Ruth Rosen

“We began to realize that we knew nothing about ourselves. I was in the history department at Berkeley and I knew zip, nada, zero about women’s history. We realized we didn’t know very much about women as a social group, or women’s literature, or women’s art.”

Ruth Rosen, historian and journalist, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, the author of three books, including The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, and hundreds of op-ed essays.  She was an early activist and journalist in the women's movement in Berkeley, and pioneered women's history at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Davis, where she won the distinguished teaching award. She is now Professor Emerita of History, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at U.C. Berkeley and continues to write journalistic articles for a variety of online magazines and journals. She is married, and in her spare time, she hikes, plays the flute, travels, and plays with five grandkids.