Ruth Rosen

Ruth Rosen is a pioneering historian of gender and society, who taught the first courses in this field at Berkeley in the early 1970s.

She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California at Davis, where she taught American history, women’s history, history and public policy, and immigration studies for over two decades. The recipient of the University of California Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983, and many national fellowships, including two from the Rockefeller Foundation, she has lectured all over the world and was a visiting professor at the European Peace University in Austria and Ireland and was, between 2005-2011, a visiting professor in the U.C Berkeley departments of history and Goldman School of Public Policy. She was awarded the Distinguished Teach Award at Davis in 1983 for her lecture and seminar courses.

She is the editor of the The Maimie Papers, a New York Times Notable Book in l978; the author of The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1982; and The World Split Open: How The Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, revised in 2007, which was, in 2001, a Book of the Month Quality Paperback Selection; on the Los Angeles Times Best Books list, and a Finalist for Non-Fiction Award for Bay Area Reviewers Association.

She also is an award winning journalist who wrote hundreds of op-ed columns for the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers between 1990-2000 and contributed many essays to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, the Women’s Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

In 2000, she joined the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board and wrote both editorials and twice-a-week columns on the op-ed page. For her distinguished journalism, she received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the East Bay Press Club, The National Association for the Mentally Ill, the California Public Health Association, the National Federation of Women Legislators, and the Hearst Corporation. Until she left in 2005, she wrote extensively on the Bush administration’s politicization of science, its violations of civil rights and liberties through the PATRIOT ACT, constraints on FOIA, and the Presidential Records Act, and the deceptions that led to the war in Iraq and. She wrote about the Bush administration’s plan to “arm the heavens” which will violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1957. She wrote consistently about issues that affected women’s lives, including the minimum wage, child care and the right to control one’s body. She is currently a scholar in residence at the Center for Right-Wing Studies where she spent the last year writing about women in the Tea Party.

She is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine and writes regularly for TomDispatch.com, OpenDemocracy.net, Reader Supported News, the History Newswork, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo Café, the Berkeley Planet, Dissent magazine, and many other online magazines about how we would change, reframe and rethink domestic and global public policy if women really mattered. In 2007, she completed a new historical essay and epilogue for her book, The World Split Open, which was published as a new edition in January, 2007. It is titled “Gender Matters: The New Century,”

She has appeared on hundreds of radio programs, interviewed about women’s issues, anti-war movements and the 1960s. She has also appeared on NBC Nightly News, The NewsHour and local television news programs. She recently, in Novemember 2012, gave the keynote address to a conference in Ann Arbor which commemorated the Port Huron Statement that founded Students for a Democratic Party.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, a Director of Public Health, and is a stepmother of two grown children, and has five grandchildren. When not working, she can be found playing the flute , hiking or reading.

Go to her website at http://www.ruthrosen.org/ and follow her on Twitter @Ruth_Rosen.

Media Experience:

NBC Nightly News, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Various Local Outlets, Op-ed writer for the Lost Angeles Times, 1990-2000; Editorial Writer and Political Columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Hundreds of radio interviews about anti-war sentiments and movements, women's issues and political culture, NPR, KPFA, KPFK, and many public and private radio stations across the country.