A Study On The Thoughts Of Gerda Lerner’s Feminist Historiography

Gerda Lerner is one of the founders of the fileds of American feminist history. Lerner has played a key role in the development of women’s history curricula, including collecting, organizing, and editing numerous valuable documents. She conducted deep analysis on female and other historian’s roles, criticized the periodicalization of the traditional definition of historical period division, managed to merge women’s history into the general history.The purpose of the dissertation is trying to systematically elaborate Lerner’s historical thoughts on women’s history from the point of views of historiographical and intellectual histories. Through a thorough understanding of Lerner’s research and literature, the dissertation makes a systematical review and summarize of her academic and research viewpoints, methodologies. The paper will also discuss her contribution, limitation and its sources.The dissertation consists three parts: introduction, main body and conclusion.The introduction summarizes Lerner’s backgrounds. It also overviews the purpose, the potential contribution, current research status, possible ways of analysis, and the structure of the paper.The main body of the dissertation contains five chapters:The first chapter analyzes how Lerner’s feminist consciousness took shape, including impacts from her family and social backgrounds that stimulated her reflections on the inequality. There were four stages in the development of Lerner’s research on women’s history, which helps indentify the evolution of her historical viewpoints.The second chapter addresses the historical causes of Lerner’s idea on women’s“otherness”from the angles of the“women’s rights generally fell”and the“inferior status of herself roots”. The former consists of three parts: the historical cause of women’s subordination to men in economy; the status of gods v.s. goddesses and priestesses v.s. priests shifted from equality to inequality; the law artificially placed women in an inferior position. The later falls into four parts: the deep-rooted of women’s subordinate psychology; the failure of criticism of the Bible by women; the failure of struggles for gender equality in education by women; the lack of collective memory in women.The third chapter investigates historical perspectives and methodologies of Lerner’s feminism. She emphasized the women’s contributions in the history and criticized the formation of the status of women’s“otherness”; in Lerner’s research, there is a gender perspective. Since Lerner would provide an objective, well-established theoretical principle for“placing women in history”, she criticized men’s history’s criterion of understanding and the theory of historical periodicalization and considered the lack of women’s information in research; Lerner, using the method named gender interpretation, extended her investigation objects from elite to general women.The fourth Chapter systematically discusses Lerner’s thought on“universal history”. There are two components in this chapter. One is to expound the development women’s history by stages, and the other is to explain the concept of Lerner’s“universal history”. The“Universal history”is a history of the dialectic and the tensions between the two cultures—male and female. Such a synthesis could be based on close comparative study of given periods in which the historical experience of men is compared with that of women.The fifth chapter evaluates and rethinks Lerner’s thoughts of her contributions lie in: investigating more the disadvantaged; understanding the universality and particularity of women’s history more comprehensively; proposing concepts and methodologies of“universal history”. But she neglected the economic factors in promoting women’s historical and social status; she also ignored one of the reasons that woman should be under research by historians—women are part of the human beings; she neglected the final goal that women and all human beings are pursuing.The conclusion summarizes the five chapters. This section also discusses the potential research areas that could be explored in future studies.