Gerda Lerner

Gerda Lerner, founder of the first graduate program in women’s history in the United States, died on January 2, 2013. Having fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1939 at the age of eighteen, she settled in the United States where, after raising a family, she returned to school. She earned her A.B. from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1963 and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1966. Gerda Lerner’s career focused on establishing women’s history as a legitimate academic field and a formal curriculum at several colleges and universities, including founding and co-directing the country’s first graduate program in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College in 1972. She also founded and directed the graduate program in women’s history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she held the position of Robinson Edwards professor of history emerita at the time of her death. Among her most influential feminist works are The Female Experience (1976) and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993). Her research and writing interests also included African American history, such as the screenplay for the film Black Like Me (1964), on which she collaborated with her film editor husband, Carl Lerner, and the documentary anthology Black Women in White America (1972). From 1981 to 1982 she served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and she was a founding member of the National Organization for Women. Her scholarly work earned her several honors and awards, including the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1992 and the Bruce Catton Prize for lifetime achievement in historical writing in 2002. She was the first woman to receive the latter.