11/26/2025
Gerda Lerner created it.
She was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna on April 30, 1920, to a wealthy, secular Jewish family. Her father Robert owned a profitable pharmacy and pharmaceutical factory. Her mother Ilona was an artist who struggled to balance her creative ambitions with the expectations of a Viennese wife and mother. Gerda watched her mother's frustration. She noticed, too, how the household servants were treated—the invisible labor, the unequal conditions. Even as a child, she was paying attention to who had power and who didn't.
She attended local schools and gymnasium. She was bright, curious, restless. And then the world she knew collapsed.
On March 12, 1938, N**i Germany annexed Austria. Gerda was seventeen years old.
Her father, warned that he would be arrested, fled to Liechtenstein, where he had previously established a business. Soon after he left, the Sturmabteilung—the stormtroopers—arrived at the Kronstein apartment. They said they were searching for subversive books. A month later, they came back with a warrant for Robert's arrest.
He was gone. So they took Gerda and her mother instead.
The Gestapo imprisoned them as leverage—hostages to force Robert to return and surrender his assets. Mother and daughter were separated. Gerda was placed in a cell with two Christian women held on political grounds. She was Jewish. Jews received restricted rations. She believed she would not survive.
But her cellmates shared their food with her. They were Communists, arrested for their politics. They kept her alive.
She spent six weeks in that cell. She turned eighteen in prison.
Her father finally complied. He sold his Austrian assets to Gentiles for a pittance. The N**is released Gerda and her mother.
But the family was scattered now. Her mother moved to France. Her younger sister Nora relocated to Palestine. Gerda—stateless, alone, the only member of her family to obtain a visa—immigrated to the United States in 1939. She was nineteen years old.
"Facing death in this way," she later wrote, "became a source of courage for her and enabled her later to face with equanimity the dragons of the academic world."
She arrived in New York with no money and no English. She worked as a waitress, salesgirl, office clerk, X-ray technician—whatever she could find. She taught herself the language. She began to write.
In 1941, she married Carl Lerner, a theater director and film editor who would later become best known for his work on Twelve Angry Men. They moved to Hollywood, had two children—Stephanie in 1945, Daniel in 1947—and joined the Communist Party. Gerda became a local leader of the Congress of American Women, a grassroots organization fighting for economic and consumer issues. She published short stories about N**i brutality and the capacity to resist it: "The Prisoners" in 1941, "The Russian Campaign" in 1943.
In 1949, the Lerners returned to New York. Carl's Communist ties had made it difficult to find work in Hollywood. They severed their connection to the Party. Gerda kept writing—a novel, No Farewell (1955), based on her Austrian experiences; a musical with her friend Eve Merriam, The Singing of Women, produced off-Broadway in 1951; screenplays, including Black Like Me (1964), which Carl directed.
But something was pulling at her. She had begun researching a historical novel about Sarah and Angelina Grimké, two South Carolina sisters who had become the most famous female abolitionists in America—and early pioneers of women's rights. The more she read, the more she wanted to know. The more she wanted to know, the more she realized: this wasn't a novel. This was history. And nobody was teaching it.
In 1958, at the age of thirty-eight, Gerda Lerner enrolled in college.
She chose the New School for Social Research in New York—an institution with a history of welcoming unconventional students and radical ideas. She was a mother of two, a published author, a former political organizer. She was also, technically, an undergraduate.
Her fascination with women's history deepened. She wanted to write about the Grimké sisters as a scholarly work, not fiction. But when she looked for courses on women in history—courses that might help her understand the context, the movements, the silences—she found nothing.
So she proposed to teach one herself.
In 1963, while still finishing her bachelor's degree, Gerda Lerner taught "Great Women in American History" at the New School. It is now recognized as the first regular college course in women's history offered anywhere.
She was forty-three years old. She had no PhD. She had no academic credentials beyond a degree in progress. What she had was a question that wouldn't let her go: Why were women absent from the story of the past?
She received her BA in 1963. Then she applied to Columbia University for graduate school.
At Columbia, she encountered resistance. Women's history was not considered a scholarly field. Her advisors warned her against pursuing it. They told her she was wasting her potential on a marginal topic. They belittled her ambitions.
She ignored them.
In an astonishing three years, she completed both a master's degree and a PhD. Her dissertation became The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967)—a landmark work that a trade publisher, Houghton Mifflin, snapped up almost immediately. It was a smart move: academic presses would have been more skeptical. But Gerda Lerner was not interested in waiting for permission.
She was forty-six years old. She had her doctorate. And she was just getting started.
In 1966, she became a founding member of the National Organization for Women. In 1968, she joined the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College—and immediately began building something new.
At Sarah Lawrence, she faced resistance again. Even at a women's college, the idea of a course in women's history struck some as unnecessary, even absurd. She persisted. In 1969, she co-founded the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession, which would later become the Council for Women in History. In 1972, she established the first graduate program in women's history in the United States—a master's degree at Sarah Lawrence.
The field was still dismissed by many as marginal. She insisted it was essential.
"Women's history is women's right," she declared. "An essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision."
In 1979, she chaired the Women's History Institute at Sarah Lawrence—a fifteen-day conference attended by leaders of national women's organizations. When participants learned about the success of a Women's History Week celebrated in Sonoma County, California, they decided to launch similar commemorations across the country. Lerner supported the effort to establish a National Women's History Week. It later became Women's History Month.
She was not just writing history. She was building the infrastructure for others to do the same.
Carl Lerner died in 1973 of a malignant brain tumor. Gerda nursed him through it, then wrote A Death of One's Own (1978)—a painfully honest memoir about their relationship, his illness, and the mystery of death. She never remarried.
In 1980, she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to establish the nation's first PhD program in women's history. She was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History. The following year, she became president of the Organization of American Historians—the first woman to hold the position in decades.
Over the next decade, she wrote the books that would define her legacy: The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), which traced male dominance to the formation of archaic states in the second millennium BCE, and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), which examined how women had been excluded from the historical record and what it cost them. She edited Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972), one of the first books to chronicle the contributions of Black women across 350 years.
She retired in 1991, but she didn't stop. She kept writing, lecturing, mentoring. Her autobiography, Fireweed (2002), returned to the horrors of her youth—the Anschluss, the prison, the flight—and traced how those experiences shaped everything that followed.
"History as a subject grabbed me and never let me go," she wrote. "And before long, when I realized that what I wanted to do was to create and promote the history of women, I put all my energy, passion and talent into becoming a good historian. I knew that as a pioneer in a neglected or nonexistent field I could succeed only through excellence."
Gerda Lerner died on January 2, 2013, in Madison, Wisconsin. She was ninety-two years old.
Over fifty years, a field that had encompassed a handful of marginalized historians became one with thousands. Women's history faculty now exist in the majority of American colleges and universities. The path she cleared is walked by generations who never knew her name.
Austria, the country that had imprisoned her, awarded her its highest honor: the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. The Organization of American Historians established the Lerner-Scott Prize, awarded annually for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women's history.
But perhaps the truest measure of her legacy is simpler: the questions she asked are now asked everywhere. Who has been left out of the story? Whose voices have been silenced? What does history look like when everyone is included?
She sat in classrooms where only men were presented as makers of the world. She decided that wasn't good enough. And then she spent the rest of her life proving it.
"The most important thing," she said in 2002, "the thing I have always lived by, is that you must be engaged in some way in the world in which you live. How, is for each person to choose."
