Gerda Lerner - Career

Career

When Lerner first moved to New York, she worked as a waitress, salesperson, office clerk, and x-ray technician, all the while writing fiction and poetry; she published two short stories providing a first-person account of the Nazi occupation. After her divorce from Jensen, she met and married Carl Lerner, a young theater director who was active with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In the 1940s she was active in the Congress of American Women (CAW, a women's group concerned with economic and social issues), helping to found the Los Angeles chapter in 1946. In 1951, she collaborated with poet Eve Merriam on a musical, The Singing of Women. Her novel, No Farewell, appeared in 1955; with her husband, she wrote the script for Black Like Me. Committed Communists, the Lerners were involved in numerous grassroots activities involving trade unionism, civil rights, and anti-militarism; they struggled against McCarthyism, especially the Hollywood blacklist.

Lerner returned to school in the late 1950s, in her 40s, earning an A.B. from the New School for Social Research in 1963, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1965 and 1966 respectively; her dissertation became her first publication, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967). In 1966, Lerner became a founding member of the National Organization for Women; she was a local and national leader in the organization for a short period. In 1968 she became a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1972 she started there the first program to offer a graduate degree in women's history (a master's degree program.) She also taught at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Lerner published numerous books and articles to help further the recognition of women's history as a field of study. Her article "The Lady and the Mill Girl" (1969) was an early and influential example of class analysis in women's history. In 1980, she created the nation's first Ph.D. program in women's history, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she later became professor emerita. From 1981 to 1982 she served as president of the Organization of American Historians. As an educational director for the organization, she helped make women's history accessible to leaders of women's organizations and high school teachers. The Organization of American Historians named the Gerda Lerner-Ann Scott Prize for the best women's history dissertation in her honor. In 1986 Lerner won the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Prize in recognition of her work on the roots of women's oppression.

Lerner was among the first to bring a consciously feminist lens to the study of history, producing influential essays and books. Among her most important works are the documentary anthologies, Black Women in White America (1972) and The Female Experience (1976), the essay collections, The Majority Finds Its Past (1979) and Why History Matters (1997), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993). She published Fireweed: A Political Autobiography in 2002.