Affiliated Academics
Ruth Rosen
Biographical Statement:
Ruth Rosen is a pioneering historian of gender and society and an award-winning journalist.
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 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 at the U.C. Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy.
She is the editor of the The Maimie Papers, a New York Times Notable Book in l978; and the author of The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1982; and The World Split Open: How The Modern Women’s Movement Changed America 2001, 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.
As a journalist, she wrote hundreds of op-ed columns for the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers between1991-2000 and contributed many essays to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, the Women’s Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
n 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.
Her editorials and columns focused on a broad range of subjects, including foreign policy, homelessness; the politics of health care, space-based weapons and the missile defense system; the politics of parole and prisons, reproductive rights, and environmental health. Until she left in 2004, 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.
She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute writing and speaking about how we would change, reframe and rethink domestic and global public policy if women really mattered.
Accustomed to writing and speaking to the general public, she has appeared on NewsHour, NBC News, Fox News and hundreds of NPR and commercial radio programs.
