Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast · Alycia Asai

Fearless Women: Exploring Patriotic Feminism with Dr. Elizabeth Cobbs

·33 min·2 clips

Cobbs says the book’s central structure is a “ladder of liberty” with the right to safety as the last rung.

Alicia sits down with Dr. Elizabeth Cobbs. She introduces Cobbs as a historian whose book, *Fearless Women, Feminist Patriots from Abigail Adams to Beyonce*, traces a long American conversation about women, politics, and patriotism. Cobbs earned her PhD at Stanford University, served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Historical Advisory Committee of the U.S. State Department, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Financial Times. She is an emerita professor at San Diego State University and recently retired as the Glasscock Chair at Texas A&M, so the interview has a distinctly scholarly feel. The discussion opens with familiar names. Abigail Adams becomes a starting point, while Phyllis Schlafly becomes a way to look at how feminism and anti-feminism can live inside the same life. Cobbs keeps coming back to patterns. She argues that anti-feminism is older than the American Revolution and that every generation seems to recycle the same complaints about feminists, from claims about appearance and sexuality to fears that women will abandon love, children, and social order. That matters because it moves the episode beyond biography and into a longer history of backlash and political argument. Cobbs also treats reform carefully. She says reform is always a double-edged sword, because efforts to widen freedom can still create consequences that deserve scrutiny. Alicia stays curious. She asks how Cobbs found the supporting women who appear in the book and how she sourced them, which pushes the conversation beyond the best-known figures. The result is a broad history conversation that moves from public memory to scholarship and from celebrated icons to the less visible women who made the story bigger. It stays easy to follow. The episode works as a thoughtful look at how American history keeps revisiting the place of women in civic life.

As heard by us

A thoughtful interview about how feminism, backlash, and reform keep colliding in American history.

Civics & Coffee uses this conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Cobbs to follow a long American argument over women and reform, with Fearless Women as the frame.

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Why you'd press play

You want women's history that moves from Abigail Adams to Beyonce without losing the thread.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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