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 take-over of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe.