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Gerda Lerner Biography

Gerda Hedwig Lerner (née Kronstein; April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was an Austrian-born American historian and author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theater pieces, screenplays, and an autobiography. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1980–81. In 1980 she was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught until retiring in 1991.

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Gerda Lerner Quotes

The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.

Left, People, Promise, Society, Thinking

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.

Emancipation, History, Primaries, Tool, Tools

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Actions Have Consequences, Different, Events, Future, Knowledge, Past

The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming.

Life, Living, Men, Needs, Running

For boys, the family was the place from which one sprang and to which one returned for comfort and support, but the field of action was the larger world of wilderness, adventure, industry, labor, and politics. For girls, the family was to be the world, their field of action the domestic circle. He was to express himself in his work and, through it and social action, was to help transform his environment; her individual growth and choices were restricted to lead her to express herself through love, wifehood, and motherhood--through the support and nurture of others, who would act for her.

Adventure, Girl, Larger, Motherhood, Place, Support

Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs. . . . Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others--into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future.

Beginning, Chooses, Meaning, Meaningful, Moving, Thinking

nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day.

Attitude, Day, Nurse, Nursing, Simply

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

Exist, Knowing, Thinking, Women, Years

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

Actions Have Consequences, Certain, Choices, Consequences, Undone

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

Constant, History, Men, Past, Struggle, Women

Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturing thought can rise.

Sex, Commitment, Intimate Relationships, Intimate, Relationship, Order

Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.

Autonomy, Determination, People, Self, Society, Terms

. . . black women. . . are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity.

Become, Financially, Goal, Lifelong, Self, White

Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.

Essential, Long, Pride, Vision

[There is a] depth and urgency of the search of Jewish and Christian women for connection to the Divine, which found expression in more than 1000 years of feminist Bible criticism and religious re-visioning.

Christian, Feminist, Found, Jewish, Religious, Women

The effect on men has been very bad, too, of the omission of women's history, because men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think as a man that everything great in the world and its civilization was created by men, then naturally you have to look down on women. And naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters.

Aspirations, Daughter, Daughters, History, Men, Son

Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin 'helping' them. Such a world does not exist — never has.

Doe, Explained, Helping, Men, World