Gerda Lerner

In the initial stages of my research, I was greatly aided by a Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1980-81, which gave me a year in which to read in anthropology and feminist theory and to study the problem of the origin of slavery. One result of that year’s work was the chapter “The Slave Woman,” which I presented at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians at Vassar College in June 1981.

The Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has supported my research on this book with a summer research grant in 1981 and with grants for project assistants. My appointment as Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Senior Distinguished Research Professor in 1984 gave me a semester free from teaching obligations, which enabled me to do final revisions and complete the book. I am deeply grateful not only for the tangible support, but for the encouragement of my work implicit in it.

The term “oppression of women” inevitably conjures up comparison with the other oppressed groups and leads one to think in terms of comparing the various degrees of oppression as though one were dealing with similar groups.