Editors' Note

As the end of our first full year as co-editors of the Journal of Women's History comes into view, we marvel at how fast it has gone and how much we have learned since our road trip from Columbus to Champaign-Urbana, when we transported all the file boxes and looked forward to the challenges ahead. We've now experienced the life cycle of many manuscripts, warmed to the rhythms of scheduling, copyediting, and proofreading, and all but perfected the balancing act of all the phases of production that must be entertained at once. As always, we remain both indebted to and in awe of our managing editors, Rebecca McNulty and Jen Edwards, who run the day-to-day operations and succeed in doing so with apparently inexhaustible reserves of efficiency, patience, and goodwill. We are continually humbled by their ability to juggle the demands of journal with their own dissertation work, and to help us shape the directions it will take.

Most if not all of the essays that appear below come from the bulging "pipeline" we inherited from the last year of Leila Rupp and Donna Guy's co-editorship. We've grouped them into two sections, the first of which, "Accounting for Women," focuses on a wide variety of women's work—from the managing of household money to conservation reform to the doing of manicures—and raises questions about the relationship of such activities to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they took place. Susan Rimby's "Better Housekeeping Our of Doors" tells the story of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women, a Progressive-era group that was active in all manner of local and regional conservation efforts. Although the literature on American conservation has focused on famous men (like Gifford Pinchot, Commissioner of Forestry under Theodore Roosevelt) and on projects in the west and south (like national and state parks), Rimby makes a case for unearthing the work of northeastern women like Mira Lloyd Dock, a trained botanist who promoted local clean-up initiatives and, through the SFPW, supported health and welfare programs that targeted community girls and women. Nor were the Pennsylvania women unique. As Rimby demonstrates, civic clubs and women's organizations "cleaned up" countless communities across the region, improving towns, suburbs, and cities and leaving new spaces such as playgrounds both as boons to working-class neighborhoods and as enduring evidence of white middle-class women's investment in the environment and quality of life issues.

If accounting for Mira Dock and her contemporaries compels us to rethink the narratives of American conservation history, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's essay invites us to refigure the relationship between domestic labor, economic activity, and the realm of affect and emotion. "Abigail's Accounts" excavates the record books of an early-nineteenth-century Quaker woman who presided over her family's account books and in the process, left us an invaluable archive of the operations of daily life two hundred years ago. Drawing on the riches offered by Abigail's books, Hartigan-O'Connor reads debits and credits against the backdrop of a vibrant market economy and mines the payment of servants' wages, gift giving, and charity for what it can tell us about the emotional dimensions of economic transactions. So, for example, we see how Abigail's relationships with her domestics, her friends, and even her young relatives drew her into the cash nexus, even as they developed in her a fine-tuned and highly "flexible understanding of values and exchange" at both the monetary and the symbolic level. Hartigan-O'Connor's work adds welcome nuance to debates about the history of women's work, and especially to scholarship on the labor and economic value of housework, by suggesting that we will cease to exceptionalize domestic labor as unpaid or disconnected from market forces only if we work to materialize the "web of financial and affective connections" and thereby to view economic life as a whole.

Julie Willett's piece on manicurists, aptly titled "Hands Across the Table," provides a more modern account of the social and cultural worlds...