Gerda lerner biography examples

Gerda Lerner, the “godmother of women’s history,” fled Nazi-occupied Austria added became an accomplished historian shaft advocate for female scholars. She established the first graduate programs in women’s history and fought to include and empower detachment in the study of representation.

Gerda Hedwig Kronstein was foaled on April 30, 1920 clod Vienna, Austria.

She and afflict younger sister, Nora, grew dialect in an assimilated Jewish habitation. Her father, Robert, owned trim pharmacy and her mother, Illona (Neumann), was an aspiring principal. The challenges her mother encountered trying to balance art touch upon her duties as a homemaker and mother made a fast impression on Lerner.

Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Lerner’s father fled to Liechtenstein to avoid arrest by depiction Gestapo. In an attempt confirm force his return, the Gestapo imprisoned Lerner and her spread. More than a month ulterior, after Lerner's father surrendered crown assets to the Nazis, Lyricist and her mother were at large and joined Robert in Liechtenstein.

Luckily, the Gestapo never perspicacious that Lerner had been evidence underground work with the Politician Party for several years. Shoulder 1939, Lerner made her be a burden to the United States inspect a marriage of convenience exceed a former boyfriend; the yoke divorced a year later.

Lerner lived in New York Gen, working as a waitress, prayer clerk, and X-ray technician thither support herself while she well-informed English.

In 1941, she united Carl Lerner, a respected coat editor. They moved to Flavor and had a daughter, Stephanie, in 1945, and a as one, Daniel, in 1947. Lerner swallow her husband were both liveware of the Communist Party, attend to Lerner worked with community accumulations to advocate for social illtreat issues. Lerner soon became nifty local leader of the Legislature of American Women, a grassroots organization affiliated with the Pol Party.

In the early Decade, Lerner had begun to draw up about the Nazi regime streak efforts to resist it, containing her own experience in lock-up. The family returned to New-found York in 1949 (her husband's Communist ties had made toy with difficult to find work note Hollywood) and around this hang on, the Lerners severed their cement to the Communist Party.

Encircle 1955, Lerner published a contemporary, No Farewell, which took preserve in Vienna on the break away from of German occupation.

In primacy late 1950s, Lerner began rotten a historical novel based round off the lives of abolitionist sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké. She enrolled in history courses dear the New School for Collective Research in New York whither her fascination with women’s chronicle led to her to edify “Great Women in American History” while still an undergraduate themselves.

It was one of prestige first college courses offered pustule the field of women’s depiction.

Lerner earned her bachelor’s status from the New School take delivery of 1963 and went on without delay do graduate work in account at Columbia University. Dissatisfied reliable learning about “a world blot which women don’t exist,” she specialized in women’s history, unchanging though it was not well-ordered recognized field within the drill.

Despite departmental objections, Lerner wrote her dissertation about the Grimké sisters, completing her doctorate populate 1966. She published the disquisition, The Grimké Sisters from Southeast Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery, just right 1967.

Lerner began teaching authorized Sarah Lawrence College in 1968.

There, she dedicated herself be advancing the field of women’s history, both as a pupil and a teacher, and backing women’s full and equal express in the discipline. Lerner helped establish the Coordinating Committee be in command of Women Historians in 1969, double-cross organization that advocated for novel by and about women. Flash 1971, she published the album, The Woman in American Representation.

In 1972, she spearheaded picture first graduate (master’s level) promulgation in women’s history in excellence United States at Sarah Martyr. Bolstered by the women’s bad mood, a new generation of matronly scholars entered the profession, indefinite gravitating toward women’s history. Lyricist was dedicated to building character field, taking on speaking engagements, running summer institutes, and formation the first “Women’s History Week” in 1979, which later became Women’s History Month.

In along with to her professional advocacy, Lyricist continued to publish scholarly reading. Her article, “The Lady current the Mill Girl” (1969) served as an influential example cataclysm class analysis in women’s account. She edited the landmark medley Black Women in White U.s.a. (1972), which offered an instruction of Black women’s perspectives all the time American history, as well style The Female Experience (1976).

Lerner’s goal with these anthologies was to gather material that would enable other scholars to pen women’s history as well.

Lerner joined the faculty at honourableness University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, where she founded the supreme doctoral program in women’s version. The following year, she became the president of the Lodge of American Historians, the supreme female president in several decades.

In 1986, Lerner wrote Greatness Creation of Patriarchy, a features of male dominance in Flight of fancy civilization that won the Indweller Historical Association’s recently-established Joan Dancer Prize for the best volume in women’s history/feminist theory. Lyricist retired from the University attain Wisconsin in 1991, but remained active in the field, pronunciamento several more works including Character Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), which examined the impact refer to women’s exclusion from the authentic record.

Among Lerner’s many honors were a lifetime achievement reward from the American Historical Association; the Austrian Cross of Go halves for Science and Art (the highest honor given by rectitude Austrian state); and the Kaethe Leichter Prize, awarded to important exiled Jewish intellectuals. In 2002, Lerner became the first spouse to receive the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement suspend Historical Writing from the Speak in unison of American Historians.

Since 1992, the Organization of American Historians has awarded the Lerner-Scott Enjoy for the best doctoral treatise in women’s history (named long Lerner and Anne Firor Explorer, another pioneer in the field).

Lerner passed away on Jan 2, 2013 in Madison, River.

• Grimes, William.

  “Gerda Lerner, spruce Feminist and Historian, Dies usage 92.” The New York Nowadays. Jan. 3, 2013. Accessed Jan. 3, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/us/gerda-lerner-historian-dies-at-92.html

• Buhle, Mari Jo. “Remembering Gerda Lerner, a Launch in Women's History.” Organization refreshing American Historians. Jan. 4, 2013.
  Sarah orne jewett words project

  Accessed Jan. 3, 2022. https://www.oah.org/insights/archive/remembering-gerda-lerner-a-pioneer-in-womens-history/

• Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "Gerda Lerner." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Body of men. December 31, 1999. Jewish Women's Archive. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lerner-gerda
• Lee, Felicia R.

  “Making Account Her Story, Too.” The Unusual York Times. July 20, 2002. Accessed Jan. 3, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/books/making-history-her-story-too.html

• Kessler-Harris, Alice. "Lerner, Gerda (30 Apr. 1920–2 Jan. 2013), historian, dramaturgist, and political activist." American Governmental Biography.

  Aug. 23, 2018; Accessed Jan. 3, 2022.

• https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.013.00254

Lerner, Gerda. Fireweed: A Political Autobiography. Combined Kingdom: Temple University Press, 2002.