Meet Gerda Lerner, one of the founders of the field of women's history. Think she's got some things to say about women's history then? Um, yes. She's *actually* got some things to yell.

Listening to her say "Excuse me?" with such rage and knowledge made me smile. I love how she's just having none of it!

Transcript:

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Short unedited interview with Gerda Lerner Interview by Elizabeth Debold

Elizabeth Debold: Why is understanding our history so important for us as women?

Gerda Lerner: Well, understanding our history is not just important to women, it's important to everybody.

Elizabeth Debold: That's true.

Gerda Lerner: We defined what our goals are and what we think is possible to reach in our lives by the stories we inherit about people who came before us.

Elizabeth Debold: Right.

Gerda Lerner: Who are like us. But unlike peasants or unlike working class men, the story of women's contribution has never been coherently told until now, until Feminist scholarship is filling out the gap there. And so what I wanted to do was to tell this generation that is now teaching and also that are now the students. That first of all, nobody gave us anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me, it took 72 years of unbroken organizing grass roots effort to get women suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law. It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in Social Policy. And so the first thing, rule one, nobody gave us anything, we had to fight every inch of the way for every advance, and against constant resistance. It wasn't like you once fought a battle. You fought the battle that the story of women should be told. For example, I taught at Sarah Lawrence College which was at the time predominantly a women's college. And when I proposed to teach course in Women's History, they said, "Who needs it? We're a woman's college. Everything we do is women's history." and I said, "Not at all, because you are always telling it from the male point of view, from the male gaze at women." And the real story is, that despite this hundreds of years of discrimination and oblivion, women persisted that they have a story, and we had to win every step of the way. We had to win the right to tell this. So, rule number one, nobody gave us anything.

Elizabeth Debold: Yeah.

Gerda Lerner: And then somebody said to me, "You know, you have a brilliant academic record and your papers are good, your student reports are excellent, they love you as a teacher. Why don't you just abandon this outlandish idea and pursue your career?" I said, "My career is to prove that women have a history." and I can do that. And I just need somebody to give me a chance to do it.

www.livinghistorymovie.com

There may be small errors in this transcript.

About:

This is a video of feminist Gerda Lerner, the best feminist grandma ever who was also one of the founders of the field of women's history, interviewed by Elizabeth Debold. Lerner died in 2013. I'm so glad this interview happened.

The images were made by exgynocraticgrrl on Tumblr. You can reblog the post here.

Topics:

• Gender