10 Quotes by Gerda Lerner

perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most "unfeminine" quality of all -- that of intllectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The Hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male-system builders.

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 unrelenting, unbroken organizing grassroots effort to get women's 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.

Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.