“A Feminist world-view will enable women and men and women to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.”
Those words were the last sentence in Historian, Gerda Lerner’s book entitled The Creation of Patriarchy. Her second book, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, will be the topic for the next blog posting. On the flyleaf of this book, I wrote this note to my granddaughter and daughter who will ultimately be the recipients of my books: “A wonderfully inspiring woman who had the best interests of both men and women at heart. A brilliant thinker and scholar who really challenged one to get out of their patriarchal ‘rut’. I took several classes with her and can personally attest to the fact that she is one of the outstanding ‘mothers’ to the feminist movement.”
Gerda’s first words in her introduction were, “Women’s History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women…”and she worked tirelessly to fill in that gap during her teaching career. Her statement is backed up by her personal observations of students in her Women’s History classes at the University of Wisconsin for over twenty years. “I have observed profound changes in the consciousness of students who have experienced Women’s History. Women’s History changes their lives.”
History of the creation of patriarchy, which begins at the time writing was invented in Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE when men interpreted and recorded historical events. “They recorded what men have done, experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected and ignored in interpretation. Historical scholarship, up to the most recent past, has seen women as marginal to the making of civilization and as unessential to those pursuits defined as having historic significance.
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 story from the viewpoint of the male half of humanity only.” ( p. 4, The Creation of Patriarchy.) Here lies the beginning of patriarchy.
Due to the writings of Gerda Lerner and other feminist authors, we are being challenged to write Herstory, to fill in the blanks and balance about 5,000 years of patriarchal thought presented as the history of everyone until quite recently. It is a male energy assumption by traditional history and I list only a few examples as illustrations.
History for most began with the birth of Christ, pre-Christian history was seen by history writers merely as a preparatory stage for true history.
Female subordination was universal, was God-given or natural, and thus unchangeable…not to be questioned.
There is an expectation in traditional history that women follow the same roles and occupations as Neolithic times, a kind of biological determinism. It is another way of saying that nothing changes over time.
The list of assumptions and challenges to them are lengthy and covered well by Gerda who traces the institutionalization of patriarchy over thousands of years and in the end, shares what developing a feminist consciousness will do for liberating both women and men.
The first step is that we must become, at least for a time, women-centered and second, for as far as possible leave patriarchal thought behind. Hence the need for the rise and understanding of the Feminine Principle.
To be women-centered means ignoring the perceptions of women’s marginality which is a patriarchal invention and instead put in place, “The basic assumption...that it is inconceivable for anything ever to take place in the world in which women were not involved, except if they were prevented from participation through coercion and repression.” p. 228.
“To step outside of patriarchal thought means being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions. For example, I have always wondered about the title of The Great Books educational program not only because of who is represented there, but also who made the choices to put them there, passing them on as the one and only cultural history. I also love the bumper sticker, “Question Authority.” It is a profound and liberating thought and is attributed to several men. I personally think it is an unreported feminist.
To question authority means trusting one’s own knowing of female experience, experience that has been “ historically trivialized and ignored under patriarchy. This invisibility, Lerner believes has created within our own selves “a deep-seated resistance to 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.” This also means being critical of our own thought because it has gotten there through patriarchal tradition.
“Finally, it means developing intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther than our grasp, the courage to risk failure.” (Remember Susan B. Anthony’s exhortation, FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE!) Lerner goes on to say that ”...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 - the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. To claim for ourselves the hubris shown by the god-makers, the hubris of the male system builders.” (p. 228).
I like to think that Gerda was envisioning in 1986 what we are now witnessing in the current election of more than 100 women to political office. They are creating the march toward building a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human, in which women are given credit for “Holding up Half of the Sky”.
Gerda Lerner died in 2013 at the age of 92 in Madison, Wisconsin. Her other books include The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness and Why History Matters in addition to eight others. She received 18 honorary degrees recognizing her life’s work to balance out the male-dominated history written by patriarchy. In addition, she founded the Women’s Studies program at Sarah Lawrence College and established a PHD program in Women’s History at the University of Wisconsin.
This is my tribute to her brilliant and indomitable mind and spirit. It is an expression of gratitude for her belief in women, and the ability of men and women to acquire a feminist consciousness. I am lucky to have been one of those women. She is unabashedly one of my Heroines.