Gerda Lerner Quotes

#1. Women's history is the
primary tool for women's emancipation.

Gerda Lerner

#2. [There is a] depth and urgency of the search of Jewish and Christian women for connection to the Divine, which found expression in more than 1000 years of feminist Bible criticism and religious re-visioning.

Gerda Lerner

#3. Nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day.

Gerda Lerner

#4. Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin 'helping' them. Such a world does not exist - never has.

Gerda Lerner

#5. Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.

Gerda Lerner

#6. When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

Gerda Lerner

#7. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

Gerda Lerner

#8. The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.

Gerda Lerner

#9. Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturing thought can rise.

Gerda Lerner

#10. Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.

Gerda Lerner