Rose was born in 1935 and grew up in
New York and
Ohio. She received a
Bachelor of Arts degree from
Antioch College and pursued postgraduate studies in
sociology at
Northwestern University where she earned a
Master of Arts degree in 1962 and a
doctorate in 1974. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled
Managing uncertainty: The honeymoon period of new patients on an adolescent ward. She began her academic career at
Colby College in 1974 before moving to the
University of Michigan in 1993. As well as teaching sociology and
women's studies, Rose became increasingly interested in
cultural history and, in particular,
gender history in the context of the
United Kingdom in the 19th and 20th centuries. She published
Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (1992) which explored the relationship between gender and capitalism in a range of industries during the
Industrial Revolution. Historian
Angela Woollacott notes that according to Rose, class and gender are not separate systems or structures in 19th century industrial England, but the "content of class relations is gendered and the content of gender distinctions and gender relations is 'classed'". She also co-edited
Gender and Class in Modern Europe (1996) and
Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities (2002). After this, she was involved in the "imperial turn" in British historiography and co-edited
At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (2006). Before her retirement to the United Kingdom, Rose wrote a synthetic studies of gender history entitled
What Is Gender History? (2010) and co-edited
The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (2020). ==Death==