A native New Yorker, the twenty-year-old Ridder arrived in Duluth in 1943 as a new member of 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 Independent-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 fifty-plus years, her enjoyment in raising four children, and her ongoing nurturance of her spiritual life.

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.