Gerda Lerner - Living with History / Making Social Change

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I. REDEFINING THE PROFESSION OF HISTORY

II. DOING HISTORY

III. LIVING IN HISTORY

APPENDIX A.

APPENDIX B.

APPENDIX C.

The terms of reference by which African Americans have referred to themselves have changed over the course of history. I have followed the practice of using the designation chosen by the author or by the group in question during a particular historical period (thus: "Negro women's club movement," but "Black Liberation"). According to the same principle I refer to the nineteenth-century "woman's rights movement" and to the twentieth-century "women's rights movement."

African Americans have struggled for over a hundred years to have the term used to designate them capitalized, as are the designations for other ethnic or racial groups (Italian, Spanish, Caucasian). Thus, whenever the noun "Black" is used as a substitute for "African American" or "Negro," it should be spelled with a capital "B." There is some confusion about the spelling of the adjective "black." One can reason both ways-"Black women and Italian women," both designating group adherence, or "black and white women," both designating skin color. I capitalize the noun and lowercase the adjective, but I recognize this is a term in transition.

I also capitalize "Women's History" when it is an academic field, just as I would capitalize English, Physics, Math. When it refers to a specific case ("women's history differs from that of men," or, "we study the history of women"), it is lowercased.

In English, capitalization has always been used to indicate high or honorific status. When dealing with long-neglected subject groups, the choice of spelling cannot be arbitrary or accidental. It must reflect the historical context, even if it questions traditional usage.

At this time, when I look back on my life and my work, I see patterns and connections that were not so clearly visible at an earlier stage of my life. The impact of outside political and social events that I experienced in childhood and as a teenager shaped my connection to history: I was a victim of terror and persecution; my life was deeply affected by historical events. As a witness to terrible events, I early learned that history matters. On the other side, a childhood in which artistic creativity and expression were cherished and in which learning was considered not only a practical means of career building, but a means of finding equilibrium and meaning in life well equipped me for survival as a refugee. The life of learning and thinking would always be connected for me with teaching others and with finding a way of applying what I knew to the problems in society.

This book combines essays written over a period of several decades that touch upon the highlights of my practical work as a teacher and as an agent of social change in and out of the academy, and others, recently written, that focus on some of my main concerns as a historian and a political thinker. In this book I want to show how thought and action have been connected in my life; how the life I had led before I became an academic affected the questions I asked as a historian; how the social struggles in which I engaged as an academic woman informed my thinking. I want to explain how a decision to change the content of historical scholarship and knowledge so as to give women just representation became a challenge to develop new teaching methods and to create alternate models of academic discourse. I want to trace how feminist teaching led to the development of "outreach" projects that influenced a large number of people, far beyond the reach of the academy.

Social change is made by strategic analysis and by consistent and continuous organizational work. An adequate strategic analysis -that is, one that can be proven successful by pragmatic application-needs to be based on deep analysis that takes many factors into consideration, and on an understanding of what can be learned from historical precedent. It relies on the building of coalitions and it encourages a lifelong commitment to social action in its participants.

Growing up under a fascist government as a young girl, I wanted to change the world. Antifascism was real to me, a ray of hope in a hopeless environment-it meant democracy, free elections, equal rights for all citizens, freedom of thought. During a short stay in a Nazi jail, from which at the time I had no hope of ever escaping, I learned from my cell mates that political action meant working with others. One could not survive alone.

Later, in America, as an unskilled immigrant worker, I learned firsthand what it meant to be poor and without a support network. I had lived my childhood and adolescence in middle-class comfort; now I was on my own in a labor market in which women were restricted to only the most undesirable jobs. I worked as a domestic, as an office worker, as a salesgirl, and, after a year of training, as a medical technician-always at minimum wages and without job security. During job searches and on the job I experienced discrimination against women-pervasive, sometimes subtle, often open. At times it was mixed with other forms of discrimination. I applied for a job as a switchboard operator at the New York Telephone company. I never made it past the first interviewer. "We don't hire Jewish girls," she informed me. "Why?" "Their arms are too short to reach the switches." That was a new one ...

Jobs were offered in gendered listings -jobs for men, jobs for women. All required previous experience. If you did not have that, you could not get an interview. If you claimed it, you had to provide written references. If you admitted to being an immigrant, you were not considered fit for an interview. It took four months of such hopeless job searches for me to learn that lying was essential. I got my first paid job by lying about my ethnicity, my religion, and my experience and by providing fake references. My employers were Jewish refugees from Vienna, like myself, only they were rich and I was poor. I was required to wear spike-heel shoes and stand on them forty-eight hours a week (sitting down was not allowed), in order to provide an elegant and glamorous look to their 5th Avenue store. With my feet painful and damaged for life, I learned that gender mattered. After a year of working for these employers, I reported them anonymously to the Department of Labor for paying below minimum wages to their factory workers, all of whom were Jewish refugees from Europe. Anony mous or not, I immediately got fired, without a reference. Thus, I learned about class the hard way, and I have never forgotten it. When I became an academic, it was natural for me to consider class and gender as categories of analysis in all my work.