Shaping My Feminist Life

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 20-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, feminist organisations, and the women's athletic program at the University of Minnesota. She interweaves these public details with the more private ones. Unifying Ridder's narrative are her natural feminism, her innate sense of fair-mindedness, and her conviction that privilege and position bring with them the obligation to work toward the social good of the community.