Carolina QuotesI have sometimes been asked, "How has your being Jewish influenced your work in Women's History?" The simplest way I can answer this question is, I am a historian because of my Jewish experience.
Gerda Lerner Connected to the Carolinas
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- "A Weave of Connections"
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“I have sometimes been asked, "How has your being Jewish infl…” Gerda Lerner. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-772319A97C. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/772319a97c
More from Gerda Lerner
What is left to a Jew who refuses the religious community? Antisemitism and history. In short order I experienced plenty of both.
Even in its surface meaning, the term "Women's History" calls into question the claim to universality which "History" generally assumes as a given. If historial studies, as we traditionally know them, were actually focused on men and women alike, then there would be no need for a separate subject. Men and women built civilization and culture and one would assume that any historical account written about any given period would recognize that basic fact. But traditional history has been written and interpreted by men in an androcentric frame of reference; it might quite properly be described as the history of men. The very term "Women's History" calls attention to the fact that something is missing from historical scholarship and it aims to document and reinterpret that which is missing. Seen in that light, Women's History is simply "the history of women."
What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in the fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within this framework. And then they must tear it down.