Lerner, Gerda

LERNER, GERDA (1920-2013). The historian, playwright, and political activist was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna, Austria, the oldest of two daughters in the secular Jewish family of Robert Kronstein, a pharmacist, and Ilona Neumann Kronstein, an artist. An advocate of the importance of history to a transformative politics, she devoted her academic lifetime to showing that women had a history, and that knowing it could alter human consciousness.

Gerda Kronstein grew up in a politically divided Vienna where Communists were often reviled, Jews relegated to the intellectual sidelines, and independent women marginalized. As a young student, she participated in activities against the Nazis, and, in 1936, began reading Marx. After Germany and Austria united in the 1938 Anschluss, Gerda survived a six-week imprisonment with the help of communist cell-mates who shared food and survival skills with her. Released, she took her university matriculation exam (Abitur) just before leaving Austria to join her father who had fled to Lichtenstein. A former boyfriend and his American family sponsored her visa application to the United States where she arrived in 1939. She immediately (and briefly) married.

Schooled in political turmoil and Nazi resistance, Gerda became part of a refugee, anti-Fascist community. She married her second husband, film and theater director Carl Lerner in 1941, and moved with him to Los Angeles where, in 1946 and 1947, their two children, Stephanie and Dan, were born. The Hollywood blacklists of the early 1950s ended Carl’s career in Hollywood, and the family then moved to New York.

Lerner began to write and to organize during the early 1940s. Her early articles and her fiction were guided by her sense of herself as an outsider and a refugee, and she quickly stretched her horror of anti-Semitism to encompass racism. Her empathy with African Americans and especially with Black women was magnified by membership in the Communist Party, which at the time fiercely opposed racial segregation. She joined the CPUSA early in the 1940s and became a local leader of the Congress of American Women in Los Angeles, and then in New York. She left the party in the early 1950s.

Though Lerner refused until late in her life to acknowledge her former allegiance to Communism, she committed herself to the anti-sexist, anti-racist and egalitarian values nourished in her early years. She articulated her progressive sensibilities in her writing of the 1950s. These included a musical play written with her friend Eve Merriam entitled The Singing of Women, (1951), and a novel, No Farewell (1955), which focused on Vienna before the war. Together with her husband, she explored the experience of racism, co-writing the screenplay for Black Like Me (1964), a film he directed.

Lerner’s experiences as an outsider, a refugee, and a political activist, led her into women’s history, which became at once her professional vocation and her intellectual and political calling. In 1962, her children all but grown, she enrolled in an undergraduate degree program at the New School for Social Research where she taught one of the first courses in US women’s history. She completed her BA degree in 1963 and enrolled in the history graduate program at Columbia University. Over departmental objections she wrote her dissertation on Sarah and Angelina Grimke, nineteenth-century abolitionists and early women’s rights advocates. Completed in 1966, and published shortly after, The Grimke Sisters From South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition set the course for her career, and established the groundwork on which she would argue that women’s history “forced us to question not only why certain content was previously omitted, ignored, and trivialized, but also to consider who decides what is to be included.”

Thereafter, Lerner devoted her life not only to research and writing about women, but to professionalizing the field of women’s history and to training historians of women. At Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught from 1968 to 1980, she created the first Master’s degree in women’s history. She moved to the University of Wisconsin, where she organized a path-breaking PhD program in women’s history. She helped to found the Coordinating Committee of Women Historians in 1969, which pressured traditional scholarly conferences and journals to make room for presentations and articles by and about women. She organized an influential Institute for Women Leaders in 1979 and raised money to bring together graduate teachers of women’s history at a Wingspread conference in Wisconsin in 1988. She lectured tirelessly on the need for women’s history and methods for excavating it.

All the while, Lerner remained engaged in her own scholarly trajectory. Early in her career she responded to doubts about the lack of sources by assembling a path-breaking collection of documents, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972), which inspired a generation of young researchers to assemble and investigate a panoply of sources that made the history of African American women possible. In 1977, she published The Female Experience: An American Documentary. With characteristic lack of humility, she introduced the book by asking readers to imagine what history would be like “if it were seen through the eyes of women and ordered by values they define?” Never one to refuse a challenge, she spent years reading in anthropology and classical history before publishing The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), which explored the “historical process by which patriarchy becomes established and institutionalized.”

Elected president of the Organization of American Historians in 1982, Lerner went on to earn seventeen honorary degrees, including one from her alma mater, Columbia University. When Austria granted her the Cross of Honor for Science and Art in 1996, she spoke in German (a language that she thought she had left behind) of her status as a refugee and a Jew. She captured her feelings of outsiderness in her 1997 memoir, Fireweed. “I started out as an embattled outsider,” she wrote, “and in thirty-six years of steady effort have been an agent in the transformation of traditional history.” When Gerda Lerner died in Madison, Wisconsin at the age of ninety-two, she was still writing.

Weigand, Kate. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Papers of Gerda Lerner, 1950-1995. Collection Overview. Schlesinger Library. Radcliffe Institute. Harvard University. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5036

Papers of Gerda Lerner, 1924-2006. Collection Overview. Schlesinger Library. Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5080

Keller, Renate. Why Women Need to Climb Mountains: A Journey through the Life and Work of Dr.Gerda Lerner. 2016. Film.