Wide Horizons with Historian Ruth Rosen -

The Babblery

Wide Horizons with Historian Ruth Rosen

00:00 / 59:59

In her work in the Second Wave feminist movement, historian Ruth Rosen experienced a lot of revelations about the lives of women. But once that time was past, she experienced a different type of revelation as male historians described the 70s as “a decade when nothing of importance happened.”

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For Ruth and the other women who were touched by the Second Wave—which includes almost all adult women alive at that time—this surge of feminist awakening forced a tsunami of change. Galvanized by male historians’ ignorance about the fundamental changes that feminism wrought in our society, Ruth started the deep research that led to the publication of her book, A World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.

In this conversation, we start with the book and the period that set the trajectory of Ruth’s life. Originally aiming to be a concert pianist, Ruth realized that women’s history—a field that didn’t exist before her PhD was granted—was an open field of wonders. Her academic work and then her career as a journalist led her to be a series of firsts: wherever her work took her, she was almost always the first woman in the room.

Finally, we address the world that she and her cohort navigates now, experiencing lives as elder women that bear little resemblance to their mothers’ lives. What is her advice to young women facing backlash? Listen and find out!

“If you don’t name the problem, you can’t change the law. And you can’t change custom, you can’t change the zeitgeist of the culture. There’s nothing that you can do until you have a name for it, and then you can get a collective grievance.”

Ruth Rosen is a professor emerita of history at the University of
California and a former editorial writer and columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Major books are The Maimie Papers, The Lost Sisterhood, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America and A Fearless Woman: A Memoir of Resilience and Resistance. Learn more on her website.