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:

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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.