Why History Matters: Life and Thought

Now 76, Lerner is one of the founders of the academic discipline of women's history, an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and author of such key books as The Majority Finds Its Past, The Creation of Patriarchy and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. In the dozen essays included here (half previously unpublished), Lerner masters her subjects, basing any generalizations on an impressive array of statistics or on personal experience. A frequent theme is Lerner's experience of being driven out of prewar Vienna as a Jew; a visit to Munich in recent years left her feeling ""nauseated and defiled"" after a chat with a typical Bavarian barfly who still believed in most of Hitler's tenets. The title of Lerner's book has a parallel to George Santayana's famous saying that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it: Lerner finds that ""Civil wars and racist persecutions thrive on selective memory and collective forgetting."" Hence her horror at seeing a swastika smeared on her university office door. Lerner's words are alive and timely, especially when she points out that the supposed advances made by women in the 20th century have been ""grossly uneven"" and even have a ""nasty edge,"" concluding that most women across the world live under conditions ""as bad or worse"" than in 1900-a contention she backs up with impressive documentation on life expectancy, infant mortality, career achievement and more. Now more than ever, readers of history need such lucid critical minds as Lerner's, and this collection is therefore especially welcome. (Apr.)