She said that the political feminism of the 1960s led her to reshape the questions she asked and to push the boundaries of both the methods and the conceptual frameworks of traditional history (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 11).
The planning group "believed we had a historical mandate to identify new domains, create new institutions, or try to carve out places for ourselves in areas that had previously excluded, devalued, and ignored us" (Friedlander et al., 1986).
The group's activities resulted in the volume, Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (1986), edited by Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Smith-Rosenberg.
The project explores the concept of modern citizenship as emerging from intense interactions among four violent events in the Atlantic world: the U.S., French, Haitian and Irish revolutions.
It focuses on the complex triangulation of race, slavery, and gender, using them to examine the contradictions and ambivalence lying at the heart of both citizenship and, most especially, of liberal political thought.
From 1996 until her retirement in 2008 Smith-Rosenberg taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies (emerita).
At Michigan, she served as graduate chair of the American Culture Program and director of the Atlantic Studies Initiative, which she helped establish.