Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
This is one of the first scholarly works that focused on women’s resistance to oppression. The Grimké sisters were two women brought up on a plantation who rejected the idea that there should be slavery and they couldn’t express these views in the south, so they left and went north.
Your next author, Gerda Lerner, is an Austrian Jew who came to the United States as a refugee and ended up writing about women in South Carolina with her book The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina.
Yes, Gerda really is one of the most fascinating women historians and this is one of the first scholarly works that focused on women’s resistance to oppression. The Grimké sisters were two women brought up on a plantation who rejected the idea that there should be slavery and they couldn’t express these views in the south, so they left and went north. They became the first women to really speak out in public against the slave system and that sparked controversy about whether or not women should speak in public at mixed gatherings.
I think the book really demonstrated how important women’s protest activities were to political activism and the historical record. Lerner’s subsequent books on the history of women in the United States, African-American women’s writing and her magisterial The Creation of Patriarchy all explained the role of women in history and helped give women back their voice. All her books helped the majority to find its past.
And I think Lerner really is a fascinating woman. She was always very aware of oppression, having escaped the Nazis in Vienna. So I think her life served as a powerful model of activism and scholarship. Once she was in the United States she married and had a conventional life as wife and mother and then did her own education, was a mature student and really was one of the founders of the study of the history of women.
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Jay Kleinberg, author of History of Women in the Americas, shares her book choices on her specialist subject for World History Week and says that abortion will always remain a flashpoint in American politics because so many powerful groups focus on it as a political, rather than a medical issue. She herself worked at a free clinic giving pregnancy and birth control counselling because the Women’s Liberation Movement was very much involved around the issue of abortion. ‘I think that is partially a result of our own age group at the time and the Summer of Love,’ she says.
