"The new historians of "family and childhood," like the majority of theorists on childrearing, pediatricians, psychiatrists, are male. In their work, the question of motherhood as an institution or as an idea in the heads of grown-up male children is raised only where "styles" of mothering are discussed and criticized. Female sources are rarely cited (yet these sources exist, as the feminist historians are showing); there are virtually no primary sources from women-as-mothers; and all this is presented as objective scholarship. It is only recently that feminist scholars such as Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have begun to suggest that, in Lerner's words: "the key to understanding women's history is in accepting-painful though it may be-that it is the history of the majority of mankind.... History, as written and perceived up to now, is the history of a minority, who may well turn out to be the 'subgroup.'""
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HumanistsWomen academics from the United StatesFeminists from the United StatesMarxists from the United StatesWomen academics from Austria
Original Language: English
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Adrienne Rich. forward to Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerda_Lerner
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Gerda Lerner
Gerda Lerner (30 April 1920 – 2 January 2013) was an Austrian-born American feminist, historian, author, and advocate of Women's History.
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