981.

Women and History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), Volume 1: The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986, Volume 2: The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, from the Middle Ages to 1870, 1997.

Why History Matters: Life and Thought, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimke, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.

Also author of Dorothea Dix and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, sound recordings, Pacifica Tape Library. Coauthor, with Eve Merriam, of the musical, Singing of Women, 1956. Contributor of short stories to various literary magazines, and of articles and reviews to professional journals. Author of numerous professional translations.

SIDELIGHTS: A pioneer in the field of women's studies, Gerda Lerner has written extensively about the role of women in history and how traditional histories have failed to address specifically female issues. Using a variety of sources, Lerner frequently compares issues of race, class, and gender in her studies of women. Believed to have taught the first postwar college course in women's history, she has also helped establish several graduate programs in the field.

Anne Lewis Osler in Feminist Writers explained that "Lerner's research, combined with her commitment to organize programs designed to train future generations of feminist scholars, helped establish women's history as an essential component of contemporary history curriculums in colleges and universities both in the United States and abroad." As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese described her in the New Republic, Lerner "has played a unique role in making women's history the thriving field it has become; she has delineated its appropriate contours; searched for a method and a theory appropriate to its practice; unearthed the sources necessary to its writing; insisted not merely on its autonomy and integrity, but on its inescapable centrality to any worthy history of humankind."

Lerner's Black Women in White America: A Documentary History chronicles 350 years of suffering by individuals who were often considered property not only by reason of their race, but of their gender. Reviewer Joyce Jenkins commented in the Saturday Review that this "superb" book is "the first, to my knowledge, to treat in depth the grossly neglected segment of American history staked out by the book's title." Lerner uses numerous documents as well as newspaper items to report the troubles of these women from their own perspective, not that of a distanced observer. While Jenkins disputed some of the author's assertions, such as the supposedly recurrent theme of racial solidarity, she remarked that overall it "displays sharp insight into the long-range effects of this slave past."

Adrienne Rich observed in the New York Times Book Review that, although as a white historian Lerner is "scrupulously restrained in her theorizing," in Black Women in White America she provides "a thorough historical framework in which the documents could be read and interpreted." Moreover, Rich described the documentary as an "indispensable complement" to Lerner's next work, The Female Experience: An American Documentary. Rich explained that this second documentary "expands [Lerner's] vision of history, while keeping the form begun earlier." As with Black Women in White America, the book presents letters, diaries, newspaper clips, speeches, and other documents that had not been published previously.

"More than any other compilation," remarked Eve Merriam in Ms., "all the many strands needed for comprehending the female experience are successfully interwoven." More notable, however, is the author's presentation of her material; instead of following traditional divisions of history, which she claims do not represent important milestones for women, Lerner attempts to establish an order according to women's issues known as "historical periodization." As Rich explained, the author recognizes that "periods of history regarded as progressive for men have often been regressive for women.… 'Progress' has been defined from a male point of view." Merriam offered similar praise, saying that "in The Female Experience, Lerner has lifted history out of its iron rigidity, out of its chronological framework—what a daring concept and how inexorable it seems now that she has done so."

The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History compiles many of Lerner's essays and speeches, including those of her theories of historical periodization, into one book. "By bringing these pieces together," commented June Sochen in the Washington Post Book World, "Lerner gives us a good opportunity to see the development of her thought as she participated in the shaping of the discipline." Sochen criticized some of Lerner's ideas, however, such as her tendency to see women's history and culture as independent from mainstream events. "Does the existence of a female culture operate outside history? … The temptation of some women historians to portray all examples of female culture as subversive, alternative value-systems is questionable at best."

Fox-Genovese, while praising Lerner's work as groundbreaking, still faulted the author's failure to consider religious and class issues as notable influences in women's history. These reservations aside, the critic found that "committed to recreating the female perspective, Lerner nonetheless never sacrifices the specificities of income and race to an all-inclusive feminism."

In The Creation of Patriarchy, Volume One of Women and History, Lerner ventures into prehistory, attempting to trace the roots of patriarchal dominance. Kamarck Minnich claimed in Ms. that in doing so, Lerner "gives us a grand historical framework that was impossible even to imagine before the enlightenment about women's place in the world provided by her earlier work." In this volume, Lerner cites "historical, archeological, literary, and artistic evidence for the idea that patriarchy is a cultural invention," noted Glenn Collins in the New York Times. Although the author herself acknowledges that this kind of evidence is "fragile," Sarah B. Pomeroy still criticized her use of these sources. "To construct a grandiose paradigm demonstrating the continually deteriorating position of women," the critic wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Mrs. Lerner considers societies as different as the Sumerians, Babylonians … Hebrews, and Greeks as though they existed on a historical continuum and evolved directly from one another." This kind of evidence, remarked Pomeroy, "does not permit definitive conclusions." Contrarily, Minnich found that Lerner uses "careful scholarship and ever more carefully refined theoretical concepts" to present her ideas about women and the evolution of patriarchy.

The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 is the second volume of Women and History. In this book, the author reviews European culture from the seventh century through the nineteenth century, showing the limitations imposed by a male-dominated culture and the sporadic attempt to resist that domination. She examines in detail the educational deprivation of women, their isolation from many of the traditions of their societies, and the expressive outlet many women have found through writing. "Interwoven with the multitudes of fascinating examples that Lerner provides is, of course, the broader argument," advised Susan E. Henking in America. "Mysticism, motherhood, and creativity have been available—and utilized—as routes to self-authorization for centuries. Glimmers of feminist consciousness appeared and disappeared in the interstices of patriarchal culture; feminism's lineage thus reaches much further back than has been traditionally understood. Yet it did not linger. Why?"

Lerner examines the many reasons for this, and gives her thoughts on what is needed to continue the social progress for women. Lynn Hunt, a contributor to the Journal of Social History, said of The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: "Its range and sympathetic detail make this an excellent one-volume overview of women writing about women's consciousness in the centuries before the organization of an explicit feminist movement." Evaluating both volumes of Women and History, Londa L. Schiebinger stated in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History that "together they provide a powerful history of the insidious workings of patriarchy and the toll that being left out of history has taken on women and their creativity."

Although it is a personal narrative rather than a historical study, A Death of One's Own contains the same humanist perspective and development of ideas as the rest of Lerner's work. Written six years after her husband's death, the work recounts Gerda and Carl Lerner's attempts to deal with the knowledge that Carl was dying of a brain tumor. The two decide on a policy of openness and honesty, sharing their feelings as the cancer progresses, even if this policy conflicts with their individual needs. "There's little melodrama or self-pity in this," observed Alex Raksin in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "only an extraordinarily personal evocation of [Lerner's] struggle to achieve peace of mind through realism rather than nihilism."

In writing the book, Lerner takes an approach similar to that of her other work; she uses various sources, such as diary entries, poems, and straight narrative to present her story. "In her deeply moving book," commented Joan Kron in Ms., Lerner "has woven a tapestry: recollections of Carl's illness, her conflicting diary entries from the same period, and 'fragments' of her life in Europe before she became a refugee from the Nazis." In doing so, she "strives to connect past and present, living and dead in a continuum of meaning," said Helen Yglesias in the New York Times Book Review.

Many reviewers expressed similar praise for A Death of One's Own. Yglesias commented that it is "a book that heartens and breaks the heart at the same time," even though Lerner "is no sentimentalist, and does not sensationally display the grim details." Anne Tyler wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "Gerda Lerner's simple ability to cope—her endurance, her strength, her willingness to fight whenever fighting will help—is admirable.… But what I found awe inspiring is the fact that through it all, she never loses the capacity to feel." Tyler also found the book to be a "page-turner," and Kron similarly found it involving. "When Carl Lerner finally dies," Kron wrote, "one not only weeps for him, but for oneself with envy for such a relationship."

In Why History Matters: Life and Thought, Lerner fuses memoir and scholarly thought. This collection of essays begins with her recollections of life in post-World War I Austria and describes her family's flight from the advance of the Nazis and their subsequent relocation to the United States. Lerner relates how, as a teenager, she questioned the exclusion of women from full participation in synagogue, and eventually abandoned organized Judaism for over fifty years. She reflects on her experiences with anti-Semitism, her path to scholarly eminence, and all the things she lost when she rejected her Jewish heritage and her German background.

"The result is an intensely moving and intellectually satisfying collection," wrote Eleanor J. Bader in the Progressive. Bader concluded, "Why History Matters underscores the importance of knowing our familial, ethnic, and societal histories. These are starting points toward a world without hierarchies, war, or economic inequity." Catharine R. Stimpson in the Nation wrote, "As survivor and historian, Lerner warns us that we cannot survive and grow—as individuals or as a species—unless we have a full, accurate, enabling sense of the past. This triple sense of loss, pain and responsibility pervades her work.… Why History Matters records her heroic quest to respect differences among women, to work hard, if not always successfully, to avoid the false universal, and to offer a unifying vision of women's history and of America."

Fireweed: A Political Autobiography is Lerner's detailed documentation of her years from childhood to 1958 when she first began her studies at the New School for Social Research in New York. She recalls in "Beginnings" starvation and imprisonment in Austria and her family's survival, due in part to the fact that her father had opened a branch of the family business in Liechtenstein, where he stayed. Her mother moved to France, and Lerner's sister relocated to Israel. Lerner came to the United States at the age of eighteen under the sponsorship of the family of the young man she would marry. The marriage failed, and Lerner survived as a typical immigrant, working for minimum wage. She met Carl, and they both obtained divorces in Reno so that they could marry, then moved from New York to Hollywood, where Carl's career in film blossomed.

Carl Lerner was a member of the Communist Party, and in 1946, Lerner, who had become a citizen several years earlier, also joined and became active in progressive politics. During the era of McCarthyism, they were swept up in the anti-Communist hysteria, and Carl was unable to secure work. He returned to New York, leaving Lerner to cope with caring for their two sons with few resources. Lerner joined her husband after six months, and once in New York, she worked for education, integration, women's rights, and international peace. New York Times Book Review contributor Inga Clendinnen noted that "the protection from deportation of aliens suspected of Communist sympathies was especially dear to her: she cites a pamphlet she wrote on one tragic case, and it's a dazzler." The Lerners left the Party and wrote a documentary that was instrumental in bringing Martin Luther King to prominence, but they were excluded from the campaign for racial equality, possibly because of their radical past.

Women's Review of Books writer Karen Offen wrote, "What I find especially important is precisely that this is a life told by a woman who is deeply aware of and concerned about world and national events and their impact on the lives of ordinary people. Yet, as a woman historian devoted to women's history and recognition of the female experience, she also fully acknowledges the importance of the 'private' side—the men and women in her life, her two American-born children, and the irreplaceable gifts of love, friendship, genuine human sympathy, generosity, hard work—and uncommon good luck."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

American Women Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Lerner, Gerda, A Death of One's Own, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1978.

Lerner, Gerda, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.

periodicals

America, December 4, 1993, p. 17; September 16, 1995, pp. 3-5.

Booklist, June 1, 1996, p. 1744; April 1, 1997, p. 1279; April 15, 2002, Vanessa Bush, review of Fireweed, p. 1378.

Boston Globe, April 6, 1997, p. N17.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, spring, 1995, pp. 671-672.

Journal of Social History, spring, 1995, pp. 675-77.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1997, p. 202; February 15, 2002, review of Fireweed, p. 238.

Library Journal, March 15, 1997, p. 74; May 1, 2002, Elaine Machleder, review of Fireweed, p. 112.

Life, May 5, 1972.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 17, 1985.

Ms., May, 1977; October, 1978; September, 1980; May, 1986.

Nation, May 12, 1997, p. 34; October 14, 2002, Nancy MacLean, review of Fireweed, p. 28.

New Republic, December 1, 1979.

New Yorker, March 25, 1972.

New York Times, April 28, 1986; July 27, 1997, p. 20.

New York Times Book Review, March 20, 1977; August 6, 1978; April 20, 1986; May 2, 1993; December 4, 1994, p. 88; July 27, 1997, p. 20; August 11, 2002, Inga Clendinnen, review of Fireweed, p. 14.

Progressive, March, 1994, pp. 18-22; May, 1997, p. 39.

Publishers Weekly, February 3, 1997, p. 83.

Saturday Review, May 6, 1972.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1995, p. 24.

Washington Post Book World, August 13, 1978; January 27, 1980.

Women's Review of Books, October, 2002, Karen Offen, review of Fireweed, pp. 3-5.

online

Independent Weekly,http://www.indyweek.com/ (April 24, 2003), "The Personal Is Historical."

National Woman's History Project Web site,http://www.nwhp.org/ (March 10, 2003), "Gerda Lerner: A Pioneer in Woman's History."

University of Wisconsin, Madison Web site,http://www.news.wisc.edu/ (April 30, 2002), "Emeria's Autobiography Places Personal History in Political Context."*