Women's Studies in colleges

Vienna, 1938. Gerda Kronstein was 18 years old when Nazi soldiers came for her family.

Her father had already escaped to Switzerland. Gerda and her mother were arrested—punishment for her father's flight and for Gerda's work with the anti-Nazi resistance. They threw her into a cell with two Christian women held on political charges.

Gerda was Jewish. After the Nazis cut Jewish rations to near-starvation levels, her cellmates shared their food with her. "They taught me how to survive," she would later say. "Everything I needed to get through the rest of my life I learned in jail in those six weeks."

She spent her 18th birthday in that cell, certain she would be executed.

But somehow, impossibly, she was released. In 1939, Gerda escaped to New York under sponsorship of a socialist fiancé. She arrived with nothing—no family, barely any English, no credentials, no safety net.

She worked as a waitress. A seamstress. An office clerk. An X-ray technician. Anything to survive.

She married Carl Lerner in 1941. They had two children. She wrote fiction and poetry in her spare time, published a novel in 1955. She thought that would be her life—working-class immigrant, writer when time permitted, survivor getting by.

Then, at age 38, Gerda enrolled in college.

She attended the New School for Social Research, planning to study history to help with a second novel. But something happened in those classes that changed everything.

"In my courses," she later explained, "the teachers told me about a world in which ostensibly one-half the human race is doing everything significant and the other half doesn't exist."

She looked around at her own life. At her mother. At her cellmates who had saved her life. At herself—refugee, survivor, activist, writer, mother.

"I asked myself how this checked against my own life experience."

Her answer was blunt: "This is garbage. This is not the world in which I have lived."

If history books said women didn't exist, then history books were wrong.

Gerda decided to prove it.

She earned her bachelor's degree in 1963 at age 43. Then she kept going. While working full-time and raising two children, she pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Her professors warned her: choosing women's history would doom her career. The field didn't exist. No one took it seriously. She was too old, too female, too focused on the wrong subjects.

Gerda ignored them.

For her dissertation, she wrote about the Grimké sisters—white Southern women from a slaveholding family who became leading abolitionists and early women's rights advocates. The topic was considered frivolous, marginal, unimportant.

She finished her Ph.D. in 1966 at age 46.

Then she did something audacious: she took her dissertation straight to Houghton Mifflin, a major trade publisher, bypassing academic presses entirely. "The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina" was published in 1967, just one year after she earned her doctorate.

It became a landmark work.

But Gerda wasn't satisfied with writing books. She wanted to change the system.

In 1963, while still an undergraduate, she'd taught "Great Women in American History" at the New School—considered the first regular college course in women's history offered anywhere in America.

Now, with a Ph.D., she pushed harder.

In 1968, she joined Sarah Lawrence College. There, she didn't just teach women's history—she built the infrastructure to make it permanent. In 1972, she established the first graduate program in women's history in the United States.

Think about what that means. Before 1972, you literally could not get a graduate degree in women's history anywhere in America. The field did not officially exist in academia.

Gerda created it.

She understood something crucial: teaching courses wouldn't be enough. Women's history needed institutional power—degree programs, funding, faculty positions, academic credibility. She needed to build an army of scholars who would be too numerous, too qualified, too accomplished to ignore.

So she trained them.

She ran summer institutes. She organized conferences. In 1969, she helped establish the Coordinating Committee of Women Historians to advocate for women in the profession. In 1979, she organized the first "Women's History Week"—which later became Women's History Month.

She was building a movement, one course, one program, one graduate student at a time.

In 1973, tragedy struck. Her husband Carl developed a malignant brain tumor. Gerda nursed him through his illness, watching the man she'd built her life with slowly die. He passed away that year.

She wrote a painful, honest memoir about his death—"A Death of One's Own" (1978). Then she kept working.

In 1980, at age 60, she moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison with one condition: the university had to promise to hire a second faculty member in women's history. They agreed.

At Wisconsin, she established the nation's first Ph.D. program in women's history.

Now women could earn doctorates in a field that hadn't existed two decades earlier.

In 1981, Gerda became president of the Organization of American Historians—one of the first women to hold the position in decades.

Then she wrote her magnum opus.

"The Creation of Patriarchy," published in 1986, made waves across multiple disciplines. In it, Gerda argued something radical: male dominance over women wasn't natural or biological. It was historical—created by human societies starting around 2,000 BCE in the Ancient Near East.

If patriarchy was created by history, she argued, it could be ended by history.

The book was followed by "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness" in 1993, examining how women's exclusion from the historical record had been perpetuated and could be overcome.

Her work transformed not just women's history, but how we understand history itself.

By the time Gerda retired in 1991, the field she'd built from nothing had exploded. Women's history faculty taught at the vast majority of American colleges and universities. Thousands of scholars were doing work that had been considered impossible when she started.

She'd proven that the half of humanity written out of history books had always been there—creating culture, making change, building civilizations. They just hadn't been recorded.

Or rather, they'd been recorded—then erased, minimized, forgotten.

Gerda spent her life recovering what had been lost and ensuring it would never be lost again.

When asked about her work, she was characteristically direct: "The history of women had been forgotten, oppressed, silenced and marginalized until the last 30 years. I'm one of the people that helped bring that history alive, to point out it was valid and important."

Gerda Lerner died on January 2, 2013, in Madison, Wisconsin, at age 92.

She'd lived long enough to see the field she created become standard in universities worldwide. Long enough to see Women's History Month become a national observance. Long enough to train generations of historians who would continue her work.

She was born in Vienna in 1920 to a wealthy Jewish family. She survived Nazi prison. She escaped to America with nothing. She worked menial jobs for decades. She raised children. She wrote novels.

Then, at 38, she went back to school.

And she changed how half of humanity understands its own past.

Between 1977 and her death, the Organization of American Historians awarded the Lerner-Scott Prize annually to the best doctoral dissertation in women's history—named for Gerda and her colleague Anne Firor Scott.

Her papers—over 25 linear feet of them—are housed at Harvard's Schlesinger Library, preserved for future generations of scholars.

In 2002, at age 82, she became the first woman to receive the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing.

The praise from her peers was extraordinary. Arthur C. Clarke called her "the most brilliant editor I ever encountered." Colleagues called her "the godmother of women's history," "the mother of women's history," "the single most influential figure in the development of women's and gender history since the 1960s."

But perhaps the most telling tribute came from one of her own quotes, repeated by historians worldwide:

"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 didn't just study history. She corrected it.

She didn't just write about women's contributions. She created the academic infrastructure that made it impossible to ignore them.

She didn't just survive a Nazi prison cell at 18. She spent the next 74 years ensuring that the stories of women who survived, who fought, who built, who created would never be erased again.

From a prison cell in Vienna to founding the field of women's history. From being told women don't belong in historical narratives to training thousands of historians to prove otherwise. From working as a waitress at 20 to receiving lifetime achievement awards at 82.

Gerda Lerner looked at a world that said half of humanity had contributed nothing to history and said: "This is garbage."

Then she spent her life proving it.

And now, when students worldwide study women's history in their universities, when Women's History Month is observed every March, when doctoral students write dissertations on women's contributions to science, politics, art, and culture—

They're walking through doors that Gerda Lerner built.

She didn't just reclaim history. She made sure it could never be erased again.

SOURCE:

Facebook page The Inspireist

PS. I worked as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Florida in the early 1980s, when they were establishing women's studies classes. The Women in Agriculture program spanned across 5 colleges, where different classes focused on aspects of women's contributions. Food Science, Agriculture, Spanish, Africa, and Anthropology. My job was typing up a digital bibliography of the holdings in each department to be combined.

Some immigrants to consider

 In the five decades preceding the American Revolution about a quarter of a million Irish people immigrated to the North American British colonies. The vast majority of them were Protestants, almost always Presbyterians from Ulster (northern Ireland)—descendants of folks who had immigrated to Ireland from Scotland and northern England in the 17th century. Fleeing religious persecution and in search of better economic opportunities, they usually arrived in Pennsylvania, and from there took the Great Wagon Road south, into Virginia and the Carolinas. Typically poor and without the means to acquire property in the lowlands, they settled along the Appalachian and Piedmont frontiers, places that tended to suit their fiercely independent manner of living. Quick-tempered, resourceful, and Calvinist, they were called “Irish” by their neighbors, though they preferred to refer to themselves as Ulster folk. We know them today as the Scots-Irish.

The term “Scots-Irish” (or sometimes “Scotch-Irish”) came into use in the mid-19th century, as mass migration brought millions of Irish Catholics into the northeastern United States—an exodus that became a tidal wave during the Great Potato Famine (over the last 50 years of the 19th century, immigration—and starvation—emptied Ireland of almost half of its population). To distinguish the descendants of the Ulster Protestant immigrants from the Irish Catholic immigrants, the former came to called “Scots-Irish” and the later simply “Irish” (or Irish-American).

Today nearly 10% of the U.S. population (over 31 million people) self-identify their ancestry as “Irish.” About 3 million self-identify as “Scots-Irish.”

The image is an artists’ depiction of a family of Scots-Irish immigrants traveling to the North Carolina frontier

Source: FB A Daily Dose of History

President's Daughter - Activist

  "In February of 1987, Amy Carter walked into a courthouse in Massachusetts not as a former first daughter seeking sympathy, but as a college student and activist facing criminal charges for protesting CIA recruitment at the University of Massachusetts, and what happened next proved she'd been learning far more in the White House than anyone realized. She and fourteen other activists were arrested for trespassing during a sit-in against CIA involvement in Central America, and instead of hiding behind her famous name or pleading for special treatment, Amy helped mount a necessity defense that turned the trial into a referendum on American foreign policy itself. Her legal team called expert witnesses including former CIA agents and diplomats who testified about covert operations in Nicaragua, essentially putting the government on trial while Amy sat calmly in the defendant's chair, no longer the kid with the treehouse but a young woman wielding her platform for something bigger than herself. The jury acquitted her and her co-defendants, validating their argument that civil disobedience was necessary to prevent greater harm, and suddenly everyone who'd dismissed her as the awkward presidential daughter had to reckon with the fact that she'd been paying attention all along. She wasn't performing activism for cameras or clinging to faded relevance; she was risking her freedom for beliefs formed during a childhood spent watching power operate from the inside, understanding its costs in ways most activists only theorize about. Amy could have coasted on her father's legacy, accepted speaking fees and board positions, lived comfortably on her historical footnote, but instead she chose arrests and protests and the hard work of living according to conscience rather than convenience.

Amy Carter

Wikipedia gives this:

Amy Carter...became known for her political activism. She participated in sit-ins and protests during the 1980s and early 1990s that were aimed at changing U.S. foreign policy towards South African apartheid and Central America. Along with activist Abbie Hoffman and 13 others, she was arrested, while still a Brown student, during a 1986 demonstration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for protesting CIA recruitment there. She was acquitted of all charges in a well-publicized trial in Northampton, Massachusetts. Attorney Leonard Weinglass, who [had] defended Hoffman in the Chicago Seven trial in the 1960s, utilized the necessity defense, successfully arguing that because the CIA was involved in criminal activity in Central America and other hotspots, preventing it from recruiting on campus was equivalent to trespassing in a burning building.

She is a member of the board of counselors of the Carter Center, established by her father, which advocates for human rights and diplomacy.

President Jimmy Carter

Historic peaceful overthrow of Babylon

Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire

(Did you study him in any of your world history lessons? Me, nope! Guess I didn't go back far enough)

In March 1879, Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian archaeologist working for the British Museum, was excavating the ruins of Babylon in modern-day Iraq. Among the broken bricks and buried temples, he uncovered a small clay cylinder, about 22 centimeters long, inscribed with wedge-shaped Akkadian cuneiform script. At first glance, it seemed like another royal record, but soon scholars realized its extraordinary importance.

The text dates back to 539 BCE, when Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, conquered Babylon. 

The inscription describes how Cyrus entered the city peacefully, restored temples, and allowed displaced peoples to return to their homelands. Unlike typical conquest records that glorify violence, this cylinder spoke of tolerance, respect for local gods, and rebuilding communities. For this reason, many later called it the “first charter of human rights,” though historians see it more as a royal proclamation of legitimacy.

The discovery was astonishing because it connected archaeology with biblical history. The Book of Ezra describes Cyrus allowing the Jews to return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and the cylinder seemed to echo that policy. Today, the artifact rests in the British Museum, admired not only as a relic of ancient Persia but also as a symbol of enlightened rule.

This humble piece of clay, buried for centuries, became a voice from the past; reminding us that power can be expressed not only through conquest, but through mercy, restoration, and respect.

At the 43rd General Conference of UNESCO in Samarkand, the Cyrus Cylinder was recognized as one of the earliest documents on human rights in the world and inscribed on the World Heritage List. This significant step was approved by the member states of UNESCO.

Cyrus the Great's cylindrical history of his peaceful overthrow of Babylon (being held by unknown modern man)

The Bill of Rights

December 15 -

 "On this day in 1791 that the Bill of Rights was adopted by the United States, becoming the most sacred and debated laws in the history of our country. One of the people most responsible for the content of the Bill of Rights was a man named George Mason, who might not have even been a part of the process if he hadn't been a lifelong friend of George Washington's. He was a wealthy landowner in Virginia, and he liked to debate political ideas, but he wasn't interested in politics because he shied away from public life.

Then, when the Revolutionary War broke out and George Washington was named Commander of the Continental Army, George Mason reluctantly took over his friend's seat on the Virginia legislature. When the Virginia legislators held a convention to reorganize their state government, George Mason arrived late and found himself assigned to the committee to write the new state constitution.

So it was only by chance that Mason wound up writing Virginia's "Declaration of Rights." Mason had read the philosopher John Locke as a young man, and he shared Locke's idea that all people are born with certain rights, and that government's purpose should be to protect those rights. And George Mason believed that the best way to protect those rights would be to list them in the constitution itself. Virginia's "Declaration of Rights," was the first time in modern history that a government specified the absolute rights of individuals.

While George Mason was working on Virginia's "Declaration of Rights," he took under his wing a 25-year-old legislator named James Madison. Madison was deeply influenced by Mason's ideas about freedom, and he passed them along to his friend Thomas Jefferson.

Mason mostly sat on the sidelines during the rest of the Revolutionary War, but after the war he was asked to participate in the Constitutional Convention. The trip from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia was the greatest distance he ever traveled, and it was a trip he quickly began to regret. He found that he disagreed with the other delegates on numerous issues, especially slavery, which he thought should be outlawed in the new constitution.

But more than anything, George Mason fought for the inclusion of a list of rights in the national constitution, just as he had written it into the Virginia Constitution. But when he brought his idea for a bill of rights to a vote, it failed by a wide margin. And so, when it came time to sign to new U.S. Constitution, George Mason was one of the only men there who refused. His decision created quite a stir, and it even ruined his lifelong friendship with George Washington. The two men never visited each other again.

But Mason hoped that his protest would encourage an eventual passage of a bill of rights, and it was ultimately his former protégé, James Madison, who made the Bill of Rights a reality. Madison introduced the Bill of Rights into the first session of Congress in 1789, and he used Virginia's Declaration of Rights as the model. Madison originally supported the adoption of 17 amendments, which was eventually trimmed to 12, of which 10 were adopted, including the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to privacy, and the right to a fair trial. George Mason died in 1792, a year after those freedoms and rights became law.

Thanks Writer's Almanac

Sci-Fi Mama - Judy-Lynn del Rey

 Her name was Judy-Lynn del Rey. And she became the most powerful editor in science fiction history.

Born in 1943 with achondroplastic dwarfism, Judy-Lynn grew up devouring science fiction in New York City's public libraries. At a time when the genre was dismissed as pulp fiction for teenage boys, she saw something else entirely: the future of storytelling.

She started at the bottom—an office assistant at Galaxy, the most prestigious science fiction magazine of the 1960s. Within four years, she was managing editor.

Then Ballantine Books came calling.

When she arrived at Ballantine in 1973, science fiction and fantasy were afterthoughts in publishing. Fantasy in particular was considered unsellable—unless you were Tolkien. Judy-Lynn thought that was nonsense.

Her first major move was audacious: she cut ties with one of Ballantine's bestselling authors, John Norman, whose "Gor" novels were popular but notoriously misogynistic. It was a risk. She didn't care.

Then came the gamble that changed everything.

In 1976, someone brought her an opportunity: the novelization rights to an upcoming space movie by a young director named George Lucas. Hollywood thought the film would bomb. Studio executives were skeptical. Most publishers passed.

Judy-Lynn said yes.

The Star Wars novelization sold 4.5 million copies before the movie even premiered.

She would later call herself the "Mama of Star Wars."

In 1977, she launched Del Rey Books—her own imprint, with her husband Lester editing fantasy while she oversaw everything else. Their first original novel was Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara. It became a phenomenon.

She didn't stop there.

Remember The Princess Bride? The original 1973 novel had flopped. It was headed for obscurity. Judy-Lynn rescued it, reissuing it in 1977 with a striking gate-fold cover and an aggressive marketing campaign. Without her intervention, there might never have been a movie.

She published the Star Trek Log series. She championed Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant trilogy—convincing Ballantine to release all three books on the same day from a completely unknown author. Unprecedented.

She published Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon—the first science fiction novel ever to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

And she did all of this while competitors called her imprint "Death-Rey Books"—because she was utterly dominant.

Between 1977 and 1990, Del Rey Books had 65 titles reach bestseller lists. That was more than every other science fiction and fantasy publisher combined.

Arthur C. Clarke called her "the most brilliant editor I ever encountered."

Philip K. Dick went further: "The greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins"—the legendary editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But here's what burns: the science fiction community never nominated her for a Hugo Award while she was alive. Not once. The men who ran the industry praised her in private and overlooked her in public.

In October 1985, Judy-Lynn suffered a brain hemorrhage. She died four months later, at 42.

Only then did the Hugo committee vote to give her the Best Professional Editor award.

Her husband Lester refused to accept it.

He said Judy-Lynn would have objected—that it was given only because she had just died. That it came too late.

He was right.

Judy-Lynn del Rey transformed science fiction from a niche hobby into a cultural force. She made fantasy into a mainstream publishing category. She bet on Star Wars when no one else would. She saved The Princess Bride from oblivion. She published the first #1 New York Times science fiction bestseller.

She did all of this standing 4'1" tall in an industry run by men who underestimated her at every turn.

The next time you pick up a fantasy novel, or watch a Star Wars movie, or quote The Princess Bride—

Now you know who made it possible.

My young grandchildren have told me FaceBook is for old people...so they don't do it. I admit to the title of "Elder" and I also admit to loving what's left of FaceBook between the awful ads...there are still stories like this one. Thanks for the determined old people who still share cool information!! This time from The Curiosity Curator.

Title IX Amendment - that opened doors for women and girl athletes in schools.

The author of Title IX Amendment - that opened doors for women and girl athletes in schools.

 Patsy Mink -- the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress and the co-author of the landmark women's educational equity Title IX Amendment -- was born on this day in 1927. A third generation Japanese American from Hawaii, Mink became engaged in political activism from a young age, in part motivated by witnessing the discrimination her father faced as the only Japanese American civil engineer working on Maui during the World War II period. In one of her early acts of political activism, when she moved to the mainland to attend the University of Nebraska, Mink organized a coalition of students, community members, and businesses to successfully bring an end to the university's long-standing policy of racially segregating student housing.

After graduating, she applied to twenty medical schools but was denied admission to all because none would accept women. Mink decided that the judicial process would be the best way to compel the schools to accept female students and shifted her focus to law. She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951. After returning to Hawaii, Mink was elected to the Hawaii Territorial Legislature and, after Hawaii became a state in 1959, she served in the Hawaii State Senate.

In 1965, Mink became the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress where she served from 1965-1977 and again from 1990 until her death in 2002. During her tenure in Congress, Mink gained a reputation as a vocal advocate for women's rights and civil rights, and was a leading opponent to the war in Vietnam. Although her outspokenness engendered criticism at times, Mink believed in standing by her ideals, famously stating: "It is easy enough to vote right and be consistently with the majority. But it is more often more important to be ahead of the majority and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while if necessary."

One of her greatest legacies is the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act, the breakthrough 1972 U.S. civil rights law which prohibits gender discrimination in any educational program or activity. Mink was one of the bill's principal authors and the driving force behind its passage; it was later renamed Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in her honor. Filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford, who made the documentary "Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority," describes Mink's influence as follows: "Mink's story captures the spirit of a generation of trailblazing women and shows that one person — armed with vision, drive, and perseverance — can make a difference. I never doubted that I would have the opportunity to go to college — even graduate school — and to play sports. Women of my generation take for granted the very things that Patsy Mink fought for."

Mink, who also became first Asian American to seek the presidential nomination during the 1972 election, passed away in 2002. Her death occurred one week after the 2002 primary election, too late for her name to be removed from the general election ballot. As a result, Mink was posthumously re-elected to Congress on November 5, 2002.

Patsy Mink is one of the trailblazing women in U.S. politics featured in the excellent book, "Leading the Way: Women In Power" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/leading-the-way

For a wonderful book for teaching tweens and teens about the history of Title IX and its impact on girls' lives, we highly recommend "Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX: The Law That Changed the Future of Girls in America" for ages 11 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/let-me-play

There is also a fantastic picture book about trailblazing women in sports - that includes an introduction to Title IX - for ages 6 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/girls-with-guts

For more books for children and teens that celebrate women's contributions to politics today and in the past, check out our blog post, “Remember the Ladies: 25 Children's Books on Women in Politics” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11162

And, for more stories of female trailblazers in all fields including science, the arts, and athletics, visit A Mighty Girl's "Role Models" section at https://www.amightygirl.com/.../history-biography/biography