格尔达·勒纳

Gerda Hedwig Lerner (née Kronstein; April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was an Austrian-born American historian and woman's history author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theatre pieces, screenplays, and an autobiography. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 1980 to 1981. In 1980, she was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught until retiring in 1991.

Lerner was one of the founders of the academic field of women's history, known as the "godmother of women's history." In 1963, while still an undergraduate at the New School for Social Research, she taught "Great Women in American History", which is considered to be the first regular college course on women's history offered anywhere.

She taught at Long Island University from 1965 to 1967. She played a key role in the development of women's history curricula and was involved in the development of degree programs in women's history at Sarah Lawrence College (where she taught from 1968 to 1979 and established the nation's first master's degree program in women's history) and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she launched the first Ph.D. program in women's history. She also worked at Duke University and Columbia University, where she was a co-founder of the Seminar on Women.

Early life

She was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna, Austria, on April 30, 1920, the first child of Ilona Kronstein (née Neumann) and Robert Kronstein, an affluent and secular Jewish couple. Her family originated from Breslau, Berlin, Léva (German: Lewenz, Levice), Turdossin (Turdos, German: Turdoschin, Tvrdošín) (Upper Hungary), Helishoy (German: Holleschau, Holešov) (Moravia), and Reichenberg (Liberec) (Bohemia). Her father was a pharmacist, and her mother an artist. According to her autobiography, Gerda had a strained relationship with her mother as a child. As an adult, Gerda believed that her mother struggled because she did not fit in the role of a Viennese wife and mother. Gerda had a younger sister called Nora, and they attended local schools and gymnasium together.

Following the 1938 Anschluss, Kronstein became involved with the anti-Nazi resistance. She and her mother were jailed that year after her father had escaped to Liechtenstein and Switzerland, where he stayed during the war. Gerda occupied a cell for six weeks with two Christian women held on political grounds. They shared their prison food with her because Jews received restricted rations. In 1939, her mother moved to France, and Lerner's sister relocated to Palestine. That year, Gerda emigrated to the United States under the sponsorship of the family of Bobby Jensen, her socialist fiancé.

Career

Settling in New York, Kronstein married Jensen. She worked in a variety of jobs as a waitress, salesperson, office clerk, and X-ray technician, while also writing fiction and poetry. She published two short stories featuring first-person accounts of the Nazi annexation of Austria.

Her marriage with Jensen was failing when she met Carl Lerner (1912–1973), a married theater director who was a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). They both established temporary residence in Nevada and obtained divorces in Reno; the state offered easier terms for divorce than did most others. Kronstein and Lerner married and moved to Hollywood, where Carl pursued a career in film-making and she contributed short stories to the left-wing California literary journal The Clipper.

In 1946, Lerner helped found the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of American Women, a Communist front organization. The Lerners engaged in CPUSA activities involving trade unionism, civil rights, and anti-militarism. They suffered under the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s, especially the Hollywood blacklist, and left the CPUSA.

The Lerners returned to New York. In 1951, Lerner collaborated with poet Eve Merriam on a musical, The Singing of Women. Lerner's novel No Farewell was published in 1955. She enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1963. She wrote in her autobiography that her frequent status made her think about "people who did not have a voice in telling their own stories. Lerner's insights eventually influenced her decision to earn a Ph.D. in history and then to help establish women's history as a standard academic discipline." In 1963, she offered the first regular college course in women's history, which at the time had no status as a field of study in academia.

In the early 1960s, Lerner and her husband co-authored the screenplay of the film Black Like Me (1964), based on the book by white journalist John Howard Griffin, who had reported on six weeks of travel in small towns and cities of the Deep South passing as a black man. Carl Lerner directed the film, starring James Whitmore.

Lerner continued with graduate studies at Columbia University, where she earned both an M.A. (1965) and a Ph.D. (1966). Her doctoral dissertation was published as The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967), a study of Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Grimké, sisters from a slaveholding family who became abolitionists in the North. Learning that their late brother had mixed-race sons, they helped pay to educate the boys.

In 1966, Lerner became a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and she served as a local and national leader for a short period. In 1968, she received her first academic appointment at Sarah Lawrence College. There Lerner developed a Master of Arts Program in Women's History, which Sarah Lawrence offered beginning in 1972; it was the first American graduate degree in the field. Lerner also taught at Long Island University in Brooklyn.