During the past nearly 30 years, the women's movement in the United States has excavated hidden taboos and customs, labeled them and brought them out into the open, says a UC Davis history scholar. Speaking at "Women Transforming the Public," an international conference on women held last week at UC Santa Barbara, keynote speaker Ruth Rosen, professor of history, talked about how the women's movement helped push women's issues onto the national agenda, where they could be debated and discussed. Only then could society consider changes in public policy or new legislation to improve women's lives, Rosen says. "A lot of things that people considered taboo in the 1950s, the women's movement has named and redefined," Rosen says. For example, even though sexual harassment occurred, "there was no language for it. You can't make a policy unless you have the words for it. Before the 1970s, there was no language for sexual harassment, and yet by the 1980s, the federal government had developed guidelines on it, giving legal rights under the law." Certain customs, too, have been redefined by the women's movement. For example, hurricanes -- violent, destructive events -- for years carried only women's names. And "women activists asked why is this?" By 1978, Rosen says, the National Weather Service began naming hurricanes by alternating men's and women's names. One of the greatest accomplishments of the movement, Rosen says, was that activists questioned "what is natural" and what kind of arrangements could be changed. Today, for example, more men are involved with child care because feminists asked why women should be the only ones responsible for the care of the next generation, Rosen says. Rosen is the editor of "The Maimie Papers" and author of "The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918," and contributes regularly to the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her forthcoming book, titled "The World Split Open: The Women's Movement and How It Changed America," will be published in early 2000 by Viking Press.