Gerda Lener, a pioneer of women's history |
By William Grimes, The New York Times, January 3, 2013
Gerda Lerner, a
scholar and author who helped make the study of women
and their lives a legitimate subject for historians and
spearheaded the creation of the first graduate program in women’s history in
the United States, died on Wednesday in Madison, Wis. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by Steve J. Stern, a history professor and
friend at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Dr. Lerner had taught for
many years.
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.”
That picture changed rapidly, in large part because of her efforts
while teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in the early 1970s. In creating a
graduate program there, Dr. Lerner set about trying to establish women’s
history as a respected academic discipline and to raising the status of women
in the historical profession. She also began gathering and publishing the primary
source material — diaries, letters, speeches and so on — that would allow
historians to reconstruct the lives of women.
“She made it happen,” said Alice Kessler-Harris, a history professor
at Columbia. “She established women’s history as not just a valid but a central
area of scholarship. If you look at any library today, you will see hundreds of
books on the subject.”
Gerda Hedwig Kronstein was born on April 30, 1920, in Vienna, where
her father, Robert, owned a large pharmacy. Her mother, the former Ilona
Neumann, a free-spirited bohemian at heart, tried unsuccessfully to reconcile
her budding career as an artist with her duties as a housewife and mother. This
struggle made a marked impression on her daughter.
Immediately after Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Dr. Lerner’s
father, a Jew, was tipped off that he was about to be arrested. As a hedge, he
had started a pharmacy in Liechtenstein, and there he fled, whereupon the
Gestapo arrested his wife and daughter to force his return. Five weeks later, after
he sold his Austrian assets for a nominal sum, his wife and daughter were
released and left for Liechtenstein as well.
“It was the most important experience of my life, because I didn’t
think that I was going to come out alive,” Dr. Lerner told The Chicago Tribune
in 1993.
A more thorough investigation by the Gestapo might have revealed that
their young prisoner had been doing underground work for the Communists for
several years.
Through a marriage of convenience, Gerda Kronstein made her way to New
York, where she worked in menial jobs and trained at Sydenham Hospital in
Harlem as an X-ray technician. As a saleswoman at a Fifth Avenue candy store,
she was fired after she reported her employers to the Labor Department for
paying their factory workers less than the minimum wage.
In 1941, she married Carl Lerner, a theater director and Communist who
helped her polish her halting English by having her repeat tongue-twisters like
“Mae West is wearing a vest.” The couple moved to Hollywood, where Mr. Lerner
became an apprentice film editor.
Dr. Lerner placed a short story based on her jail experience,
“Prisoners,” in The Clipper, a liberal literary journal, joined the Communist
Party and began working with community groups to organize supermarket boycotts
and neighborhood child care centers.
“I
was unduly intense, super-serious, incapable of small talk or the kind of
friendly gossip that hold acquaintances together,” she wrote in “Fireweed: A Political Autobiography” (2002).
“My perfectionism, insistence on anti-fascist commitment in word and deed, and
general ‘heaviness’ as a person set me apart from others.”
Because of his
politics, Mr. Lerner found it increasingly hard to find work in Hollywood, so
in 1949 the couple returned to New York, where he became a top film editor,
working on “Twelve Angry Men,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “Klute” and other
films. In 1964, the two collaborated on the film “Black Like Me,” based on the 1961 book by the
Southern white journalist John Howard Griffin that recounted his experiences
disguised as a black man in the Deep South. Mr. Lerner directed, and together
they helped adapt the book for film.
Mr. Lerner died in 1973 after a long illness that Dr. Lerner wrote
about in “A Death of One’s Own” (1978). Her survivors
include a sister, Nora Kronstein; a daughter, Stephanie Lerner; a son, Dan; and
four grandchildren.
Dr. Lerner, with great difficulty, found a publisher for “No Farewell”
(1955), a novel about the coming of fascism to Austria, but by the late 1950s
she faced uncertain prospects as a writer. With thoughts of writing a
historical novel, she began researching the lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimké,
daughters of a wealthy plantation owner, who traveled throughout the United
States proselytizing for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The novel never materialized, but her research led to a new career.
She began taking history courses at the New School for Social Research, where,
while still an undergraduate, she taught “Great Women in American History.” It
was one of the first courses ever given in the United States on women’s
history.
After earning her bachelor’s degree from the New School in 1963, she
enrolled at Columbia, her work on the Grimké sisters in hand, to study women’s
history. Bending the rules, the university allowed her to complete her master’s
and doctorate in three years. In 1967, she published “The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against
Slavery.”
At Sarah Lawrence, where Dr. Lerner began teaching history in 1968,
she was the driving force behind what is widely credited as the first graduate program in women’s history in the
United States, established in 1972.
At the same time, after writing the textbook “The Woman in American
History” (1971), Dr. Lerner began gathering documentary material that would
allow other scholars to write women’s history. Her material was published in
two important sourcebooks, “Black Women in White America: A Documentary
History” (1972) and “The Female Experience: Documents in American History”
(1976).
In 1980, she joined the history department at Wisconsin-Madison, where
she created the university’s doctoral program in women’s history. She retired
from Wisconsin in 1991. In 1981, she became the first woman in 50 years to be
elected president of the Organization
of American Historians. The Lerner-Scott Prize, named in honor of her and
Anne Firor Scott, another pioneer in women’s history, has been given annually
since 1992 for the best doctoral dissertation on women’s history in the
United States.
Dr. Lerner wrote two ambitious studies on women and society: “The
Creation of Patriarchy” (1986) and “The Creation of Feminist Consciousness”
(1997). Many of her essays were collected in “The Majority Finds Its Past:
Placing Women in History” (1979) and “Why History Matters” (1997).
“I
want women’s history to be legitimate, to be part of every curriculum on every
level,” she wrote in “Living With History/Making Social Change”
(2009), a collection of autobiographical essays. “I want people to be able to
take Ph.D.’s in the subject and not have to say they are doing something else.”
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