What did Gerda Lerner seem to be saying about women as victims of oppression? What do women sacrifice by accepting this?

In this essay, published originally in 1975, Lerner, a feminist and a historian, is surveying various trends in the study of women's history, discussing their benefits, but also, more importantly, their drawbacks. Fundamentally, she is suggesting that the ways women's history has been studied up to that point have tended to operate, sometimes unintentionally, within the same patriarchal assumptions that oppressed women in the first place. So in studies that have, quite accurately, depicted various ways in which women have been historically oppressed (the subject of your question), historians have tended to obscure or downplay the ways in which women resisted oppression. This makes it appear, in Lerner's words, that "women were largely passive," or that their actions were simply reactions to "male pressures or to the restraints of patriarchal society." Thus women as historical actors are placed "in a male-defined conceptual framework: oppressed, victimized by standards and values established by men." To use the word that social historians often use to describe the actions of the historical people they study, this approach obscures the agency of historical women. "The true story," Lerner says, of these women is "of their ongoing functioning in that male-defined world, on their own terms," and because focusing simply on oppression does not reveal this, it is "of limited usefulness to the historian." So the focus on oppression is, like a focus on "great" women, for example, always going to yield a very simplistic picture of women's historical lives even as it draws much needed attention to the systems of oppression faced by women. This is a very common concern among historians, not just concerning women, but also in relation to enslaved people, Native Americans, working-class people, and many others. How do we illustrate the structures and processes that oppress people without overlooking the ways that those same people figure out how to live within them?
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