In a bold rewriting of twentieth-century political history, Dorothy Sue Cobble reclaims social democracy as a central thread of American feminism and shows how global forces, peoples, and ideas shaped US politics and social movements. She follows egalitarian women’s activism from the democracy movements before World War I to the upheavals of the New Deal and the Cold War, to the reassertion of conservatism and the revival of female-led movements today. American women, she argues, pushed the nation and the world toward democracy and greater equality.

A distinguished professor of history and labor studies emerita at Rutgers University, Dorothy Sue Cobble specializes in twentieth-century politics and social movements. She is the author of The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America and other prize-winning books. Recent honors include fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Swedish Research Council. In 2017 Stockholm University awarded her an Honorary Doctorate of Social Science.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.