Living with History / Making Social Change

Gerda Lerner

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781469622019, 9780807832936
• eBook ISBN: 9780807887868
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching History

This stimulating collection of essays in an autobiographical framework spans the period from 1963 to the present. It encompasses Gerda Lerner’s theoretical writing and her organizational work in transforming the history profession and in establishing Women’s History as a mainstream field.

Six of the twelve essays are new, written especially for this volume; the others have previously appeared in small journals or were originally presented as talks, and have been revised for this book. Several essays discuss feminist teaching and the problems of interpretation of autobiography and memoir for the reader and the historian. Lerner’s reflections on feminism as a worldview, on the meaning of history writing, and on problems of aging lend this book unusual range and depth.

Together, the essays illuminate how thought and action connected in Lerner’s life, how the life she led before she became an academic affected the questions she addressed as a historian, and how the social and political struggles in which she engaged informed her thinking. Written in lucid, accessible prose, the essays will appeal to the general reader as well as to students at all levels. Living with History / Making Social Change offers rare insight into the life work of one of the leading historians of the United States.

PART I

Redefining the Profession of History

Chapter one: A Life of Learning

This essay is based on my Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, presented to the American Council of Learned Societies on May 6, 2005.^* Being chosen for this lectureship is a distinct honor, which comes with the obligation common to all honorees to address the assigned topic, “A Life of Learning”—in short, to present an intellectual autobiography. It is a daunting assignment. I would never have volunteered for it, especially not after having recently finished a partial autobiography that carefully avoided discussing my academic life and thought. The honor of this lectureship seduced me, and since the work was done, I think it fitting to open this book with it. It can serve as a framework and background for the essays presented in this volume. I try here to trace the evolution of my thought and the process of my learning, which has always been characterized by close interaction between analysis and application, theory and practice.

My life has been marked by breaks and discontinuities—abrupt fissures; destruction, loss, and new beginnings. I am a survivor of terror and persecution; I have changed cultures and languages, nationality and class. I’m an outsider as a woman, a Jew, an immigrant, and a radical. I have also been a successful insider, an institution-builder and a respected member of my profession. My various transformations have been driven by necessity, imposed by outside events, yet they have been counter-balanced by certain lifelong continuities: my work as a creative writer, my pervasive preoccupation with historical events and the shaping of history, my deep commitment to social action and to responsibility in the public sphere, and my lifelong focus on the condition of women in society. And always I have tried to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between action and thought. I have tried to find the right balance between the life of the mind and what people call “real” life, the life in social context.

Perhaps, what I need to explain in this lecture is how, finally, it all came together.

I was born a middle-class Jewish girl in Vienna in 1920. My family always lived in a nest of security surrounded by the vast insecurity of a truncated former empire, repeatedly threatened by invasion and instability. To be born and raised Jewish in a country in which Catholicism was the state religion and anti-Semitism was an honored political tradition meant, from early on, to be branded as different. Jews were set apart, we were not “normal.” Fascists and anti-Semites were organized in political parties and, in the years of my growing up, became more and more powerful. Finally, it was not a question of whether they would come to power, but when.

What of the life of the mind? I received mixed messages in the family. My father, a pharmacist, exemplified the virtues of scientific inquiry, of respect for verifiable truths and replicable experiments.

My mother was a sort of feminist, heavily influenced by Ibsen, Scandinavian novelists, and French avant garde thinkers. She was a self-defined Bohemian, rebelling against bourgeois standards of propriety, advocating sexual freedom, and experimenting with all kinds of then novel practices, from vegetarianism to Yoga. She was unhappy in her marriage and revolted against the traditional roles of housewife and mother. She fashioned an alternate lifestyle for herself that scandalized her mother-in-law, with whom she lived in a constant state of warfare. My mother was an artist and wanted to focus on that vocation, something she was not fully able to do until the years of emigration, when she was free of familial responsibilities. She had a studio in the city, where she kept a kind of salon for young artists and writers. Despite their marital difficulties, my father helped her artistic development in every way.

The power struggle between my mother and my grandmother and the constant tensions in the home confronted me early with the need to make choices among conflicting loyalties. In my teenage years I sided with my mother and regarded her as a victim of societal restrictions. I saw the world as divided into warring fields; I felt an obligation to choose among them.

In 1934 a violent civil war raged in Austria, and in Vienna virtually at my doorstep. After a week of bloody fighting Austria’s democracy was replaced by a clerical-fascist dictatorship. Parliamentary democracy and its parties were outlawed; trade unions were banned and opponents to the new regime were jailed. Supported by the German government, an underground Nazi movement carried out a war of terrorism inside Austria, with the goal of Anschluss, the absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany.

In this climate of totalitarianism I learned to dispel my sense of despair and helplessness by exploring the world of ideas in books I found in our library. I read Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky and B. Traven’s romantic novels about South American revolutionaries. I made pictures in my mind of prisons, torture, of brave, dedicated fighters for freedom. With school friends I listened to American jazz and discovered Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. These cultural impressions and the art films from Russia, France, and Italy to which my mother took me encouraged me toward a more active political involvement.

Still, it took nearly a year before I found the courage to participate, even in the smallest way, in underground activity. In my case this consisted in reading and passing on an underground newspaper and in helping through “Red Aid” a family whose father had been exiled as the result of the 1934 fighting. Even though these actions were relatively insignificant, each carried a six-month to one-year jail sentence with it, in case of discovery. I was full of fear, yet I lost the sense of defeatism that had so oppressed me; I felt myself coming closer to the antifascist movement, that unknown band of political resisters out there in the wider world.

In 1936, my parents arranged for me to spend six weeks in England as part of a student-exchange program. Unfortunately, the suburban family to which I had been assigned turned out to be British fascists and anti-Semites. I managed to leave them and join a Socialist youth encampment in Wales, which was run by J. B. S. Haldane, the eminent biochemist, and his wife, both longtime pacifists, who had recently publicly joined the Communist Party. I succumbed to their charm, their warmth, and the stimulation of their conversation, which seemed to encompass the world. I made friends with an Oxford student who made it his business to convert me to Marxism the proper way, which consisted of my reading the classics, followed by hours of his explicating the finer points to me in true Oxford fashion. I swallowed these new and to me forbidden ideas the way a thirsty person swallows a cool drink. And I got an entirely new view of myself in a community of young people who looked upon me as a bit of a heroine, for having survived youth in a fascist country and having shown some spirit of resistance. I returned from England with increased self-confidence, a stronger commitment to antifascism, and a new interest in Marxist thought.

During my years of adolescent exploration, I also came under the influence of Karl Kraus, the greatest satirist and by many accounts the greatest modern poet in the German language. In his magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch), he mercilessly satirized militarism, bureaucracies, and, above all, the debasement of the German language. I attended his brilliant one-man readings of Shakespeare plays and Offenbach operettas—unforgettable performances. His powerful writing, his poetic force, his dedication to the structure of thought enraptured me. Years later, in making myself into a writer in English, my second language, his reverence for language guided me along the way. I knew I must learn more than vocabulary and syntax; I must learn the different culture expressed in the grammar and poetics of my new language before I could become a writer. I consider myself a Kraus disciple to this day.

While still in Vienna, I was fortunate in attending, for eight years, a private Realgymnasium for girls headed by a Jewish woman director and staffed by well-educated, highly motivated women teachers, many of whom held advanced degrees. I loved the rigorous training I received in that school and enjoyed the sense of power I got from learning easily and with enjoyment. My favorite subject, German, was taught by a small, friendly woman, who, as it turned out later, was an avid member of the underground Nazi Party. I learned High and Middle High German from her and studied the ancient ballads in their original. I choose to write an honors thesis on twelve German ballads, representative of the genre’s changing styles from the Middle Ages to the present. The fact that I combined literary history and stylistic analysis in this early work foreshadowed my future interests. I managed to complete the essay just a month ahead of the Nazi takeover. That my Nazi teacher judged it excellent and felt it accrued credit to her would later lead her to support me when I was jailed.

My classical Gymnasium training compared favorably with the best American high school and junior college education, but the existence of the Americas was barely acknowledged in it. These continents were considered marginal in the ethnocentric definition of humanist knowledge of pre–World War II Austria. Later, when I began to critique the exclusions and omissions of traditional history, I would recall the partial and biased training in history I had received. It was possible in my day to be a European intellectual, excellently trained and credentialed, and yet to be ignorant of the history and culture of several continents.

The Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938 affected my family directly. Within two weeks my father was informed by a “friendly Nazi” that he was on a list of people to be arrested, and he left the country the same day. He was able to do so because he had five years earlier established a pharmacy in the small principality of Liechtenstein, a tiny neighboring country, and he had regularly gone there on business. His foresight and the fact that he never returned to Vienna saved our entire family by providing us with a place of residence when all the world was closing its borders against Jews. Immediately, it led to two raids of our home by armed Nazis and, a few weeks later, to the arrest of my mother and myself. We were separated from one another, put into a regular city jail, not accused of anything. It later turned out we were being held as hostages for my father, in order to induce him to return.

I did my jail time in a cell with two young political prisoners, who had to look forward to long sentences. They educated me in courage and resourcefulness and when our starvation-level rations were cut in half for me, the Jew, they shared their rations equally with me. They were Socialists and lived by that ethic. I believed that I would never go free and that, if my underground work were discovered, I would end my days in a concentration camp. I learned that fear could be conquered by coming to terms with the worst possibilities and that fighting back, even in the most hopeless situations, would give rise to hope. I obsessively focused on getting out of jail in order to take my Matura exam—the final exam without which it was impossible ever to attend a university in Europe. The exam was scheduled for five weeks after my arrest. I wrote petitions on toilet paper, I made a pest of myself with all the guards, I asked to be taken with armed guard for my exam. No response, except the ridicule of the guards. The day after the supposed exam I was taken to a Gestapo interview and learned that all these activities about the Matura were in my record, yet I was returned to jail. A week later my mother and I were released and I found out that the exam had been postponed for a week in order to install a Nazi examining board. I went to the exam the next morning and passed it with honors. I also learned that my German teacher and other Nazi teachers had petitioned the Gestapo in my behalf. Since I was the only student in my school to be arrested, they were sure it was a simple mistake.

My mother and I had been released from jail only on condition that we would leave the country forthwith. Then followed three months of police harassment and threats of being jailed again, and the overcoming of systematic bureaucratic obstacles put in our way by the government. Finally, shortly before the infamous Kristallnacht, my mother, my younger sister, and I were able to join my father in exile in Liechtenstein.

What did I learn?

Social definitions can turn privileged citizens with rights into outcasts—in fact, by Nazi definition, into vermin that can and should be killed.

Expropriation and the taking away of citizenship accomplish the same end.

One cannot survive alone. In order to survive, one must foster courage, accept help, and help others.

In April 1939 I managed to immigrate into the United States, hoping to bring my family there later. This proved to be impossible, due to U.S. restrictions on immigration. Having experienced the force of politics and power firsthand, I early became a dedicated antifascist. My intellectual encounter with Marxism continued during the years of emigration and my years as an unskilled, underpaid immigrant. Two and a half years after my arrival in the United States I married Carl Lerner, a theater director, who wanted to work in film, and who was a Communist. We moved to Hollywood, where I became involved in radical left wing union politics and, later, in the struggle against the Hollywood blacklist. During my own years as a Communist I was involved mainly in grassroots activities for nuclear disarmament, peace, racial justice, and women’s rights. For the next twenty years of my life I would live at the societal bottom level, where sheer survival comes first, action and efforts at organizing come next, and abstract thought is a luxury, a leisure-time indulgence. Still, I continued my uphill struggle as a writer, publishing short stories, a novel, and translations, and working on a musical, and film scripts.

IN THE FALL OF ’63 I entered Columbia University. I was forty-three years old; my daughter was in college and my son was in high school. My husband was busy with a successful career as a film-maker and teacher of film. I had shopped around before selecting a graduate school in order to be allowed to do a biography of the Grimké sisters, the only Southern women to become agents and lecturers of the American Anti-Slavery Society, as my dissertation. Columbia was the only place where the department chairman was willing to bend the institutional regulations so as to meet my needs. The topic, on which I had already been working for four years, was approved for my dissertation, even before I had fulfilled my orals requirements. Due to this flexibility, I was able to earn both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in three years from the time I entered, while also teaching part-time at the New School and for the final year at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

In a way, my three years of graduate study were the happiest years of my life. It was the first time in my adult life I had time and space for thinking and learning. Greedy for knowledge, the way only people who have long been denied an education can be, I gave up all recreation, social life, and other interests. More than anything else I was driven by an urgency to learn what I needed to know in order to carry out a passionate ambition, which by then had taken concrete shape in my mind.

During the interview at Columbia prior to my admission to the Ph.D. program, I was asked a standard question: Why did I take up the study of history? Without hesitation, I replied that I wanted to put women into history. No, I corrected myself, not put them into history, because they are already in it. I want to complete the work begun by Mary Beard. This announcement was, not surprisingly, greeted by astonishment. Just what did I have in mind? And anyway, what was Women’s History? The question set me off into a lengthy explanation, on which I have played variations for the past forty years. I ended in somewhat utopian fashion: “I want Women’s History to be legitimate, to be part of every curriculum on every level, and I want people to be able to take Ph.D.s in the subject and not have to say they are doing something else.”

As if my age and unusual background did not sufficiently mark me as “different” from other students, I set myself further apart with this little speech, as being opinionated and having grandiose ambitions. But my real difficulty in graduate school was not so much style as substance—I could not accept the content of the curriculum, the worldview I was being taught.

In the twenty-five years since I had left school in Vienna, I had been an unskilled and later semi-skilled worker, a housewife, a mother, a community activist. In all these roles I met an active group of women, who worked quietly and without public recognition, usually without pay and frequently without an awareness of the significance of the work they were doing. Political organizations were influenced by their work, yet no one would ever know of their existence through the writings of historians or through the media.

Now, in one of the best graduate schools in the country I was presented with a history of the past in which women did not seem to exist, except for a few rulers or some who created disturbances. What I was learning in graduate school did not so much leave out continents and their people, as had my Viennese education, as it left out half the human race, women.

I found it impossible to accept such a version of the past as truth. I questioned it in seminars and in private discussions with faculty, and I was quickly made the target of ridicule by my teachers and classmates. Had I been a young woman just out of college, I probably could not have withstood this social pressure. Still, after a while, I made a place for myself and even won the respect of some of the faculty for my specialized knowledge. I learned sometimes from my professors, often against them, and much by trial and error, but always I tested what I was learning against what I already knew from living. What I brought as a person to history was inseparable from my intellectual approach to the subject; I never accepted the need for a separation of theory and practice. My passionate commitment to Women’s History was grounded in my life.

Professors Robert Cross and Eric McKitrick, who jointly supervised my dissertation, gave me considerable freedom in interpretation, but insisted on professional competency in documentation, for which I will always be grateful to them. Neither they nor any of my other teachers shared my interest in Women’s History. The only exception was visiting professor Carl Degler, who taught a course in U.S. Social History, in which he included a section on women. He had long considered the history of women’s reform activities an essential aspect of social history. I learned much from him ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Living with History / Making Social Change
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Style
• Introduction
• PART I Redefining the Profession of History
• PART II Doing History
• PART III Living in History
• Appendix a Biographies of Midwestern Feminist Leaders
• Appendix b Class Syllabus for Workshop on the Construction of Deviant Out-Groups (Chapter 7)
• Appendix c Group Exercises for Workshop on the Construction of Deviant Out-Groups (Chapter 7)
• Acknowledgments
• Index