Gerda Lerner


Lerner would say years later that the woman taught her during those six weeks how to survive and that the experience taught her how society can manipulate people. It was a lesson that the women's history pioneer, who died Wednesday at age 92, said she saw reinforced in American academia by history professors who taught as though only the men were worth studying.

"When I was faced with noticing that half the population has no history and I was told that that's normal, I was able to resist the pressure" to accept that conclusion, Lerner told the Wisconsin Academic Review in 2002.

The author was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and is credited with creating the nation's first graduate program in women's history, in the 1970s in New York.

Her son said she died peacefully of apparent old age at an assisted-living facility in Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

"She was always a very strong-willed and opinionated woman," her son, Dan Lerner, told The Associated Press late Thursday. "I think those are the hallmarks of great people, people that have strong points of view and firmly held convictions."


"They taught me how to survive," Lerner wrote in "Fireweed: a Political Autobiography." "Everything I needed to get through the rest of my life I learned in jail in those six weeks."

She became impassioned about the issue of gender equality. As a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., she founded a women's studies program — including the first graduate program in women's history in the U.S.

She later moved to Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.


"She said, 'I thought you were impossible, difficult, not understanding, but you gave me a model of commitment that I've never had before,'" Stephanie Lerner recalled. "That's just how she was."



"I was much younger and very in shape. But at a certain point I said I couldn't do it anymore," Stephanie Lerner said. "She just went on ahead. That was her joy, her determination."

Gerda Lerner wrote several textbooks on women's history, including "The Creation of Patriarchy" and "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness." She also edited "Black Women in White America," one of the first books to document the struggles and contributions of black women in American history.


The couple were involved in activism that ranged from attempting to unionize the film industry to working in the civil rights movement.


"I wanted the world to be a just and fair place, and it obviously wasn't — and that disturbed me right from the beginning," she said.

She became determined to fight for equality, and she encouraged others to take up their own fights against inequality. She said people who want to change the world don't need to be part of a large organized group — they just have to find a cause they believe in and never stop fighting for it.


"I am happy because I found the balance between adjusting, or surviving what I was put through, and acting for what I believed in," she said in 2002. "That's the key."

DINESH RAMDE,Associated Press

Associated Press researcher Barbara Sambriski in New York contributed to this report.
