Fireweed
A Political Autobiography
Gerda Lerner

Making History Her Story, Too

By Felicia R. Lee for The New York Times 20 July 2002

As a historian, Gerda Lerner has learned to take the long view. It is a perspective that applies equally to her work and her life. At 82, Dr. Lerner is considered a godmother of women's history. Yet she certainly did not arrive on the scene as a full-blown feminist historian. As she recently set her table for lunch in her small brown house surrounded by trees here, she recalled years of contradictory realities: of being a housewife and a scholar, a victim of anti-Semitism and a powerful women's rights advocate, at times prosperous and at times poor.

"I wanted to show people that whatever contributions I could make as a historian and a theoretician of women's history and women's studies came out of my practical life experiences," Dr. Lerner said, tucking into a salad of sliced eggs and anchovies. "When you get older, you have a desire to look at your whole life, not just the end result and not just a particular point."

Dr. Lerner, who is a professor of history emerita at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has just published her memoir, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University Press). The title comes from the fireweed plant, which grows on disturbed soil by roadsides and in fire clearings in the forest—a flowering survivor, like Dr. Lerner. It is a "political autobiography," she explained, because she views her personal and her political selves as inseparable.

Fireweed begins in the 1920's in Vienna, where Dr. Lerner was born Gerda Kronstein, the first child of Ilona and Robert Kronstein, an affluent Jewish couple. Her father was a pharmacist, her mother a frustrated artist. The memoir details Dr. Lerner's evolution as a political activist as she faced the Nazis in Vienna and joined the Communist Party in the United States, and it examines her personal relationships that both bloomed and withered against the backdrop of sweeping historical events.

Dr. Lerner writes at length about her difficult relationship with her mother, who survived a concentration camp but died in Europe far from her estranged husband and Gerda, her elder daughter. Dr. Lerner, arriving in the United States emaciated and emotionally drained after fleeing the Nazis, made a sad first marriage so she could stay in this country.

A happy second marriage to the filmmaker Carl Lerner produced a son and a daughter and a quest to integrate the couple's political activities with family life in New York City. With luck, they survived the McCarthy era (she and her husband later severed their Communist Party ties), and on the cusp of the 1960's, Gerda Lerner was a housewife, writing a novel and other fiction and joining causes, from improving schools to protesting nuclear weapons. This memoir, which has received a bouquet of laudatory reviews, ends in 1958, just as Dr. Lerner was beginning her life as a historian. (Her creative writing, though published, never brought her fame.)

The short version of the post-Fireweed story is that in 1958, when her children were well into their teens, Dr. Lerner went back to school, initially to take a few college courses, and by 1966 had a doctorate in history from Columbia University. Her considerable reputation rests mostly on virtually creating the field of women's history and then tirelessly agitating to help her female colleagues win respect and find audiences for their work.

In 1963, at the New School for Social Research, now the New School University, Dr. Lerner taught what is believed to be the first postwar college course in women's history. In 1972, as a history professor at Sarah Lawrence College, she established the program that became a model for graduate education in women's history.

Dr. Lerner now has 11 history books to her name. She was the editor of the groundbreaking Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, (Pantheon, 1972), one of the first books to detail the contributions of black women.

"When it was published, it had enormous impact; it revealed that there were the sources to write these kinds of histories," said Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor of history at Columbia University, whom Dr. Lerner convinced to study women's history when they first met at Barnard College in 1969.

In May Dr. Lerner became the first woman to receive the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing from the Society of American Historians. As Fireweed shows, the road there was unpaved.

"I enter graduate school, and they teach me all these great names, all these famous names, and they teach me about a world in which women don't exist," she said with obvious irritation. "And when I ask about it, one of their favorite sayings was that unfortunately, most women were illiterate." She shook her head.

"I came out of an experience where I had organized at the grass-roots level, and I knew what these women could do and did do," she said. "I was able to bring that knowledge in the push for women's history."

Dr. Lerner peers out intently from big glasses and has a strong, German-accented voice that demands an ear.

Her home is immaculate, a place of Danish Modern furniture, a fluffy golden carpet, her mother's abstract art on the walls. She has lived alone since her husband died in 1973. Photographs of her four grandchildren dot the refrigerator.

A woman known for her impatience and no-nonsense manner, Dr. Lerner said she was disdainful of memoir writing as a catharsis rather than as an attempt to convey a larger meaning. She had worked out her feelings toward everything she wrote about, she said, but parts of Fireweed were painful to remember and record. The kaleidoscope of images from its pages includes a Gerda who celebrated her 18th birthday in a Viennese jail cell with two gentile girls, her rations cut in half because she was a Jew.

"I have given some readings of this chapter, and it still upsets me very much," she said, her eyes half closing. She and her mother were jailed by the Nazis in an attempt to make them reveal the location of her father, who had temporarily fled Vienna.

"I feel like a lot of people who have survived the Holocaust," she continued. "The people my age, we are the last generation of eyewitnesses. Many of us have found it extremely painful to think about this time and to speak about it even to our children or loved ones. If we don't, then the eyewitness primary account is lost, and the only people who will interpret this period are people who don't have a clue. They weren't there."

Her commitment to political struggle probably arose, she said, in Vienna in 1934, when she sat in her family's darkened apartment and heard the machine-gun staccato of fascists shooting up housing projects even as the radio newscasts said all was quiet. "I said to myself, 'This I can't live with'; I think it started then. I was 14 years old."

It was never a leap to understand why other groups she studied, like black women, felt like outsiders, she said. Or even why women too often fail to understand one another.

"I stayed home until my youngest child was 16 years old," she said. "I was a full-time mother. I have always felt that feminists have to understand more about that experience. Whenever you want to make any change in the community, from getting a stoplight at a school crossing to putting in a park, the people who make the change are your stay-at-home housewives all over the country, all over the world."

After her work at Sarah Lawrence, Dr. Lerner began the University of Wisconsin's graduate program in women's history as part of its American history program. For a long time, it was among a handful of places offering a doctorate in women's history. Now there are hundreds of women's history courses taught at universities.

"With the scholarship, the program-building and the writing, any of those three things would have made her an important historian," said Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University who taught women's history at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980's.

Dr. Lerner's body of work includes an ambitious two-volume study titled Women and History, published by Oxford University Press in 1986 and 1993. Volume I explored the creation of patriarchy and Volume II the creation of feminist consciousness from the Middle Ages to 1870. Volume I was particularly praised for its range but criticized for the slimness of some of its evidence.

"I don't think anyone would take on a topic now like she did about the history of patriarchy," Dr. Gordon said. "A lot more research would have to be done, there would be fewer generalizations." But as in writing a book like Fireweed, Dr. Gordon said, Dr. Lerner showed an ambition that combined thorough examination with unflinching honesty.

When asked whether women's studies were still needed, Dr. Lerner laughed. "For 4,000 years, men have defined culture by looking at the activities of other men," she said, putting on her professorial voice. "The minute we started questioning it, the first question was, 'Well, when are you going to stop separating yourself out and mainstream?'"

"Give us another 4,000 years," she said, "and we'll talk about mainstreaming."