Gerda Hedwig Lerner (née Kronstein; April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was an Austrian-born American historian and woman's history author.

That year, Gerda immigrated to the United States under the sponsorship of the family of Bobby Jensen, her socialist fiancé.

She worked in a variety of jobs as a waitress, salesperson, office clerk, and X-ray technician, while also writing fiction and poetry.

[10] Her marriage with Jensen was failing when she met Carl Lerner (1912–1973), a married theater director who was a member of the Communist Party USA.

[10] In 1946, Gerda Lerner helped found the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of American Women, a Communist front organization.

There Lerner developed a Master of Arts Program in Women's History, which Sarah Lawrence offered beginning in 1972; it was the first American graduate degree in the field.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Lerner published scholarly books and articles that helped establish women's history as a recognized field of study.

Among her most important works are the documentary anthologies Black Women in White America (1972) and The Female Experience (1976), which she edited, along with her essay collection, The Majority Finds Its Past (1979).

When the Institute participants learned about the success of the Women's History Week celebrated in Sonoma County, California, they decided to initiate similar commemorations within their own organizations, communities, and school districts.

In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), volume one of Women and History, Lerner ventured into prehistory, attempting to trace the roots of patriarchal dominance.

She believed that the main strength of patriarchy was ideological and that in western societies it "severed the connection between women and the Divine".

After the seventh century, more of women's writings began to survive, and Lerner uses these to show the development of what she defines as feminist thought.

Often beginning in religious or prophetic writing, this was a way for women to engage in what Lerner calls "ideological production", including defining alternative futures and "think themselves out of patriarchy".

[17] Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2003) is a detailed account of Lerner's life from her childhood in Vienna through war and emigration, to 1958.

That year, she began her formal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, an institution established by numerous European refugees from the Nazi persecution.