For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality recasts American feminism as a global story and reclaims the fight for economic justice and social democracy as a majority tradition of women's politics. This rejoinder by the author of For the Many is the concluding essay in a review dossier on the book. Cobble discusses the book's origins and its contributions to global history, women's history, and political history. She engages with comments and queries from dossier reviewers, a diverse group of historians of Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and Europe. Topics include, among others, the unfinished struggle to revalue care and social reproduction, the influence of India on US feminism, Black internationalism and full-rights feminism, varieties of socialism, rethinking Cold War frameworks, and feminist perspectives on eugenics, race, and sexuality.

Dorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential of this feminism. The juxtaposition of the activism of Black full-rights feminists helps expose this fault line of unexamined deep-seated racism, ethnocentrism, and stereotypical thinking that undermined the potential of full-rights feminism. Questions of economic and political democracy shaped the organizing efforts of Black full-rights feminists against disfranchisement, lynching, discrimination in housing, education and employment, and exclusion and segregation from public accommodations. In their transnational work, they supported policies and practices structured by Cold War imperatives, American racism and imperialism, and tensions between democracy and incipient autocracy in the emerging African nations. Cobble's book demonstrates the crucial ways that Black activists working together and with white allies pushed for the expansive promise of full-rights feminism, encompassing both political and economic rights and race and gender justice.

Histories of feminism in the past three decades have focused on the debate between equal rights and separate spheres, but have been less attentive to the many strands of socialist feminisms, which sought to build bridges between the women's movement and other social movements for freedom, equality and justice. Dorothy Sue Cobble addresses this gap, exploring the lives and works of social democratic women activists in relation to the equal rights versus separate rights debate. Reflecting the “global turn”, Cobble explores many transnational connections. Picking up on these two themes – socialist feminism and global networks – I focus on the South Asian case.

This review essay engages with Dorothy Sue Cobble's For The Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality from the perspective of European histories of socialist feminism during the Cold War. The essay suggests three themes that might lead to further discussion. These concern first of all the role of left-Catholic as well as Social Democratic women within the networks that Cobble describes in For the Many; second, the influence of nationalist or other exclusionary discourses on debates about the rights of immigrant workers, and third, the role of social democratic actors in shaping debates about working women's rights in other international organizations - particularly regional organizations such as the EEC/EU. The essay concludes that For the Many is a major contribution to our understanding of transatlantic socialist feminisms in the Cold War world.

In 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully written study of full-rights feminists gives us a much-needed history of how the ILO came to attend to questions of care work and social reproduction and how hard-fought this recognition has been.

Cobble's study of American social democratic feminism is a fascinating narrative of the lives of women who crossed the boundaries of class, race and nation-states to build a better world. Her chronological account of the careers and activism of these women is not only a major contribution to the history of feminism but also a significant addition to the study of social democracy worldwide.

This introduction to the review dossier on Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality, introduces the major themes of the work in light of Cobble's earlier interventions in gendering labor history and focus on laborite activist women here called “full rights feminists”. It asks the contributors to expand on and decenter the transnational and global influence of Cobble's feminists and their views on capitalism and democracy in light of their own research. Among questions considered are: what do we gain from attention to the ideas and activism of low-income and immigrant women in our various histories? How do questions of race/white privilege, citizenship, empire, colonialism, and imperialism complicate understandings of equality and democracy? What is revealed by considering class in women's history?