Women's History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women. - Gerda Lerner

The way the system of competing outgroups works, there is an incentive for members of one minority group to display their assimilation, their Americanism as it were, by participating in institutionalized racism. Thus some European Jewish immigrants, who in all their lives had never seen a person of color, learned racism in short order once they assimilated to American society. I wanted to be an American but I did not want to assimilate to the evil of racism, here any more than there. It was logical for me as a scholar to focus on the issue of race in American history and because of my interest in women, on the history of black women.

Even in its surface meaning, the term "Women's History" calls into question the claim to universality which "History" generally assumes as a given. If historial studies, as we traditionally know them, were actually focused on men and women alike, then there would be no need for a separate subject. Men and women built civilization and culture and one would assume that any historical account written about any given period would recognize that basic fact. But traditional history has been written and interpreted by men in an androcentric frame of reference; it might quite properly be described as the history of men. The very term "Women's History" calls attention to the fact that something is missing from historical scholarship and it aims to document and reinterpret that which is missing. Seen in that light, Women's History is simply "the history of women."

The consequence of sexual knowledge is to sever female sexuality from procreation. God puts enmity between the snake and the woman (Gen.3:15). In the historical context of the times of the writing of Genesis, the snake was clearly associated with the fertility goddess and symbolically represented her. Thus, by God's command, the free and open sexuality of the fertility-goddess was to be forbidden to fallen woman. The way her sexuality was to find expression was in motherhood. Her sexuality was so defined as to serve her motherly function, and it was limited by two conditions: she was to be sub­ordinate to her husband, and she would bring forth her children in pain.