Gerda Lerner Quotes

• The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming.

  Gerda Lerner

  Life, Running, Men

  62 Copy quote

• Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.

  Gerda Lerner

  Tools, Emancipation, Primaries

  58 Copy quote

• 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

  Pride, Long, Vision

  41 Copy quote

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

  Gerda Lerner

  Actions Have Consequences, Choices, Undone

  Gerda Lerner (1998). “Why History Matters: Life and Thought”, p.205, Oxford University Press on Demand

  40 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Doe, World

  "Why Women’s History Month" by Ruth Rosen, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 11, 2014.

  41 Copy quote

• The effect on men has been very bad, too, of the omission of women's history, because men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think as a man that everything great in the world and its civilization was created by men, then naturally you have to look down on women. And naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters.

  Gerda Lerner

  Daughter, Son, Men

  "Women and History Part I: The Creation of Patriarchy with Gerda Lerner". Interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, www.intuitionnetwork.org.

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Years, Knowing

  "Women and History Part I: The Creation of Patriarchy with Gerda Lerner". Interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, www.intuitionnetwork.org.

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Meaningful, Moving, Thinking

  29 Copy quote

• We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

  Gerda Lerner

  Knowledge, Past, Actions Have Consequences

  Gerda Lerner (1998). “Why History Matters: Life and Thought”, p.205, Oxford University Press on Demand

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Struggle, Past, Men

  34 Copy quote

• . . . 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

  Self, White, Goal

  21 Copy quote

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

  Gerda Lerner

  Determination, Self, People

  25 Copy quote

• For boys, the family was the place from which one sprang and to which one returned for comfort and support, but the field of action was the larger world of wilderness, adventure, industry, labor, and politics. For girls, the family was to be the world, their field of action the domestic circle. He was to express himself in his work and, through it and social action, was to help transform his environment; her individual growth and choices were restricted to lead her to express herself through love, wifehood, and motherhood--through the support and nurture of others, who would act for her.

  Gerda Lerner

  Girl, Adventure, Motherhood

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Commitment, Intimate Relationships

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Promise

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Attitude, Nursing, Nurse

  Gerda Lerner (2014). “The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History”, p.16, UNC Press Books

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• [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

  Christian, Religious, Women

  Gerda Lerner (1994). “The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy”, p.7, Oxford University Press on Demand

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