Carolina QuotesAs I began to work on my research priorities, the absence of black women from history appeared to me as an urgent problem to be considered.
Gerda Lerner Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- "Autobiographical Notes"
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“As I began to work on my research priorities, the absence of…” Gerda Lerner. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F239DEFD97. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f239defd97
More from Gerda Lerner
During the interview at Columbia, prior to my admission to the Ph.D. program, I was asked a standard question: Why did I take the study of history? Without hesitating I replied that I wanted to put women into history. No, I corrected myself, not put them up into history, because they are already in it, what I want to do is to make the study of women's history legitimate. I want, I said plainly, to complete the work begun by Mary Beard...In a very real sense I consider Mary Beard, whom I never met, my principal mentor as a historian.
Among equals there is no category of "Otherness." The act of categorizing another implies oppression.
Feminist consciousness begins with self-consciousness, an awareness of our separate needs as women; then comes the awareness of female collectivity-the reaching out toward other women, first for mutual support and then to improve our condition. Out of the recognition of communality, there emerges feminist group consciousness a set of ideas by which women autonomously define ourselves in a male-dominated world and seek to substitute our vision and values for those of the patriarchy. The two aspects of my own consciousness, that of the citizen and that of the woman scholar, had finally fused: I am a feminist scholar.