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Article updated: 1/4/2013 9:40 AM

Women’s history pioneer Gerda Lerner dies at 92

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This 2001 photo shows Gerda Lerner, founder of University of Wisconsin-Madison's graduate program in women's history, with an image of her autobiography, Fireweed. Lerner, a founding member of the National Organization for Woman and a pioneer in the field of women's history, has died at an assisted-living facility in Madison. She was 92.

Associated Press

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Gerda Lerner spent her 18th birthday in a Nazi prison, sharing a cell with two gentile women arrested for political work who shared their food with the Jewish teenager because jailers restricted rations for Jews. Lerner would say years later that the women taught her how to survive and how society can manipulate people. It was a lesson that the women's history pioneer, who died Wednesday at age 92, said she saw reinforced in American academia by history professors who taught as though only the men were worth studying.