Papers of Ruth Rosen, 1965-2015

Ruth Rosen was born in 1945 to Ida (Ginsberg) and Herman Rosen in New York City. Shortly after her birth, the Rosen family moved to Lake Secor, New York. In 1963, after graduating from New Rochelle High School, Rosen spent the summer in Mexico through the Experiment in International Living program. In the fall of 1963, she entered the University of Rochester (B.A. History, 1967). In April 1965, Rosen joined the March against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC. Later that year, she went to Florence, Italy, through Syracuse University's Junior Year Abroad program. After Rosen's return to the University of Rochester, she was encouraged by her professors to study art history in graduate school because, in their opinion, art history was more of a woman's field than history. In 1967, Rosen received a Career Prize Fellowship to study art history at the University of California, Berkeley (M.A. Art History, 1969, Ph.D History, 1976).

While attending graduate school, Rosen worked as an editor and photojournalist for the Every Other Weekly, a free insert of the Daily Californian, the University of California's student newspaper. A group of graduate students, including Rosen, took control of the Every Other Weekly and turned it into a political and literary magazine, which published poetry, feminist short stories, and articles on the Vietnam War. During her first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, Rosen attended the first meeting of a women's group that was forming at on campus. Rosen went to the meeting as photojournalist for the Every Other Weekly, and was inspired by the other women in the group to become a member. The group continued to meet for the next year and a half, and the members, which included Susan Griffin and Alta Gerrey, encouraged Rosen in her decision to focus on women's history, not art history. In 1969, Rosen switched her concentration from art history to the comparative history of women and the family, with the intention of studying women's issues within multiple fields and themes of history. In 1971, Rosen taught one of the first women's history research seminars for undergraduates in the history degree program at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1972, she was asked to teach a women's history night class at Sonoma State College.

In 1973, Rosen received a pre-dissertation fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, which she used to do research at the Schlesinger Library on prostitution and white slavery. During the course of her research, Rosen came across the un-edited letters of a prostitute, which were later published through the Feminist Press, with a grant from the National Endowment to the Humanities, as The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute, in 1977. In the summer of 1973, Rosen attended the first Berkshire Conference of Women Historians at Douglass College, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

In the fall of 1974, Rosen was hired by the University of California, Davis, as an Acting Assistant Professor of Women's History. The first class she taught was a survey of women's history in the United States, which covered the range of women's issues throughout American history. Rosen's course-load during her first semesters at the University of California, Davis, also included a graduate seminar in comparative women's history, and an undergraduate seminar on the literature and historical experiences of utopian communities. During her career at University of California, Davis, Rosen lectured on colonial women and the family, African-American migration, cross-cultural women's history, the Equal Rights Amendment, war and peace issues, gender and public policy, and immigration and gender. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1980. In 1982, Rosen's dissertation was published as The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918. The University of California, Davis, presented Rosen with its Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983, and she was promoted to Full Professor in 1989.

In 1988, Rosen was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 1991, Rosen began writing for the Los Angeles Times, as well as for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, the Women's Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In 1995, Ruth Rosen married Wendel Brunner; she has two stepchildren and five grandchildren.

Rosen has been a visiting professor for the European University of Peace twice; first on the Stadtschlaining, Austria, campus in 1993, and second on the Dromahair, Ireland, campus in 1996. In 1999 and 2000, Rosen was awarded Faculty Research Fellowships with the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. Her project, which hoped to detail the developments in women's rights that followed the numerous United Nations world women's conferences, was titled "Through the Eyes of Women: Global Security, Sustainability, Development, and Human Rights."

After Rosen's third book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, was published in 2000, she left the University of California, Davis, as a professor emerita of history to become an editorial writer and a political columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosen wrote about the deceptions that led to the Iraq war; wrote extensively about the George W. Bush administration's use of the Freedom Of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act, and its creation and use of the Patriot Act; described the arms race in space; penned editorials about the homeless mentally ill; detailed the politicization of science; and promoted the rights of under-represented groups. Rosen also wrote comprehensively about the founder of Curves International, Gary Heavins, and his donations to anti-choice clinics.

For her distinguished journalism, Rosen 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. Rosen has appeared in many films, including the 1990 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties by Mark Kitchell; the 2008 documentary What's Your Point, Honey? by Amy Sewell; and the 2014 documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry by Mary Dore.

In 2004, Rosen became a senior fellow at the Longview Institute, a progressive think tank, in Berkeley, California, and in 2005, she returned to the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting professor of history. Since 2011, Rosen has been both a scholar in residence and a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and its Center for the Study for the Right-Wing Movements, at the University of California, Berkeley.