Rosemarie Tong

Tong holds a BA in religious studies and German from Marygrove College, an MA in philosophy from Catholic University and a PhD from Temple University. Her MA thesis was on the 19th-century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. She earned her PhD with a dissertation titled "Towards a Rational reconstruction of Anglo-American Criminal Law: The Insanity Defense."

She chaired the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women from 2003-2007. From 1999-2002 she was the co-coordinator of the International Network for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Tong has also served as chair of the Institutional Review Board's Conflict of Interest Committee at Chesapeake Research, Inc., co-chair of the North Carolina Institute of Medicine's Task Force on Pandemic Influenza, and on the boards of the U.S. Women's Bioethics Project, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

Tong has held professorships at Williams College and Lafayette College. She was the Thatcher Professor in Medical Humanities at Davidson College until 1999, when she began her professorship at the University of North Carolina.

Rosemarie "Rosie" Tong is an American feminist philosopher. The author of 1998's Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, an overview of the major traditions of feminist theory, she is the emeritus distinguished professor of health care ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Her first husband, Dr. Paul Ki King Tong, was a Chinese immigrant and professor at Glassboro State College. The couple bore 2 sons. After Paul died in 1988, she married Jeremiah Putnam. Her son Paul died in 2013.

Tong was born Rosemarie Behensky in Chicago to Joseph J Behensky (1924-2005) and Lillian Ann Nedved (1924-1981), both of Czech ancestry. Her paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Nehodiv.