Shaping my feminist life

the long version

In this sometimes startlingly candid account, Kathleen Ridder explores the passions that have motivated her in constructing and pursuing a life of community service and personal accomplishment. A native New Yorker, the twenty-year-old Ridder arrived in Duluth in 1943, newly married into a socially prominent family of newspaper publishers. In consciously seeking to be her own person, Ridder found over the following decades numerous outlets for her considerable energies and interests: Minnesota Republican politics, the Urban League and the emerging civil rights movement, alternative education, Twin Cities regional government, feminist organizations, and the women's athletic program at the University of Minnesota. She interweaves these public details with the more private ones of her marriage of more than fifty years, her enjoyment in raising four children, and her ongoing nurturance of her spiritual life.