Gerda Lerner
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Gerda Hedwig Lerner (née Kronstein; April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was an Austrian-born American historian and feminist 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.
In 1980, Lerner moved to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she established the nation's first Ph.D. program in women's history. At this institution, she wrote The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), parts one and two of Women and History; Why History Matters (1997), and Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2002).
Selected works
Lerner edited Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972), which chronicles 350 years of black women's contributions to history, despite centuries of being enslaved and treated as property. It was one of the first books to detail the contributions of black women in history.
In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), volume one of Women and History, Lerner ventured into prehistory, attempting to trace the roots of patriarchal dominance. She concluded that patriarchy was part of archaic states forming in the 2nd millennium BCE. Lerner provides historical, archeological, literary, and artistic evidence for the idea that patriarchy is a cultural construct. She believed that the main strength of patriarchy was ideological and that in western societies it "severed the connection between women and the Divine".
The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (1993) is her second volume of Women and History. In this book, she reviews European culture from the seventh century through the nineteenth centuries, showing the limitations imposed by a male-dominated culture. After the seventh century, more of women's writings began to survive, and Lerner uses these to show the development of what she defines as feminist thought. She demonstrates the numerous ways that women "have bypassed or redefined or undermined 'male thought'". 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. Often beginning in religious or prophetic writing, this was a way for women to engage in what Lerner calls "ideological production", including defining alternative futures and "think themselves out of patriarchy".
Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2003) is a detailed account of Lerner's life from her childhood in Vienna through war and emigration, to 1958. That year she began her formal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, an institution established by numerous European refugees from the Nazi persecution. She believed that education and life work were critical to women's self-realization and happiness.
