Dorothy Sue Cobble
Biographic Data
| ID | 1082429 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dorothy Sue Cobble |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dorothy Sue |
| FAMILY NAME | Cobble |
| SIGNATURE | COBBLE D S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9943-8226 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Reimagining the Labour Movement. Feminism and the Mid-century Origins of a New Social Democracy
The push of women activists for a reimagined labour movement after the Second World War remains instructive as new generations seek to reinvigorate worker organisation and social democracy. This article details the post-war rise of labour women’s dissent in Europe and other regions and recovers the social reform vision articulated by feminists in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Particular attention is paid to the far…
A Feminism For the Many”
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.…
For the Many
For the Many
More Reward Than Punishment
I welcome this opportunity to engage with some of the historical puzzles Adam Dean and Jonathan Obert consider in their provocative take on Taft-Hartley and the CIO. What difference did Taft-Hartley make, and to whom? Did the CIO choice to throw in its lot with the Democratic Party make the passage of Taft-Hartley more likely, hasten the decline of moderate Republicanism, and help polarize American politics, as Dean and Obert assert? And what abo…
For the Many
The Other ilo Founders
A Wagner Act for Today
Joseph A. McCartin offers in this issue a deeply informed, perceptive, at times elegant review of the scholarly assessments of the Wagner Act, stretching from the “postwar celebrants” to the 1970s New Left, from critical legal studies skeptics to the present-day embrace of Christopher L. Tomlins’s prescient 1985 rotten-to-the-core analysis. “In 2010,” McCartin concludes, the act “began to noticeably loosen its grip on the imaginations of labor in…
International Women's Trade Unionism and Education
This keynote address, delivered in December 2015 at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Association General Conference in Lima, Peru, refutes the standard trope of labor movement decline and provides evidence for the global rise and feminization of labor movements worldwide. Trade union women’s commitment to emancipatory, democratic worker education helped spur these changes. The origins and effects of two historical examples are d…
The Sex of Class
Women now comprise the majority of the working class. Yet this fundamental transformation has gone largely unnoticed. This book is about how the sex of workers matters in understanding the jobs they do, the problems they face at work, and the new labor movements they are creating in the United States and globally. In The Sex of Class, twenty prominent scholars, labor leaders, and policy analysts look at the implication of this "sexual revolution"…
Who Speaks for Workers? Japan and the 1919 ILO Debates Over Rights and Global Labor Standards
Contrary to conventional wisdom, some of the most contentious disputes over international labor standards and worker rights occurred not between Western nations and the “rest” but within single nations. To explore the deep fissures in Japanese society over the rights of women and workers, I offer the first scholarly account of Japan's only woman representative to the ILO's inaugural 1919 Washington conference, elite social feminist Tanaka Taka, g…
A Higher "Standard of Life" for the World
In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, women labor reformers from nineteen nations and three continents gathered in Washington, D.C., to hammer out a set of international labor standards and worker rights. The ten-day International Congress of Working Women (icww), called by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (nwtul), with the counsel and encouragement of British and French labor women, was timed to coincide with the …
Pure and Simple Radicalism
Dorothy Sue Cobble's “Up for Debate” retrospective on the early American Federation of Labor heralds a new era of scholarship connecting labor history to larger judgments about American institutionalism — be it business, politics, the law, or ideology. Cobble reclaims both the complexity of AFL structure and its oppositional stance to market fundamentalism from what she claims (à la E. P. Thompson) from the condescension of history: ultimately, s…
The Promise and Peril of the New Global Labor History
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Senior Editors' Note
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The Other Women's Movement
American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired…
The Other Women's Movement
Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor
The waves metaphor to delineate feminist activism in the United States is troublesome, to say the least. Despite its problems, the waves model has tremendous staying power when it comes to understanding, analyzing, writing about, and teaching the history of U.S. feminism. In this collection of essays, historians revisit this model, highlighting the efficacy of feminist waves as we know them, but also challenging this model for eliding the experie…
Betting on New Forms of Worker Organization
I have always admired labor organizers, in part because their long hours and incredible ability to listen, engage, and sympathize with people from every political persuasion make it possible for the labor movement to survive. I do not envy them, however, particularly at this moment in history. They often find themselves in untenable situations, faced with impossible moral and political dilemmas. As one Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Work…
U.S. Labor Women’s Internationalism in the World War I Era
U.S. Labor Women's Internationalism in the World War I Era
Après la Première Guerre mondiale, des ouvrières américaines s’associèrent à leurs homologues d’autres pays pour élaborer des normes internationales concernant le droit du travail. Encouragée par des militantes françaises et anglaises, l’American Women’s Trade Union League convoqua en 1919, à Washington, un Congrès International des Travailleuses. Cet article analyse les propositions législatives concernant les femmes et le droit du travail formu…
Introduction
On May 15, 2008, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) held its twentieth birthday celebration at the Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard. I was next door at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library, sleepily perusing my next fat folder of government documents. As the laughter and singing wafted its way across the quad, the choice of whether to stay or go was clear. I followed the trail of balloons to the theater, grabbed my c…
Senior Editors' Note
International Labor and Working-Class History 77 opens with a special thematic feature, “Gendered Activism and the Politics of Women's Work.” In it, we include articles by Karen Hunt (Keele University), Julie Guard (University of Manitoba), Judith Smart (University of Melbourne and RMIT University), and June Hannam (University of the West of England), all of which were originally presented in 2008 at the international conference “Labouring Femini…
A “Tiger by the Toenail”
Research Article| September 01 2005 A “Tiger by the Toenail”: The 1970s Origins of the New Working-Class Majority Dorothy Sue Cobble Dorothy Sue Cobble Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (3): 103–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-3-103 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissio…
Kissing the Old Class Politics Goodbye
Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be le…
Organizing the Postindustrial Work Force
Using previously unexamined archival material, the author reconstructs one successful historical alternative to the kind of unionism that developed in mass production industries: the "occupational unionism" practiced from the 1900s to the 1960s by waitresses organized into the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. This form of employee representation was distinguished by an emphasis on occupational identity, control over t…
A Higher "Standard of Life" for the World
In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, women labor reformers from nineteen nations and three continents gathered in Washington, D.C., to hammer out a set of international labor standards and worker rights. The ten-day International Congress of Working Women (icww), called by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (nwtul), with the counsel and encouragement of British and French labor women, was timed to coincide with the …
A “Tiger by the Toenail”
Research Article| September 01 2005 A “Tiger by the Toenail”: The 1970s Origins of the New Working-Class Majority Dorothy Sue Cobble Dorothy Sue Cobble Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (3): 103–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-3-103 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissio…
A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm”
In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating…
Rethinking Troubled Relations between Women and Unions
Pure and Simple Radicalism
Dorothy Sue Cobble's “Up for Debate” retrospective on the early American Federation of Labor heralds a new era of scholarship connecting labor history to larger judgments about American institutionalism — be it business, politics, the law, or ideology. Cobble reclaims both the complexity of AFL structure and its oppositional stance to market fundamentalism from what she claims (à la E. P. Thompson) from the condescension of history: ultimately, s…
A Wagner Act for Today
Joseph A. McCartin offers in this issue a deeply informed, perceptive, at times elegant review of the scholarly assessments of the Wagner Act, stretching from the “postwar celebrants” to the 1970s New Left, from critical legal studies skeptics to the present-day embrace of Christopher L. Tomlins’s prescient 1985 rotten-to-the-core analysis. “In 2010,” McCartin concludes, the act “began to noticeably loosen its grip on the imaginations of labor in…
Betting on New Forms of Worker Organization
I have always admired labor organizers, in part because their long hours and incredible ability to listen, engage, and sympathize with people from every political persuasion make it possible for the labor movement to survive. I do not envy them, however, particularly at this moment in history. They often find themselves in untenable situations, faced with impossible moral and political dilemmas. As one Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Work…
U.S. Labor Women's Internationalism in the World War I Era
Après la Première Guerre mondiale, des ouvrières américaines s’associèrent à leurs homologues d’autres pays pour élaborer des normes internationales concernant le droit du travail. Encouragée par des militantes françaises et anglaises, l’American Women’s Trade Union League convoqua en 1919, à Washington, un Congrès International des Travailleuses. Cet article analyse les propositions législatives concernant les femmes et le droit du travail formu…
The New Labor History in American History Textbooks
If the new labor history has not changed the face of American historiography in the past twenty years, it certainly ranks among the discipline's most exciting developments. Focusing on the relationship of workers and working-class institutions to the larger social and political culture, labor historians ranging from Herbert G. Gutman and David Montgomery to Christine Stansell and Mary H. Blewett have broadened definitions of the political, challe…
Practical women”
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDorothy Sue Cobble The author would like to thank Lorin Lee Cary, Lizabeth Cohen, Tony Fels, Dee Garrison, Suzanne Lebsock, Valerie Matsumoto, Ruth Milkman, Peggy Pascoe, Julie Rubin, Penny Russell, and the members of the Rutgers University Women's History Seminar for their comments and insights. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 79th annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, Americ…
International Women's Trade Unionism and Education
This keynote address, delivered in December 2015 at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Association General Conference in Lima, Peru, refutes the standard trope of labor movement decline and provides evidence for the global rise and feminization of labor movements worldwide. Trade union women’s commitment to emancipatory, democratic worker education helped spur these changes. The origins and effects of two historical examples are d…
Who Speaks for Workers? Japan and the 1919 ILO Debates Over Rights and Global Labor Standards
Contrary to conventional wisdom, some of the most contentious disputes over international labor standards and worker rights occurred not between Western nations and the “rest” but within single nations. To explore the deep fissures in Japanese society over the rights of women and workers, I offer the first scholarly account of Japan's only woman representative to the ILO's inaugural 1919 Washington conference, elite social feminist Tanaka Taka, g…
The Promise and Peril of the New Global Labor History
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Kissing the Old Class Politics Goodbye
Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be le…
Dishing It out
A self-possessed woman
Practical women”
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDorothy Sue Cobble The author would like to thank Lorin Lee Cary, Lizabeth Cohen, Tony Fels, Dee Garrison, Suzanne Lebsock, Valerie Matsumoto, Ruth Milkman, Peggy Pascoe, Julie Rubin, Penny Russell, and the members of the Rutgers University Women's History Seminar for their comments and insights. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 79th annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, Americ…
Rethinking Troubled Relations between Women and Unions
Labor's Flaming Youth
Journal Article Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878–1923. By Stephen H. Norwood. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. xii + 340 pp. $32.50.) Get access Dorothy Sue Cobble Dorothy Sue Cobble Rutgers University, New Brunswick Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 77, Issue 4, March 1991, Pages 1376–1377, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078334 P…
Organizing the Postindustrial Work Force
Using previously unexamined archival material, the author reconstructs one successful historical alternative to the kind of unionism that developed in mass production industries: the "occupational unionism" practiced from the 1900s to the 1960s by waitresses organized into the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. This form of employee representation was distinguished by an emphasis on occupational identity, control over t…
Holding the Line
The Past is Political
Make Mine a Double
Dishing It Out
Journal Article Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century. By Dorothy Sue Cobble. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xiv + 327 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-01812-5.) Get access Elizabeth Faue Elizabeth Faue Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 3, December 1992, Pages 1208–1209, https://doi.org/1…
Becoming a Mighty Voice
The New Labor History in American History Textbooks
If the new labor history has not changed the face of American historiography in the past twenty years, it certainly ranks among the discipline's most exciting developments. Focusing on the relationship of workers and working-class institutions to the larger social and political culture, labor historians ranging from Herbert G. Gutman and David Montgomery to Christine Stansell and Mary H. Blewett have broadened definitions of the political, challe…
Dishing It out
Women and Unions
Women and Unions
(1995). Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership. Economic Geography: Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 208-210
Women and Unions
The U.S. Labor Movement
A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm”
In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating…
Policing Women
Journal Article Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD. By Janis Appier. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. xii, 227 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 1-56639-559-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-56639-560-7.) Get access Dorothy Sue Cobble Dorothy Sue Cobble Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 4, M…
A “Tiger by the Toenail”
Research Article| September 01 2005 A “Tiger by the Toenail”: The 1970s Origins of the New Working-Class Majority Dorothy Sue Cobble Dorothy Sue Cobble Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (3): 103–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-3-103 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissio…
Kissing the Old Class Politics Goodbye
Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be le…
Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor
The waves metaphor to delineate feminist activism in the United States is troublesome, to say the least. Despite its problems, the waves model has tremendous staying power when it comes to understanding, analyzing, writing about, and teaching the history of U.S. feminism. In this collection of essays, historians revisit this model, highlighting the efficacy of feminist waves as we know them, but also challenging this model for eliding the experie…
Betting on New Forms of Worker Organization
I have always admired labor organizers, in part because their long hours and incredible ability to listen, engage, and sympathize with people from every political persuasion make it possible for the labor movement to survive. I do not envy them, however, particularly at this moment in history. They often find themselves in untenable situations, faced with impossible moral and political dilemmas. As one Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Work…
U.S. Labor Women’s Internationalism in the World War I Era
U.S. Labor Women's Internationalism in the World War I Era
Après la Première Guerre mondiale, des ouvrières américaines s’associèrent à leurs homologues d’autres pays pour élaborer des normes internationales concernant le droit du travail. Encouragée par des militantes françaises et anglaises, l’American Women’s Trade Union League convoqua en 1919, à Washington, un Congrès International des Travailleuses. Cet article analyse les propositions législatives concernant les femmes et le droit du travail formu…
Introduction
On May 15, 2008, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) held its twentieth birthday celebration at the Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard. I was next door at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library, sleepily perusing my next fat folder of government documents. As the laughter and singing wafted its way across the quad, the choice of whether to stay or go was clear. I followed the trail of balloons to the theater, grabbed my c…
Political science (27 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (26 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Art (10 works) · History (10 works) · History (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works)