Editors' Note

The articles assembled in our first issue of 2009 engage questions of the state, citizenship, and women's mobilization from a diverse array of perspectives. We open with Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez's "New Avenues for Domestic Dispute and Divorce Lawsuits along the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1832–1893," which explores the shifting meanings and makings of marriage and divorce when one state, quite literally, replaces another. Focusing on the border area of what is now southern Texas, Valerio-Jiménez compares domestic lawsuits filed by women and men living under the laws of the Mexican state (1832–1846) with those generated in the very same area after the Mexican-American War (1849–1893) by women and men now living under the jurisdiction of the United States. In a compelling and nuanced analysis that avoids meta-narratives of triumph or of decline, Valerio Jiménez argues that the political, civil, and religious changes wrought by this dramatic shift in legal jurisprudence, including the right to divorce, had both negative and positive implications for Mexican American women, who turned to U.S. courts to improve their domestic lives.

In Karen Leroux's "'Unpensioned Veterans': Women Teachers and the Politics of Public Service in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States," women confront the state not from the confines of a court but in the public sphere in battles over pensions. In an historical moment when family economies were giving way to a wage economy, women teachers faced retirement with little personal savings, were barred from marriage and having children, and therefore could often not depend on families for financial support. In their struggles for pensions, teachers not only echoed the discourse of veterans, whose claims for military pensions highlighted their self-sacrifice and patriotism, but also foregrounded their critical role in training future generations to become responsible citizens. By the 1890s, women teachers won their pensions and thereby a measure of economic security, but because they had justified their claims in terms of the sacrifices they made, rather than the equality they were denied, their efforts had only a limited impact on women's broader struggles for equal citizenship in the early twentieth century.

Lisa G. Materson's "African American Women, Prohibition, and the 1928 Presidential Election" explores the connections middle-class African American women reformers drew between Democratic efforts to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the production and sale of alcohol in the United States, and the growing movement of African American voters away from the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party. While historians have tended to treat prohibition and African American voter realignment as two separate stories, Materson's focus on the political work of African American women reformers within the Republican Party brings the two narratives onto the same page and demonstrates the limited appeal of middle-class racial uplift ideology at a decisive turning point in U.S. electoral politics.

With Myrna Santiago's "Women of the Mexican Oil Fields: Class, Nationality, Economy, Culture, 1900–1938," we move from the electoral politics of the United States to the oil fields of Mexico. Writing in response to a historiography that has disappeared women completely, Santiago situates female subjects at the very center of the local and transnational economies that were based on oil extraction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Mexican women were not oil field workers, but through their domestic and cultural labors they built stable and vibrant communities and were therefore absolutely indispensable to the development of Mexico's foreign-owned oil extraction industry. Santiago does not simply present us with a triumphant narrative of women's historical agency. Much of Mexican women's activism, as she shows, relied on "traditional" notions of the male breadwinner and therefore worked to reproduce and reinforce patriarchal regimes of state and local power.

That women's mobilization can, at once, resist state power and reinforce the structures of patriarchy is dramatically recounted in our final article—Amy M. Hay's "Recipe for Disaster: Motherhood and Citizenship at Love Canal." In 1978, residents of Love Canal discovered that they had been living amidst some 22,000 tons of toxic waste. Hay...