Ruth Rosen

Ruth Rosen is a pioneering historian of gender and society, an award-winning journalist and a Professor Emerita at University of California Davis.

She is the editor of the The Maimie Papers, a New York Times Notable Book in 1978; the author of The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1982 ; and The World Split Open: How The Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, (revised edition 2006), a Book of the Month and Quality Paperback Selection; Los Angeles Times Best Books published in 2000; Finalist for Non-Fiction Award for Bay Area Reviewers Association.

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, The Goldman School of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley and is currently a visiting professor in the department of history at the University of California.

Like many European public intellectuals, she has not confined herself to academic writing. Between 1991 and 2000, she was a columnist on the op-ed page of The Los Angeles Times 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 left U.C. Davis as a professor emerita of history and worked full time as an editorial writer and a political columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she exposed deceptions that led to the Iraq war, wrote extensively about the Bush administration's violation of civil rights and liberties through the PATRIOT ACT, their constraints on FOIA, and the Presidential Records Act, described the arms race in space, penned editorials about the homeless mentally ill, detailed the administration's politicization of science, and promoted the rights of women and gays and lesbians. Her editorials about one woman who had been wrongly imprisoned prison for 25 years resulted in her release.

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.

She returned to teaching history at the University of California Berkeley in 2005 and is writing and speaking about how we would change, reframe and rethink domestic and global public policy/ if women really mattered.

In addition to teaching history, she is also on the editorial board of Dissent Magazine, is a regular contributor to Talking Points Memo, and has been published on TomDispatch.com, History News Network, Religious Dispatches.com, Common Dreams.org AlterNet.org, Open Democracy.com, DoubleXX and other online magazines. She has worked on many historical documentaries as an advisor and is one of main characters in the classic documentary, "Berkeley in the Sixties" in which she discusses her activism and analysis of the social movements in which she was involved.

She has appeared on NewsHour, Nightly News and many other television programs and on hundreds of radio programs.

Personal life

When not writing or teaching, she can be found hiking or playing the flute. She lives with her husband, Wendel Brunner, a director of public health, in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys the pleasure of two wonderful grown step children and two grandchildren.

All of her past writings, commentary, articles can be found, with their original source, at her web site, ruthrosen.org

Ph.D History, University of California, Berkeley, 1976
M.A. History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 1969
B.A. History Honors, University of Rochester, 1967
Junior Year Abroad, Florence, Italy, 1965-1966
Experiment in Living in Mexico, 1963