$24.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5606-1

Published: Spring 2005

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Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Foreword

Nowadays, when feminist historians write prize-winning books that publishers are proud to produce, it is easy to forget that not very long ago, women were—as a colleague once observed to me—a topic, not a subject. Gerda Lerner was not the first twentieth-century historian to embrace the history of women as a subject—before her there were Mary Beard, Constance McLaughlin Green, Eleanor Flexner—nor was she the only historian of her generation to do so, but she has done more than most and arguably more than anyone to establish the history of women as a field of inquiry. Like other historians, since the 1960s she has been undertaking scrupulous research and writing lucid narratives; unlike historians in other fields, she had first to demand respect for her subject.

She did this most effectively in the essays that are collected here. Written in the period between the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (to which many of these essays are a corrective, a friendly amendment) and the first years of President Jimmy Carter's administration, Gerda Lerner's careful refocusing of the distortions of history writing continue to clarify confusions and set an agenda that we still face. She perceived early on that women's history is less a separate subject than a way of thinking, a "strategy by which to focus on … that which traditional history has obscured." It is a route by which we can bypass the habit of treating the history of women as anecdotal, merely a collection "of missing facts and views." And more than anything else, it is an intellectual exercise, calling into question "the claim to universality which 'History' generally assumes as a given" and identifying relationships of power that the powerful prefer to conceal.

Writing in a decade when feminists dreamed of sisterhood, Lerner shared the dream and worked hard in her daily life to structure the collective modes by which it could be realized. But she simultaneously judged it. Even the earliest essays in this book insist that it is too easy to assume that all women are sisters. Not all are oppressed in the same ways. Women differ in class, and they differ in race: the plantation mistress may be pressured by the patriarchal power of her father and her husband, but she herself is an oppressor of the slave. At a time when other analysts were identifying the antebellum cult of true womanhood as a device to weaken women, Lerner was clear-eyed enough—in the second essay in this book—to name the cult of the lady as itself a device to support class relations, enabling white and middle-class women to claim their superiority over working-class and nonwhite people and simultaneously justifying their own exclusion "from equal education and from participation in the political process."

At a time when the American public was dazzled by Betty Friedan's denunciation of "the feminine mystique"—the insistence that women find their fulfillment in marriage, domesticity, and tasteful purchasing of consumer products for the suburban home—Lerner shared much of the enthusiasm. She told Friedan privately that she had written "a splendid book." But Lerner placed Friedan's work in historical perspective, arguing that the mystique Friedan found in the 1950s was a new form of an old phenomenon, a "compensatory ideology" developed in the antebellum era of industrialization, now "updated by consumerism and the misunderstood dicta of Freudian psychology." The problem, as Lerner saw it, was that Friedan had ignored the need for "institutional solutions to the problems of women" and had ignored how "working women, especially Negro women," suffered from "the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination."[*] In effect, the criticisms of American society made by The Feminine Mystique were themselves tangled in a romanticization—and denial—of the power embedded in class and race relations. "It is a common fallacy," Lerner would write a few years later, "to proceed on the assumption that what is true for middle-class women is true for all women." And Lerner could be brutally clear-sighted: "marriage and other sexual liaisons offer much more chance of upward mobility for the lower-class girl than does education." For them, the mystique worked.

By the end of the 1960s, Lerner had already begun to historicize the women's movement of her own time that emerged from the Old Left and the civil rights movements of the 1940s and 1950s. At a time when the media teased women's liberation, she offered the historical defense it badly needed, grounding it in the women's movement that had emerged from abolition more than a century before. But she also criticized Women's Liberation for its ahistorical and social naivete. When feminists "claimed the universality and priority of sexual oppression as an experience common to all women," they might have constructed a useful "agitational tool," but they did not have a tool that worked as a "tool for historical analysis." When class relations were ignored, so were signs of the feminization of poverty—the displacing onto women of the burdens of industrial society, partially measured in maternal and infant mortality rates. When race relations were ignored, so too was reality: Lerner could write of the female-headed black family as a reasonable response and a "useful adaptation" to the pervasive economic disempowerment of black men, grounded in African cultural tradition. But to speak of black female-headed families as "black matriarchy in contemporary society is a cruel hoax," she wrote in 1973: "Matriarchy, by definition, means power by women: decision-making power; power over their own lives; power over the lives of others; power in their communities." Throughout Lerner brings historical analysis and historical precedents to bear on the challenge of understanding policy decisions and political practices of our own time.

Yet just at the moment when Lerner has convinced the reader that the differences among women are so multiple that there can be nothing all women share, she catches us with lists of what they have had in common over the course of centuries: a history of educational deprivation, a different relationship to property than men have had, a vulnerability to sexual exploitation, topped off by a political marginalization that has denied them "political representation and power in government." Lerner is hungry for sweeping generalizations, and occasionally the ones she proposes have not stood up well over time—for example, the assertion that women's status in the nineteenth century was considerably worse than in the colonial era now seems overly emphatic (but not without some truth, although historians are more likely to speak of patriarchy gaining strength at the beginning of the eighteenth century as well as, along different lines, in the nineteenth). Many of these generalizations, however, have even greater strength than Lerner could have predicted. When she wrote in the 1970s, for example, of sexual exploitation "manifested in the rape of women of the conquered group by the victors … [and] in the millennia of organized prostitution," she had in mind events ranging in time from antiquity to the aftermath of World War II; when I read these words, I think of Rwanda, Bosnia, and the traffic in women in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and immigration scams in the United States.

In these essays Gerda Lerner speaks of oppression with some frequency. To speak of the oppression of women by men in the contemporary United States is no longer much done. In a world in which women are trained to exercise violence in the name of the state police and armed forces (and have shown that they are capable, as at Abu Ghraib, of misusing that power) generalizations about the oppression of women can sound misplaced and overstated. But Lerner's broadest generalizations, threaded through the essays, ground the oppression of women deeply in economic power, family structures, and race hierarchy. Although this work is evidence of Lerner's deep engagement with Marxist thought, she wears her economic determinism lightly. She demands, over and over, that we ask questions of the "archaic division of labor and … the values that sustain it." The questions she asks remain compelling. Lerner's analysis makes it clear why conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly are not wrong to insist that behind the apparent modesty of much of the women's rights agenda—equal pay for equal work, equal educational opportunity, equal treatment under the law—lurks a direct threat to the patriarchal family structures that we have inherited. So long as the patriarchal family is strong, it shapes economic relations and undermines political change.

The oppressions of racial hierarchy are at the intellectual as well as the physical center of The Majority Finds Its Past. In three essays, Lerner shifts the history of black women out of the anecdotal doldrums in which it had lain and into a position to challenge inherited social history. She also turned the reader's attention to the neglect of the archives on which the writing of history must be based. By making the "denial or neglect of their history" central to the oppression that black women experience, by emphasizing that despite the "renaissance" of black history in the 1960s and 1970s, black women remained victims of historians as well as victims described by historians, Lerner revitalized a line of work that had long been neglected. Her denunciations of the neglect of primary sources, her appreciation of the hidden work that has to be done to save primary sources and develop archives before historians can do their work, and her own foray into the analysis that fresh data will permit energized a whole generation of historians, librarians, and archivists. Lerner's forthright recognition of the "confrontation, competition and conflict" that has marked interaction between black and white women quite as much as, if not more than, cooperation and collaboration, her admiration for the patience displayed by black women as they strove to teach "white women … to learn to see a connection between the protection of their own homes and the protection of the honor and rights of black women," and her appreciation of the ways in which "white women were radicalized through their contacts with black women" undermine white historians' temptations to romanticize interracial sisterhood.

When she published the first of the essays in this book, Gerda Lerner had held her Ph.D. for barely three years; in professional terms, she was a very junior historian. But she was forty-nine years old, and behind her was a life—about which she has written in Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2002)—that she had saved by skepticism and by courage. Born Jewish in Vienna, she was a teenager as the fascists came to power; Lerner entered the United States alone, a vulnerable young refugee in 1938. When she writes of working-class women, she can draw on her own experience as an immigrant desperate for short-lived jobs as a domestic, in factory work, and as a salesgirl. When she writes—as she does in one of the essays here—of housewives, she can draw on her own years as a mother who immersed herself in the PTA and grassroots suburban activism. When she writes of white women who learn from black women, she could be speaking of her own experiences in progressive social movements in Los Angeles and New York.

Historians like to think that we go where the interesting questions lie. We rarely appreciate that the questions we are most likely to find interesting are the questions already resonating in the culture that surrounds us. As Clifford Geertz has famously observed, "Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends," but rather "what the mind filled with [historical and cultural] presuppositions … concludes."[*] Gerda Lerner learned early, alas, that following what counted as common sense, the path of least resistance, led inexorably to concentration camps. Her practice of distrusting received wisdom saved her life. Her practice of distrusting received wisdom pervades this book and makes possible her innovative work in women's history. Throughout her life's work, Gerda Lerner has wrestled with the central question of why history matters; in everything she writes she has challenged her readers to embrace that question as their own. Twenty-five years after its first publication, The Majority Finds Its Past retains its freshness of perspective. Few questions it raises have yet been fully answered. The agenda for future research it outlines is only partially accomplished; much remains compelling. History continues to matter as women seek public policy on which we—women and men—can rely.

In the 1970s, following Faith Whittlesey, we used to say that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did—but she did it backwards and in high heels. It is worth noting that Gerda Lerner wrote this book in her second language.

Linda K. Kerber
Iowa City, August 2004