Fireweed: A Political Autobiography

Critical Perspectives on the Past

by Gerda Lerner

Tells a story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. This memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made the author an activist for social justice before her academic career began. It presents her life in the context of the major historical events of the 20th century.

Genres: Feminism, Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Womens, Politics, Biography

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Gerda Lerner was a historian, author and teacher. She was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University.

Lerner was one of the founders of the field of women's history, and was a former president of the Organization of American Historians. She played a key role in the development of women's history curricula. She taught what is considered to be the first women's history course in the world at the New School for Social Research in 1963. She was also involved in the development of similar programs at Long Island University (1965–1967), at Sarah Lawrence College from 1968 to 1979 (where she established the nation's first Women's History graduate program), at Columbia University (where she was a co-founder of the Seminar on Women), and from 1980 until her retirement as Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerda Lerner was born into a prosperous Austrian Jewish family in 1920. She was drawn to left wing politics early, participating while still in her early teens. She was able to escape Europe in time to personally survive but went from a life of privilege to one of poverty. While her immediate family members were able to get out of Austria they were not able to leave Europe until after WWII which added to the anxiety and frustration in her life. Still she showed incredible energy and did not give up in the face of so many trials. This book covers the years before she returned to college to become a leading woman's historian. It is interesting to read about the personal path that influenced her. She held a number of jobs while raising her children and writing fiction before she returned to school and obtained her PhD at 46.

[Louise Silk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Born in 1920 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, Gerda Kronstein was a young girl when Adolph Hitler began his rise to power. After much trial and tribulation, she came alone to the United States in 1939 at the age of 18. Her immigration was dependent upon an arranged marriage that soon failed. She divorced and remarried filmmaker Carl Lerner and moved to Hollywood. There, in 1946, she joined the American Communist Party. During the McCarthy period, Carl was blacklisted and unable to find work in California.

The Lerner family moved to New York where Gerda began her career as an academic, historian, and activist.
Gerda held a number of jobs while raising her children before she returned to school. In 1963, Gerda earned her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in New York and then received her Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University in 1966. She showed incredible energy throughout her challenging life trials over many many years.

The biggest disappointment for me was that this book covers the years before she returned to college to become a leading woman's historian. I learned about her in the context of women's history where she is credited with establishing women's history as a formal academic field and was very much looking forward to that part of her story.

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a direct descendant, in some ways, of Gerda Lerner, so I’m thrilled to have read this book. Lerner founded the field of women’s history, teaching courses in the subject in the 1960s and establishing doctoral at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. Ten years ago, when I was a first-year graduate student at UW, I met Professor Lerner, a small but imposing woman that I felt in awe of even though I knew very little about her life. Having just flown through her political autobiography, Fireweed, my respect for her has only grown. This book covers Lerner’s life before she entered the academy in the late 1950s. A blurb on the cover says that it reads like a novel, and I have to agree. Lerner kept me riveted as she described her childhood experience inside Nazi-occupied Austria, an experience that, among other things, politicized her. As a teenager she secretly read and passed along underground newspapers that documented Nazi abuses, activities that she hid from even her closest loved ones. Her father fled Austria right before the Nazis came looking for him and Lerner and her mother ended up imprisoned for months because of it, another life-changing experience that Lerner describes in gut-wrenching detail. In writing this memoir so long after those events happened, Lerner has the distance and critical, inward-looking eye to contemplate how they shaped her character and politics. Lerner eventually escaped to the U.S., without her family, and struggled to find work and make a secure life for herself. In the decades between her arrival to the U.S. and her academic career, Lerner spent her time writing, raising children, and engaging in local politics in California. She writes about the Communist witch-hunts that targeted the radical artist and intellectual community she was part of in the post-war era. The fear and paranoia she experienced as a Jew living fascism stayed with her during this shameful period in U.S. history as well. Lerner constantly navigated discrimination and hardship because of her outsider status (in all the places she lived) but she does not portray herself as a victim, per se... In fact, one of my favorite passages of the book is when Lerner addresses this overtly, putting on her historian hat to make sense of her own past. She considers how her story might be understood in entirely different ways depending on the way it gets framed. My take from her book, though, is that she withstood shockingly difficult life experiences that toughened her will, strength, and commitment to fairness and justice. And she became a damn good historian and writer, too.

[shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing story of growth, wrong turns, learning, and regrowth. I appreciate lerner’s candor as she reflects on the topics of her life. She weaves her stories around the topics of the times, what we now know as history. She tells of a life desperate for equality, shaped by her experiences with nazi fascism, and the decisions that come with it.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful prose and inspiring life story. Some parts were over informed. The ending of the book was abrupt.
Great historical information and perspective, could be used for history or social studies classes.

[Chris Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lerner speaks eloquently about her life in pre-WWII Europe, her emigration to the U.S., her education, family and academic & political life. More than anyone, Lerner is responsible for starting programs of women's studies and the modern understanding of roles women have had in history.

[Jim Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerda Lerner is the scholar of feminist thought and this autobiography is awesome.