Quotes from Gerda Lerner

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

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.

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

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

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.

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining "respectability

To be without history is to be trapped in a present where oppressive social relations appear natural and inevitable

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

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

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.

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

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

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.