Gerda lerner why history matters youtube

Pioneering Women’s Historian

Gerda Lerner was a historian of remarkable eloquence, insight, and courage; a resolute advocate of the capacity of history to change the course of human events.

She devoted her academic lifetime to illuminating the idea that women had a history, and that knowing it could alter human consciousness. “Writing history and thinking about women,” she wrote in Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), “could lead to transformative politics rooted in both thought and experience.”

Born Gerda Kronstein in Vienna, Austria, in 1920, she and her family fled the country in 1938 in the face of the Nazi incursion, and after she and her mother emerged from six weeks in a Gestapo prison.

Deported, stateless, she made her way to the United States. In the war years she married film editor Carl Lerner, who would become best known for his work on Twelve Angry Men. They had two children, Steph