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H-NET BOOK REVIEW 
Published by [log in to unmask] (September, 1997) 
 
Gerda Lerner.  _Why History Matters_.  New York:  Oxford University 
Press, 1997.  xvii + 249 pp.  Bibliographical references and index. 
$30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-504644-7. 
 
Reviewed for H-Women by Margaret Ripley Wolfe 
<[log in to unmask]>, East Tennessee State University 
 
         History Matters to Women and Women Matter to History 
 
Witnesses to the professional historical conventions of yesteryear 
might have concluded that historians were bearded creatures, 
smelling faintly of bourbon, clad in baggy tweeds, and transported 
on a cloud of tobacco smoke.  Those learned males spoke mostly of 
such important topics as war, diplomacy, and politics.  Thanks to 
the inspirational presence and leadership of Gerda Lerner as well as 
other historians, men and women, the circumstances that lent 
credence to such an image have been altered. 
 
Describing and analyzing the lives of women historically is a 
"report from the trenches" in a field of research that is relatively 
new but rapidly maturing.  When the recent wave of "organized 
feminism was born,"  according to American social historian John 
Demos, "it expressed an anguished cry from the depths of oppression. 
The plot-line of women's history ever since has been a stop-and-go 
effort to escape those depths--or, stated in less extreme terms, to 
push back the limits of constraints."[1] The late nineteenth-century 
American satirist Ambrose Bierce defined history as "an account 
mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about 
by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools."[2] If Bierce 
were living in the contemporary world of political correctness, he 
would undoubtedly have something to say about the "sisterhood." 
 
Those who claim some expertise in women's history have erected their 
own shrines, fashioned their own icons, and developed their own 
ideology.  Still, women historians need offer no apologies for the 
fact that feminist research and women's studies programs represent a 
significant phase of the recent women's movement; such an admission 
hardly negates the quantity and quality of their scholarly 
contributions.  Females constitute a numerical majority and a 
political minority in the United States.  Achieving equality for the 
women in American society is a political objective, and expanding 
democracy is in keeping with American ideology.  Whatever gains that 
women have made must be cherished and protected and claimed as if 
they were "ancient and sacred privileges." 
 
The writing of women's history may be as personal an act as the 
writing of fiction, for the historian, knowingly or unknowingly, may 
be seeking to understand herself and her own world as well as other 
women and their collective past.  Unlike the writer of fiction, 
however, the historian finds no refuge in fabrication.  Just as 
history, memoir involves selectivity--what is revealed and what is 
concealed, what is made public and what is kept private.  Gerda 
Lerner's _Why History Matters_ neither purports to be a full-fledged 
memoir nor an actual autobiography; yet it possesses certain 
characteristics of both.  Its author is one of the creators of the 
specialty of women's history and a founding member of the National 
Organization for Women.  As a pioneer in developing graduate 
programs in women's history, a former president of the Organization 
of American Historians, and now Robinson-Edwards Professor of 
History, Emerita, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, her work 
as a feminist scholar has been informed by the remarkable reservoir 
of personal human experience from which she has drawn. 
 
In her first volume of essays, _The Majority Finds Its Past: 
Placing Women in History_, Gerda Lerner traces her development as a 
feminist scholar from 1960 to 1979.[3] Her latest book, _Why History 
Matters_, deals with this on-going process from 1980 to the present. 
Taken together, these two volumes reveal a great deal about her 
personal life and her public career.  Born in 1920, Gerda Lerner, an 
Austrian Jew, was in her eighteenth year when German troops occupied 
her country and the Nazis set about eliminating her people.  Her 
native Vienna, which possessed a population of approximately 176,000 
Jews in 1934, claimed only 4,746 ten years later.  Instead of 
entering university training for which she had qualified, Lerner 
became a refugee.[4] She reports being quizzed about how "being 
Jewish" has influenced her historical interests.  "The simplest way 
I can answer this question," she writes, "is, I am a historian 
because of my Jewish experience."  Being "a Jew and a Jewish woman 
and double difference became imprinted on me--not pride, but 
embarrassment; not collectivity, but exclusion ... my discomfort at 
being part of the religious Jewish community was based not so much 
on theological differences as on my unwillingness to accept the role 
this community assigned to women."[5] 
 
After fleeing Austria, Lerner settled in the United States, married, 
raised two children, and worked in a variety of jobs outside the 
home.  At age thirty-eight, she became a "reentry student" at the 
New School of Social Research in New York City, earning her Bachelor 
of Arts degree in 1962.  She did graduate work in history at 
Columbia University, completing her Master of Arts and Doctorate of 
Philosophy in three years.  When Lerner was under consideration for 
admission to the Ph.D. program, she was asked why she had taken up 
the study of history.  Her response:  "What I want to do is to make 
the study of women's history legitimate ... I want women's history 
to be part of every curriculum on every level, and I want people to 
be able to specialize and take Ph.D.s in the subject and not have to 
say they are doing something else.  I want women's history respected 
and legitimized in the historical profession."[6] 
 
By 1979, Lerner writes, "The two aspects of my own consciousness, 
that of the citizen and that of the scholar, had finally fused." 
She had become "a feminist scholar."  _Why History Matters_ deals 
with Lerner's "coming to consciousness as a Jewish woman" and "the 
many and complex reasons"  that history matters to her.[7] Along 
with an introduction, this book has three parts:  "History as 
Memory," "History:  Theory and Practice," and "Re-Visioning 
History."  Each part offers from three to five essays, prepared over 
a period of several years mostly for oral presentations and revised 
for publication in this volume.  Readily apparent is the author's 
concern for the consideration of race, class, and gender and her 
acknowledged debt to such pioneer women historians as Mary Beard and 
Eleanor Flexner.[8] Felicity of style and feminine intuitiveness 
only serve to enhance the text, which reveals the musings of a 
brilliant mind and the tragedies and triumphs of this woman's life. 
_Why History Matters_ reminds its readers of the history that we 
study as well as the history that we make. 
 
_Why History Matters_ and its earlier companion piece, _The Majority 
Finds Its Past:  Placing Women in History_, are likely to inspire a 
certain amount of nostalgia, sending readers down memory lane to 
reflect on our own lives and careers, our heroines and role models, 
the first women's caucuses or first professional conventions we 
attended, and the origins of our own feminism.  We have now 
witnessed approximately three decades of sustained commitment to and 
development of feminist scholarship.  Our stories as a community of 
scholars--as a generation of contributors to this new specialty--are 
important; they need to be told.  In reunion, remembrance, and 
reflection, we should be inspired by Gerda Lerner's example and tell 
our stories lest our individual and collective experiences be only 
casually recorded or cavalierly discarded. 
 
Notes: 
 
[1].  John Demos, Past, Present, and Personal:  The Family and the 
Life Course in American History (New York:  Oxford University Press, 
1986), 4, 11. 
 
[2].  Bierce offered such definitions in a column that he penned for 
a weekly newspaper during 1881.  That same year, his writing was 
published as _The Cynic's Word Book_ and later as _The Devil's 
Dictionary_.  Bierce is perhaps as much a part of American humor as 
Mark Twain and Will Rogers although not as well known.  In 1913, 
Ambrose Bierce, then seventy-one years old, left for Mexico and was 
never heard from again.  Thus, one of America's greatest satirists 
vanished.  Since his disappearance, he has been rediscovered many 
times although apparently not sighted.  Film-maker and actress Jane 
Fonda projected him onto the silver screen as "Old Gringo." 
 
[3].  Gerda Lerner, _The Majority Finds Its Past:  Placing Women in 
History_ (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1979). 
 
[4].  Ibid., xv. 
 
[5].  Lerner, _Why History Matters_, 5, 8-12 (quoted material from 
5, 8). 
 
[6].  Lerner, _The Majority Finds Its Past_, xix-xx. 
 
[7].  Lerner, _Why History Matters_, xii, xvii. 
 
[8].  Mary R. Beard, _Women as Force in History_ (New York: 
Macmillan, 1946); and Eleanor Flexner, _Century of Struggle:  The 
Woman's Suffrage Movement in the United States_ (Cambridge, Mass.: 
Harvard University Press, 1959).  See also Linda K. Kerber, "The 
Challenge of `Opinionative Assurance,'" _National Forum:  The Phi 
Kappa Phi Journal_ 77 (Summer 1997):  pp.  9-13.  Citing 
"opinionative assurance" as a phrase used by Mary Beard in her 1946 
book, Kerber writes, "I have not seen the phrase ... before or 
since, but when I read it I knew exactly what Beard was talking 
about:  the certainty with which we clothe our opinions when we feel 
that they are beyond question" (p. 9).  "We now stand firmly on a 
base of a quarter-century of exciting research and writing.  We at 
last have the capacity to disrupt old ways of telling historical 
stories.  It is time for a little `opinionative assurance' of our 
own" (p. 13). 
 
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