(1920, Vienna- 2013, Madison)
Writer, lecturer and historian
“During my studies the teachers told me about a world in which apparently one half of the human race was doing it all and the other half did not exist. I wondered how it could have happened. It is not the world in which I have lived”.
In 1963 Lerner held what is considered the first course of history of women in the world, at the New School in New York. In the early 1970s, when she was teaching at the Sarah Lawrence College, she created the first graduate program in women’s history and focused her efforts on making it an academic discipline. In 1980 she created the first PhD program in the United States, in women’s history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Alice Kessler Harris, a professor of history at Columbia, said about her: “She made it. She have made the history of women a central area of history”.
