Gerda Lerner, Pioneering Feminist and Historian, Dies at 92

Gerda Lerner, a scholar and author who helped make the study of women and their lives a legitimate subject for historians and spearheaded the creation of the first graduate program in women’s history in the United States, died on Wednesday in Madison, Wis. She was 92.

Her death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Steve J. Stern, a history professor and friend at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Ms. Lerner had taught many years.

In the mid-1960s, armed with a doctorate in history from Columbia University and a dissertation on two abolitionist sisters from South Carolina, Ms. Lerner entered an academic world in which women’s history scarcely existed. The number of historians interested in the subject, she told The New York Times in 1973, “could have fit into a telephone booth.”...