13+ Gerda Lerner Quotes On Education, Religion And Society

Gerda Lerner was an Austrian-born American historian, author, and feminist. She was a pioneer in the field of women's history and the author of groundbreaking books such as The Creation of Patriarchy and The Majority Finds Its Past. She was also the founding president of the National Women's Studies Association and a co-founder of the Scholars' Conference on Women's History. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gerda Lerner on education, religion, society.

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation. — Gerda Lerner

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. — Gerda Lerner

Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy. — Gerda Lerner

. . . black women . . . are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity. — Gerda Lerner

Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturing thought can rise. — Gerda Lerner

nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day. — Gerda Lerner

Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin helping them. Such a world does not exist -- never has. — Gerda Lerner

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing. — Gerda Lerner

Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others--into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future. — Gerda Lerner

The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained. — Gerda Lerner

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel. — Gerda Lerner

Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision. — Gerda Lerner

[There is a] depth and urgency of the search of Jewish and Christian women for connection to the Divine, which found expression in more than 1000 years of feminist Bible criticism and religious re-visioning. — Gerda Lerner

Life Lessons by Gerda Lerner

1. Gerda Lerner's work highlights the importance of recognizing the contributions of women to history, as well as the need to challenge the traditional narrative of history which has often excluded women.
2. Through her research, Lerner has shown that women have been active participants in history and have had a significant impact on the development of society.
3. Her work has demonstrated the value of a more inclusive approach to the study of history, which takes into account the perspectives of all groups in society.