Radical feminism combines the ideology of classical feminism with the class-oppression concept of Marxism, the rhetoric and tactics of the Black Powe… - Gerda Lerner

What I learned from that comfortable, sheltered life I led in a country in which Catholicism was the state religion and antisemitism was an honored political tradition, was that being Jewish set one apart. Jews were not "normal," we were not right, we were different. And that difference had something to do with our inescapable, compelling history.

What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in the fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within this framework. And then they must tear it down.

I have sometimes been asked, "How has your being Jewish influenced your work in Women's History?" The simplest way I can answer this question is, I am a historian because of my Jewish experience.