Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee Allabest. Have you ever been to a beautiful city somewhere where there are cafes and shops and businesses built along narrow streets? And you learn that the foundations of the streets were laid thousands of years ago. They've been inhabited continuously with people living their lives

and tearing down old structures and building up new ones over and over and over again upon

that same grid, those same streets generation after generation. Have you ever wondered who

decided on this street layout? When? Why? Somebody made it up at

some point. Is this city grid still serving the needs of the people who are building their

lives on these streets now? Today we will be discussing a book that examines the foundations of

patriarchy, the cultural, psychological,

and political system upon which humans have been building their societies and their religions

and their personal lives for thousands of years. The book is called The Creation of Patriarchy,

and it's by Gerda Lerner. Written in 1986, it answers the questions of who,

when, how, and why of these foundations. But before we start, I want to introduce my guest

Sherry Crawford. Hi, Sherry. Hi, Amy. Before we dive into the book, I just want to take a minute and learn a little bit of

background about the author of our text, GERDA Learner.

So, Sherry, if you could just tell us a little bit about the author, that would be great.

Okay.

Gerta Hedwig Cronstein was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, 1920. In 1934, a virtual civil war broke out

in Vienna between Nazis and leftist workers. Many Jewish men were starting to be arrested,

so Gerda's father left the family for safety, intending to send for them later. In his absence,

the Nazi stormtroopers arrested Gerta and her mother instead, seeking to use them as bait to force her father to return.

Gerta and her mother were imprisoned separately and held in prison for six weeks, and Gerta believed she survived only because some communist cellmates shared their food with her.

She looked back on these

experiences as a Nazi resistor, an imprisoned teenager, as the most formative influences of her life.

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