Book Review – FOR THE MANY by Dorothy Sue Cobble

Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality. Princeton University Press, 2021. 584 pp. ISBN: 978-0691156873. 

Reviewed by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University

The transnational turn has been a mainstay in U.S. history for quite some time now, but in recent years, feminist scholars have joined the trend. From globalizing the suffrage movement and examining the work of international organizations to exploring global networks around issues of reproductive rights, sex trafficking, and civil rights, new studies have placed U.S. feminism in a broader international context, offering a more complex understanding of the interconnectedness of feminist struggles and campaigns around the world. Dorothy Sue Cobble’s For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality adds to this critical scholarship by highlighting the role of American working-class women and women of color as they fought to advance social justice and equality for all.

Cobble has written extensively on the centrality of working-class women and labor feminism in shaping the feminist movement in the U.S. Yet, by shifting her perspective beyond the U.S., For the Many grounds the contributions of labor feminists to world politics. The focus on working women allows Cobble to tell a story that challenges traditional periodizations and understandings of American feminism, offering a narrative that stretches over most of the twentieth century and points to the continuity of women’s struggle for equal rights and democracy. This periodization also allows Cobble to amplify less familiar actors such as Rose Schneiderman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Anderson, Frieda Miller, Maida Springer, and Esther Peterson and to reclaim their rightful place in the movement.

Cobble labels the women in her book as “full rights feminists” as a way to “foreground their desire for the full array of rights and their belief that civil and political rights are intertwined with social and economic” (3). She expands the definition of feminism, showing that it is not limited to a narrow vision of gender equality but is an encompassing ideology that seeks to better all people’s lives and to promote economic justice. Indeed, the fight for economic justice—through unions, equal pay, and international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO)—is central to the book.

One of the book’s most intriguing aspects is Cobble’s decision to focus on the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) as the exemplar of full rights feminist internationalism. Founded in 1903, WTUL was a mixed-class group of labor organizers and social reformers who prioritized the interests of working-class women. Whereas U.S. women’s historians would be familiar with WTUL’s activity around suffrage and labor organizing, Cobble convincingly argues for its international focus and scope. She situates the League as an important player in global politics, especially before and after World War I, most notably the Women’s Labor Congress and the first ILO’s International Labor Conference (ILC) in 1919.

Cobble acknowledges the limitation of women’s power on the world stage, and much of her book is a story of partial successes, missed opportunities, and sometimes outright failure. Many of the organizations these women founded were short-lived, and global and national politics often prevented women from enacting meaningful change. One example is the WTUL’s failure to introduce its “working women’s charter” in Versailles, arriving after the Labor Commission had adjourned. Full rights feminists managed to gain more success in the 1930s, as their vision for social democracy garnered more influence in the Roosevelt administration and in shaping New Deal programs. By 1937 and 1938, this influence translated to the ILO’s adoption of the Women’s Rights Resolution and the Lima Declaration of Equal Rights, putting the full rights feminist agenda on the global stage. However, it was only after World War II, when a new generation of full rights feminists entered the world stage, that their vision of equal democracy took hold, promoting a new understanding that saw women’s rights as human rights, as articulated in the UN Charter and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Despite Cobble’s attempts to highlight Black American women’s crucial international work, she also acknowledges that Black and white women’s internationalism ran parallel but separate (56). Whereas WTUL was not a segregationist organization per se, the politics of women’s activism throughout much of the twentieth century makes the argument of multiracial coalition less compelling. Additionally, the international networks these women formed were also separate. While Black activists were at the forefront of Pan-Africanism, WTUL’s networks were primarily based in the European and Anglo-speaking world, again showing the difficulties of creating a genuinely global, multiracial, multiethnic social democratic women’s movement. Some Black women appear in the book; however, Asian, Latina, Native American and other women of marginalized groups are almost entirely absent. Cobble is much more successful in pointing to the cross-class solidarities that full rights feminists promoted and the long-lasting relationships they fostered among working-class women worldwide.

Moreover, although For the Many aims to tell a transnational and even international story, the book is more about American women and their global networks and how they shaped and influenced the fight for social democracy in the U.S. than the development of international feminism. Cobble is correct in arguing that the U.S. was not always a model for or a leader of global feminism and that U.S. feminists often turned to places like Latin America and Scandinavia for inspiration. Indeed, one of the book’s biggest strengths is decentralizing the American perspective and hegemony in advancing women’s equality, showing that, more often, the “United States had as much to learn as to teach” (222).

Cobble excels in threading the local with the global, giving attention not only to tensions among American feminists and their international peers but also to internal debates among U.S. feminists and their competing visions. She tells this complicated and continuously changing story without losing the reader’s attention. Her beautiful and clear prose makes it easy to follow the multiple actors and organizations across time and space. A list of abbreviations at the end also facilitates the reading and keeping up with the many acronyms in the book. Although the history that Cobble delineates is not a celebratory one of “upward progress” (10), she aptly argues for the importance and relevancy of full-rights feminism. The epilogue reminds the readers of the lessons we can take from the feminists of the last century, providing a hopeful and useful model for feminism today.