Dorothy Sue Cobble. For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality.

Abstract

For the Many may not have been conceived as a response to the avalanche of criticisms directed at historical American feminist leaders and past waves of twentieth-century American feminism for harboring elitist, racist, classist perspectives and exclusionary practices, but the book provides a strong counterpoint to those criticisms nonetheless. This is not because its author in any way excuses or denies the bourgeois and even counterrevolutionary strains winding their way through American feminism in the last century. Instead, Dorothy Sue Cobble decenters the usual feminist suspects—the Alice Pauls and the Betty Friedans, along with the organizations and campaigns for which they were most noted—and places cross-class, cross-race, and cross-national collaborations among female labor activists and women’s labor organizations at the center of the story. By centering those feminists who, Cobble claims, most consistently called for racial equality and working-class rights, and who stood against colonialism, she paints a far more liberational political portrait of American feminism than does the dominant historical narrative that has been proffered to the general public for decades now.