Everywoman Her Own Historian

Abstract

Regularly described as the founding mother of Women's History (Lerner always capitalizes Women's History) and the author or editor of a dozen books, including The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Agesto Eighteen-Seventy (1993), Gerda Lerner is still at least as interesting as a historical subject as she is as a historian. Reviewing Lerner' s book-length autobiography, Fireweed (2002), Karen Offen summed up her extraordinary life by noting that Lerner had been Austrian, stateless, then American ... a privileged child, a resister, a prisoner, a refugee, a governess, an immigrant, an enemy alien, a lover and wife, an X-ray technician, a mother, a grandmother, a novelist, a musical librettist, an organizer, a student, and, ultimately, a historian, a seeker of social and political justice, and a U.S. citizen who has made an indelible mark.1 Astonishingly, this accounting understates or leaves out a lot.