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 in 1983, 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, The Goldman School of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley and was a visiting professor in the department of history at the University of California.
She is the editor of the The Maimie Papers, a New York Times Notable Book in l978; the author of The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1982; and The World Split Open: How The Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, (revised edition 2006), 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.
Like many European public intellectuals, she has not confined herself to academic writing. Between 1991 and 2000, she was a columnist on the op-ed page of The Los Angeles Times and contributed many essays to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, the Women’s Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In 2000, she left U.C. Davis as a professor emerita of history and worked full time as an editorial writer and a political columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she exposed deceptions that led to the Iraq war, wrote extensively about the Bush administration's violation of civil rights and liberties through the PATRIOT ACT, their constraints on FOIA, and the Presidential Records Act, described the arms race in space, penned editorials about the homeless mentally ill, detailed the administration's politicization of science, and promoted the rights of women and gays and lesbians. Her editorials about one woman who had been wrongly imprisoned prison for 25 years resulted in her release.
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.
She returned to teaching history at the University of California Berkeley in 2005 and is writing and speaking about how we would change, reframe and rethink domestic and global public policy if women really mattered.
In addition to teaching history, she is also on the editorial board of Dissent Magazine, is a regular contributor to Talking Points Memo, and has been published on TomDispatch.com, History News Network, Religious Dispatches.com, Common Dreams.org AlterNet.org, Open Democracy.com, DoubleXX and other online magazines.
She has appeared on NewsHour, Nightly News and many other television programs and on hundreds of radio programs.
When not writing or teaching, she can be found hiking or playing the flute. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Interview 2022, Bay Area Women in Politics, Bancroft Library, Unversity of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Interview, University of Rochester, Special Collections Archives, Rochester, NY
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA
University of California Television, Institute of International Studies, Berkeley, CA, with Harry Kreisler, June 12, 2008
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
M.A. History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 1969
B.A. History Honors, University of Rochester, 1967
Junior Year Abroad, Florence, Italy, 1965-1966
Experiment in Living in Mexico, 1963
