The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner

has retarded their coming into consciousness as a collective entity and has literally aborted and distorted the intellectual talents of women for thousands of years.' If women are to sustain and further their individual and collective efforts, they must be aware of their own historical experience. Collective amnesia, she writes, 'has forced thinking women to waste much time and energy on defensive arguments. Men's power to define what is political and what is not, what is historical and what is not, what is meaningful and what is not, has left women adrift in an eternal present. Lerner argues that more than any other factor, the absence of a usable past explains why the subordination of women has persisted for so long and why feminist consciousness emerged so late. This is the main point of 'The Creation of Feminist Consciousness,' the companion volume to 'The Creation of Patriarchy.' Here Ms. It has been women's most debilitating cultural deprivation. The exclusion of women from history has not been merely one among many exclusions. Take, for example, the case of Lucinda Foote, known to us only by virtue of her 1792 rejection letter from Yale, which said she was qualified in every respect 'except for her sex.' Patriarchy insured that from the beginning the cultural product we call history would not embrace questions of women's experience. By this time, as the feminist historian Gerda Lerner showed in her 1986 book, 'The Creation of Patriarchy,' the ideology that justified a subordinate status for women was as firmly a part of the conceptual universe as the sequence of the seasons. THE earliest written records of Western civilization date from about 4,000 years ago.

From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy.

The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner