Gerda Lerner

The creation of patriarchy

When precisely did the ideas, symbols and metaphors of patriarchy take hold of Western civilization? When were women, so central to the creation of society, moved on to the sidelines? Where is the evidence to support the notion that male dominance over women is a natural state of things? Gerda Lerners radical review of Western civilization shows that male dominance over women has nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with cultural and historical habits. Dr Lerner draws her evidence from a host of archaeological, literary, and artistic sources, using them to pinpoint the critical turning points in the allocation of womens roles in society. She draws especially on archaeological evidence of the cultures of ancient Hebrew and Mesopotamian societies, cultures from which modern Western civilization has largely derived. This approach enables her to trace the ways in which men and women have been classified as essentially separate creatures - from ancient Greek philosophy onwards - and also to examine ways in which their experience of society differs, through the structures and symbols of class and religion. Most of all, by showing patriarchy as the result of an historical process, Lerner produces an irresistable argument that it can be altered, and ended, by similar means.

Early Community Work of Black Club Women

by GERDA LERNER Blaick women organized, throughout the nineteenth century, at first on a local, lateron a state and national level, to undertake educational, philanthropic and welfare activities. Urbanization, the urgent needs of the poor in a period of rapid industrialization and the presence of a sizeable group of educated women with leisure led to the emergence of a national club movement of white women after the Civil War. Similar conditions did not begin to operate in the black communities until the 1890s, when local clubs in a number of different cities began almost simultaneously to form federations. In 1896 the newly formed National Association of Colored Women (NACW) united the three largest of these and over a hundred local womens clubs.1 The activities of the black womens club movement were recorded by the pioneering black historians.2 However, the continuity and extent of this work and its significance have largely escaped the notice of historians. There is as yet no adequate history of the black womens club movement and no interpretative literature.3 Because of the widely scattered nature of this effort, the fluid structure of the NACW and the

Reconceptualizing Differences Among Women

The development of womens history in the past twenty years has not only helped to bring new subject matter to history, but has forced us to deal with the concepts and values underlying the organization of historical studies and of all intellectual fields. It has forced us to question not only why certain content was previously omitted, ignored, and trivialized, but also to consider who decides what is to be included. In short, we have begun first to question and then to challenge the conceptual framework for the organization of traditional knowledge. We challenge it because of its omissions: it leaves out the experiences, activities, and ideas of half or more of humankind. We challenge it because it is elitist: it leaves out not only all women, but most men, those of non-white races, those of various ethnicities, and, until quite recently, those of lower classes. In so doing, it defines all the groups omitted as less significant than the groups included. Patently, this is untrue and therefore it is unacceptable. We challenge it because what traditional history teaches us denies our own experience of reality. We live in a world in which nothing happens without the active participation of men and women and yet we are constantly being told of a past world in which men are

The Necessity of History and the Professional Historian

There is no adequate preparation for writing a presidential address. Trying to choose among the many urgent themes that demand attention, one is painfully aware of the wisdom of ones predecessors and ones own limitations. The audience to be addressed is the most critical and important one will ever face: a national audience of colleagues. For a woman, following a long line of male presidents, there is an added responsibility: one wishes to be representative of the profession as a whole and yet not neglectful of those long silenced. Behind me stands a line of women historians, who practiced their profession and helped to build this organization without enjoying equality in status, economic rewards, and representation. Even the most exceptional among them, whose achievements were recognized and honored by the profession, had careers vastly different from their male colleagues. For example, of the leading female academic historians who practiced in the early decades of this century, only one was employed at a major university, four worked in womens colleges, the others in outside institutions. The medievalist Nellie Neilson, president of the American Historical Association in 1943 and to this day the only woman to hold that office, spent her entire career in Mount Holyoke College. Louise Kellogg, president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1930, worked at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Helen Sumner Woodbury made her major contribution to labor history in the Childrens Bureau. Martha Edwards, like Sumner a holder of the Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin, spent her career first in the Wisconsin State Historical Society, then as a teacher in the extension division. Florence Robinson, who held an M.A. in history from Wisconsin and earned the Ph.D. there a few years prior to her death, was unable to find a teaching job in history and headed the home economics department of Beloit College during her entire career. It was she who endowed the Robinson-Edwards chair I now hold, in memory of her father

Sarah M. Grimké's "Sisters of Charity"

Sarah Moore Grimke (1792-1873), daughter of a Charleston planter and slave owner who, together with her sister Angelina Emily Grimke, pioneered in asserting womens rights and advancing womens status within the abolition movement, was one of the earliest theoreticians of womens rights in the United States. Her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838) developed the first full-fledged argument for womens rights in this country. Her earlier pamphlet, Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836), was concerned not with the question of women but with a refutation of the defense of slavery based on the Bible. Sarah Grimkes other theoretical work is scattered in letters, diaries, and fragments of pamphlets and is as yet unpublished. There is enough of it to warrant the claim that her contribution to feminist theory was considerable and, in two substantial respects, far ahead of that of her