The pioneering feminist historian Gerda Lerner has died at the age of 92. Lerner published multiple books on women and feminism over a decades-long academic career. She is widely credited with having earned recognition for women’s history as a valid academic pursuit. In an interview with the author Elizabeth Debold, Lerner discussed her early days at Sarah Lawrence College, where she established the first women’s history graduate program in the early 1970s.

Gerda Lerner: “When I proposed to teach a course in women’s history, they said, 'Who needs it? We're a women’s college. Everything we do is women’s history.’ And I said, 'Not at all, because you're always telling it from the male point of view, from the male gaze at women.’ And the real story is that despite these hundreds of years of discrimination and oblivion, women persisted that they have a story. And we had to win every step of the way. We had to win the right to tell this. So, rule number one, nobody gave us anything.”

Lerner died Wednesday in Madison, Wisconsin.