In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women's history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. Lerner's memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. The child of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was still a teenager when a fascist regime came to power in 1934, and she became involved in the underground resistance movement. The Nazi takeover of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe. Once in the United States, she experienced the harshness of the Depression and despair over the fate of her family. Still, she persisted in adapting to the new culture and to becoming a writer. Here she met and married her life-long partner, Carl Lerner, a film editor and director. Together they become deeply involved in left-wing activities, from struggling to unionize the film industry and resisting the blacklist in Hollywood to community organizing for peace, for an interracial civil rights movement, and for better schools in New York City. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women's history. In Fireweed, Lerner presents her life in the context of the major historical events of the twentieth century and the repression of dissent. Hers is a gripping story about surviving hardship and summoning the courage to live according to one's convictions.

Gerda Lerner, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, is Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, Emerita, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her eleven books in history include Creation of Patriarchy; Creation of Feminist Consciousness; Why History Matters; and Black Women in White America: A Documentary History.

"Gerda Lerner's absorbing memoir bears witness to the major events of the twentieth century....[She] is a gifted storyteller who writes with passion and clarity. This political autobiography is a must read!"—Joyce Antler, Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture, Brandeis University

"A spirited, eminently readable and unapologetic memoir of leftist life in a rightist era....[L]eaving readers hungry for more[,] Lerner's autobiography also makes a fine contribution to social history."—Kirkus Reviews

"Fireweed is made out of courage and wisdom. One of the finest historians of our time has written an eloquent memoir that makes clear how Women's History has grown out of lived experience. Read it as a story of a girl coming of age in dark times; read it as a story of a brave young woman who lives her progressive ideals in cold war America. I simply could not put down this loving, chilling and heartbreaking book."—Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor of History, University of Iowa and author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship