Gerda Lerner famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Tools #Emancipation
We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. 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.
-- Gerda Lerner

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

#Pride #Long #Vision
The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its courseâ€”it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Running #Men #Organization
The effect on men has been very bad, too, of the omission of women's history, because men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think as a man that everything great in the world and its civilization was created by men, then naturally you have to look down on women. And naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Daughter #Son #Men
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 â€” never has.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Men #Doe #World
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.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Attitude #Nursing #Nurse
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.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Thinking #People #Promise
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.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Thinking #Years #Knowing
Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturing thought can rise.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Sex #Commitment #Order
The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Choices #Action #Undone
Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Determination #Self #People
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.
-- Gerda Lerner

#Struggle #Past #Men

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