Gerda Lerner > Quotes

“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 of women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, on from another, by defining "respectability" and "deviance" according to women's sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“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, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy

“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.”
― Gerda Lerner

“Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.”
― Gerda Lerner

“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.”
― Gerda Lerner

“It should be noted that when we speak of relative improvements in the status of women in a given society, this frequently means only that we are seeing improvements in the degree in which their situation affords them opportunities to exert some leverage within the system of patriarchy. Where women have relatively more economic power, they are able to have somewhat more control over their lives than in societies where they have no economic power. Similarly, the existence of women’s groups, associations, or economic networks serves to increase the ability of women to counteract the dictates of their particular patriarchal system. Some anthropologists and historians have called this relative improvement women’s “freedom.” Such a designation is illusory and unwarranted. Reforms and legal changes, while ameliorating the condition of women and an essential part of the process of emancipating them, will not basically change patriarchy. Such reforms need to be integrated within a vast cultural revolution in order to transform patriarchy and thus abolish it.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“By making the term "man" subsume "woman" and arrogate to itself the representation of all humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought. By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever they are describing, but they have disroted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly. As long as men believed the earth to be flat, they could not understand its reality, its function, and its actual relationship to other bodies in the universe. As long as men believe their experiences, their viewpoint, and their ideas represent all of human experience and all of human thought, they are not only unable to define correctly in the abstract, but they are unable to describe reality accurately.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“Those women, who have been admitted to the center of intellectual activity of their day and especially in the past hundred years, academically trained women, have first had to learn “how to think like a man.” In the process, many of them have so internalized that learning that they have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives. The way to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and generalize from them. Such thought, men have taught us, must be based on the exclusion of feelings. Women, like the poor, the subordinate, the marginals, have close knowledge of ambiguity, of feelings mixed with thought, of value judgments coloring abstractions. Women have always experienced the reality of self and community, known it, and shared it with each other. Yet, living in a world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of insignificance. Thus they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of feeding and cleaning? Patriarchal thought has relegated such gender-defined experiences to the realm of the “natural,” the non-transcendent.”
― Gerda Lerner

“To step outside patriarchal thought means: Being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions.
Testing one’s statement by trusting our own, the female experience. Since such experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers.”
― Gerda Lerner

“To be without history is to be trapped in a present where oppressive social relations appear natural and inevitable”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“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”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“All human beings are practicing historians [,] We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing.”
― Gerda Lerner

“Thus, the recorded and interpreted record of the past of the human race is only a partial record, in that it omits the past of half of humankind, and it is distorted, in that it tells the story from the viewpoint of the male half of humanity only.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“دعمتْ نظريات سيغموند فرويد (Sigmund Freud) التفسير التقليدي بقوّة أكبر. فالإنسان السويّ بالنسبة إلى فرويد هو الذَّكَر؛ أمّا الأنثى بحسب تعريفهُ، فهي كائن يفتقرُ إلى قضيب، و يفترض أنّ بنيتها السيكولوجية كلّها تتمركز على الكفاح لتعويض هذا النقص.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“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

“توحي رمزية قصة "سفر التكوين" بقطيعة بين آدم، المخلوق من طين، و حواء، وريثة إلهات الخصب القديمات، التي خلقت من جزء من الجسد البشري، و كلٌّ منهما مشرّب بجوهر إلهيّ عبر تدخّل يهوه. تتدعّم القطيعة في قصة السقوط، حين يصدر يهوه مرسومًا بالتقسيم الجنسي للعمل، كعقوبة هذه المرة. سيعمل آدم بعرق جبينه؛ و حواء ستمنح الحياة و هي تتألم و تربي الأجيال. و تجدر الإشارة أن العقوبة المفروضة تجعل من عمل الإنسان عبئًا، و كلنها تحكم بالألم و المعاناة ليس على عمل المرأة فحسب بل على جسد المرأة المنجب للطفل أيضًا، النتيجة الطبيعية لجنسانية المرأة.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“There was a considerable time lag between the subordination of women in patriarchal society and the declassing of the goddesses. As we trace below changes in the position of male and female god figures in the pantheon of the gods in a period of over a thousand years, we should keep in mind that the power of the goddesses and their priestesses in daily life and in popular religion continued in force, even as the supreme goddesses were dethroned. It is remarkable that in societies which had subordinated women economically, educationally, and legally, the spiritual and metaphysical power of goddesses remained active and strong.”
― Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy