![]() She became determined to “save” her granddaughters from Ilona’s influence. ![]() ![]() Her mother Ilona soon became a bohemian, an advocate of sexual freedom, vegetarianism and yoga, which “scandalized” Robert’s mother. (Her autobiography, Fireweed, offers a vivid picture of her family and household.) Her father Robert was an ambitious young army officer who married a woman with a substantial dowry, which he used to establish a profitable pharmacy and pharmaceutical factory. Her family was typical of the Jewish bourgeoisie in central Europe but also most unconventional, in the way that their class status allowed. She was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1920. Over 50 years, a field that encompassed a handful of brave and potentially marginal historians became one with thousands and expanded from Lerner’s development of an MA program at Sarah Lawrence College to the presence of women’s-history faculty in the great majority of US colleges and universities. ![]() Gerda Lerner was the single most influential figure in the development of women’s and gender history since the 1960s. ![]()
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