Welcome to the Revolution

To create the scholarly life she's led for over thirty years, University of California at Davis history professor Ruth Rosen first had to help wrench open the doors of academe to women including herself. Her just-published book, "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America," chronicles how she and hundreds of other radical women launched a new wave of feminism in the late '60s and watched it crash over America, changing how we think about sex, motherhood, and just about everything else.

Rosen is already known for bringing to light one of the major discoveries of feminist scholarship -- 'The Maimie Papers," an early-20th-century prostitute's letters to her upper-class benefactress -- as well as "The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900-18," about a Progressive Era movement to abolish prostitution. Her latest work, which took ten years to write, is a gold mine of feminist research. For "The World Split Open," Rosen interviewed over one hundred feminist activists and combed scores of archival collections, including FBI files, collections at Radcliffe, Duke, the University of Wyoming, New York University, the Bancroft Library, and Berkeley archivist Laura X's women's library. The bibliography alone -- 31 pages of references to books and articles for readers to follow up on -- is worth the price of the book.

Forcing open academe's doors didn't just help Rosen gain entrance to the ivory tower. It also helped her escape it. Over the years, her old-fashioned academic critics (most of them male) have given her lumps not only over her activism and participatory scholarship, but because she's chosen to write extensively for the popular press -- from Dissent and the Women's Review of Books to hundreds of op-ed pieces for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, to which she is a regular contributor. (Maybe what irked them the most -- given the impenetrable quality of most academic writing these days -- is Rosen's clear prose.) As Rosen says in her book, she wrote it for "the women and men who did not participate in the women's movement, who were too busy trying to survive, who felt excluded or estranged, who were too scared, were too old or too young, were not yet born, or are still not born." As an historian she writes for people who love to read history but aren't necessarily scholars.

In Berkeley, California, where she lives, Rosen talked avidly about her work, her book, and the women's movement:

JUDITH COBURN: I can't resist starting off by asking why you thank Norman Mailer in your introduction to "The World Split Open."

RUTH ROSEN: Two years ago, I was at an annual seminar at Robert J. Lifton's home in Cape Cod, and Norman Mailer was making an informal presentation to the assembled group. As an aside, he said that the women's movement never helped anyone but the women who take the shuttle to Washington, DC with their attaché cases and live like men. I told him how much his version of the modern women's movement was media-generated and without intimate knowledge of what it had actually done. I told him how NOW's first six actions all benefited working-class women as well as privileged women.

He was surprised, but I had just finished my book and knew more than I'll ever know again. No matter what he said, I had facts and knowledge that had eluded him. Afterward we bantered and talked and he asked for a copy of my book. I then reread his infamous "Prisoner of Sex," and we had a lively correspondence. For my part, I told him that I now read his "assault" on feminism quite differently. I heard the vulnerable man beneath the aggressive prose, the man who needed women and feared them. It was quite an experience. I told him also that his great legacy as a major American writer, as well as a progressive activist, will be tarnished by his attacks on the women's movement, and that he should reconsider what he thought in light of the actual history. I await his response.