Editorial Note: Unity, Solidarity, and Difference in US Politics and Society

We write this note just a few short weeks after returning from the Women's March on Washington, which took place on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of the current US president. Elisa, Jean, and Leigh Ann Wheeler, a former editor of the Journal of Women's History (JWH), travelled from upstate New York to DC with mixed emotions of anger, trepidation, and defiance in the face of the shifting political landscape. We took some comfort, however, in the "Unity Principles" of the March, which opened with the righteous yet commonsensical proposition that "Women's Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women's Rights." This was followed by a bold affirmation of intersectional feminist politics: "We must create a society in which women—including Black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian queer and trans women—are free and able to care for and nurture their families, however they are formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments."¹

But inclusivity is difficult work, and critiques of the March, which began shortly after it was announced, continued for weeks thereafter. The absence of women of color among March organizers was rectified quickly, but tensions remained as participants and observers debated whether cisgender white women and their concerns had been centered at the expense of the March's intersectional ideal. Women of color moreover noted that for many white women protest only became a strategy after the results of the 2016 US presidential election, despite the prior visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement and extraordinary displays of resistance by Native Americans at Standing Rock, ND.² Some astute commentators traced a longer historical trajectory to this dynamic, pointing to the ways the US feminist movement, for more than a century, ignored women of color and the realities of their oppression.³

Such assessments remind us of the need to refine our understanding of a truly intersectional politics that acknowledges the compounded oppressions experienced by some women—and not by others. In the pages of this journal and elsewhere, women's and gender historians have elaborated upon similar questions, documenting the multiple avenues through which race and gender oppression is experienced, the ways that white middle-class womanhood has been presented as a false universal, and the concomitant invisibility of women of color in groups that purportedly represent them. The articles in this issue acknowledge the ideological weight of dominant configurations of womanhood and femininity in the modern United States. But they also reveal how Native American, African American, and working-class women have challenged, reconfigured, incorporated, or even refused these structures, expressing themselves through corporality, cultural practices, social activism, and art.

We open with two articles that consider the relationship of black and Native bodies to white standards of health, wellness, beauty, and maternal virtue—and, by extension, to fitness for citizenship in the United States. In "'Beauty Secrets: Fight Fat,'" Ava Purkiss examines how ideals of pulchritude, slimness, and black womanhood intersected with the white-led physical culture movement that, between 1900 and the 1930s, promoted exercise, conscious eating, and physical education for US women. According to Purkiss, although black women were omitted from the physical culture movement—which envisioned slim, attractive, and healthy bodies as necessarily white—they were active participants in the shift to stigmatizing fatness and encouraging black women to ameliorate their bodies through exercise. "Black anti-fat bias" therefore functioned as one facet of respectability politics by attempting to render black bodies compatible with the image of productive, fit, and responsible bodies most desirable to the state. Purkiss writes that "black women used physical culture to offer alternative images of themselves as slim, desirable, and in good health; this stood in direct contrast to dominant portrayals of black women as sick, overweight, and unattractive." This appropriation of physical culture was especially meaningful for elite black women because, in keeping with the insights of intersectional feminism, even if all women were the targets of fat stigma, "fat" black women carried "extra racial burdens" that...