While Cobble's 2004 book The Other Women's Movement focused on United States “labour feminists”, who saw the labour movement as a vehicle for eliminating sex-based disadvantages for working-class women, For the Many focuses, to a greater extent, on the internationalism of women labour leaders. More importantly, it reinserts social democratic and labour movement women into international histories of feminism during the twentieth century, paying particular attention to global campaigns for equal pay, the rights of working parents (especially mothers), and domestic or care work, which, for too long, have been analysed from the perspective of Cold War struggles between communism and liberal ideals.īy tracing the individual trajectories of American “full-rights” feminists in a period that was “coterminous with the heyday of American social democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s” Dorothy Sue Cobble's magnificent new book brilliantly deconstructs many of the Cold War paradigms that shape historical scholarship on feminism in the twentieth-century world. Sender's story is just one example of the numerous ways in which For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (hereafter For the Many) foregrounds the internationalism of socialist feminism in the US. There, she drew on her experience of European socialisms as a champion of economic and social rights at the UN.

Instead, she represented the Social Democratic Party in the Reichstag from 1922 until 1933, when Hitler's rise to power forced her to escape to Czechoslovakia, before making her way to the United States. Unlike Clara Zetkin, however, with whom she worked in the Socialist Women's International Secretariat, Sender did not join the Communist Party of Germany. Born into a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family, in Frankfurt, in 1888, Sender was deeply involved in European socialist and labour politics from an early age. In 1946, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) took the unlikely step of appointing a woman – German–Jewish émigré and former socialist member of the German Reichstag Toni Sender – as its full-time paid representative to the newly created United Nations.

A history of us feminisms