Gerda Lerner (April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was a historian, author and teacher. She was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University.
Lerner was one of the founders of the field of women's history, and was a former president of the Organization of American Historians. She played a key role in the development of women's history curricula. She taught what is considered to be the first women's history course in the world at the New School for Social Research in 1963. She was also involved in the development of similar programs at Long Island University (1965–1967), at Sarah Lawrence College from 1968 to 1979 (where she established the nation's first Women's History graduate program), at Columbia University (where she was a co-founder of the Seminar on Women), and since 1980 as Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
She also wrote the screenplay for her husband Carl Lerner’s film Black Like Me (1966).
Read more about Gerda Lerner: Early Life, Career, Selected Works, Death
Famous quotes by gerda lerner:
“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.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“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.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“Girls, get an education and escape slavery.”
—Rena Rietveld Verduin, U.S. farm woman. As quoted in The Female Experience, ch. 45, by Gerda Lerner (1977)