Women's history pioneer Gerda Lerner dies

MILWAUKEE -- Gerda Lerner spent her 18th birthday in a Nazi prison, sharing a cell with two gentile women arrested for political work who shared their food with the Jewish teenager because jailers restricted rations for Jews.

Lerner would say years later that the women 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 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, said. "I think those are the hallmarks of great people, people that have strong points of view and firmly held convictions."

She was born into a privileged Jewish family in Vienna, in 1920. When the Nazis rose to power, she was imprisoned alongside the two other young women.

"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, she founded a women's studies program -- including the first graduate program in women's history in the United States.

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

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

She married Carl Lerner, a film editor, in 1941. They lived in Hollywood for a few years before returning to New York.

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

Lerner was determined to fight for equality, and 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.