Women's History Pioneer Gerda Lerner Dies at 92 Gerda Lerner, a
pioneer in the field of women's history and founding member of
the National Organization for Woman, has died in Wisconsin. She
was 92. Her son says his mother died peacefully Wednesday night
at an assisted-living facility in Madison, the city where she
founded a doctoral program in women's history at the University
of Wisconsin. Lerner was born in Austria to a privileged Jewish
family in 1920, and spent six weeks in a Nazi prison as a
teenager. She later wrote that the experience taught her how
society manipulates people, a lesson she saw reinforced by
academics who suggested history was only about men. She
eventually came to the U.S. and established the nation's first
graduate program in women's studies at Sarah Lawrence College in
Bronxville, N.Y. (Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All
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