Mary Beth Norton
Feminism has given Americans a common language, Elizabeth Cobbs argues in this brilliant and inspiring book, making her case through sixteen paired biographies of diverse, carefully selected female subjects, both well-known (Mary Church Terrell, Frances Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly) and unknown (Abigail Bailey, Ann Marie Riebe, Yvonne Swan). A remarkable and gripping achievement.
Karen Garner
Cobbs’s history reclaims feminism as a national social movement that has been pronounced un-American, exclusionary, and on the radical fringe…The breadth of this history is impressive and the depth of the research in terms of plumbing both published and manuscript sources for details about these women’s lives and the campaigns they waged, commands our scholarly attention and praise.
Times Literary Supplement - Christine Bold
The well-researched stories Cobbs tells are at once harrowing and exhilarating…Cobbs’s subjects [are] women who, having taken the worst their country had to offer, gave in return their energy and determination to drive its most progressive agendas.
Senior Women Web
Who are the feminist patriots and where did they come from? Covering US history since 1776, this book tackles women’s drive for equality, or at least access, to sixteen different ‘rights’ starting with education and ending with physical safety.
Arts Fuse - Roberta Silman
Fearless Women is so well-written, so well researched, and so engaging that you will find it of real value even as it tells some stories you thought you already knew…We should all welcome the hope that it bestows.
New York Journal of Books
An excellent and well-researched deep dive into the lives of women who insisted that they be considered an integral part of the American experience…This is an exciting and compelling read.
Tiya Miles
In the skillful hands of Elizabeth Cobbs, intrepid women of diverse backgrounds come alive on the page as they struggle to defend their own honor, care for their families, and fight for equality, autonomy, and dignity in a nation that has long denied them. Fearless Women is a gripping panoramic history that pairs ingenious excavation with enlightening explanation to relight the fire of feminist political identity at the very moment when we need it most.
Foreword Reviews
Unflinching…Delivering a timeless message of equality, Fearless Women is wide-ranging in its biographical surveys of the women who shaped the US’s struggle for women’s rights since her founding.
David M. Kennedy
What a great read! In unfailingly crackling prose, Cobbs freshly retells some familiar stories and colorfully excavates many new ones. Rich, consistently compelling, and often moving in detail, Fearless Women brilliantly illuminates women’s long struggle for equality in America, while making a robust case for the centrality of that struggle in the master narrative of American history. A magnificent achievement.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-12-14
Historical study of the complexities of feminism in America.
Cobbs, a professor of American history and author of The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, highlights the lives of women, from the 18th century to the present, whom she calls “feminist patriots,” ascribing the term feminist broadly, to “people who fought for their own rights or those of others,” and patriot to mean someone “who has a love of country and a willingness to defend national values.” As she acknowledges, “some feminists were racists, just as some civil rights activists were sexists.” Her selections include the predictable—Susan B. Anthony, civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell, labor reformer Frances Perkins—and the surprising: Equal Rights Amendment opponent Phyllis Schlafly, for one, who, Cobbs concedes, “can be seen as a classic anti-feminist feminist.” In each chapter, organized chronologically, the author contrasts one woman who serves as “the face of feminism” with another who “experienced a dilemma to which reformers did not yet have solutions.” She also points out that “some of these problems exist to this day.” She pairs the outspoken Abigail Adams, for example, with her contemporary, Abigail Bailey, whose husband abused her, sexually preyed on servants, and raped their daughter. Bailey had little legal recourse to sue for divorce, but she eventually successfully defended herself and her children. Cobbs looks at abolitionist Angelina Grimké and Harriet Jacobs, a slave, who both responded to their society’s systemic violence. Mexican American activist Martha Cotera, who promoted the recognition of sexism, joins Yvonne Swan, who fought to claim self-defense for killing a rapist. Cobbs draws on memoirs to portray many of her lesser-known subjects, such as Muriel Siebert, who rose from being an underpaid financial analyst to becoming the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The right to compete, learn, lobby, vote, earn equal pay, obtain equal legal protection, and be assured of physical safety are among the issues the author examines through the lives of her brave protagonists.
A fresh, well-researched perspective on women’s history.
