Editors' Note

The articles in this issue proceed from the conviction, still worth underscoring in the context of "women's" history, that axes of power other than gender often exercise a critical role in the shaping of women's lives. They each make the case for the role of gendered presumptions and lived experience in women's history, of course, but they offer compelling evidence that in some instances the ideological and material work of gender can be occluded, subordinated to, and otherwise muted by the historical force of class or race as systems of power and sites of struggle. In the process, and in keeping with the best work in women's history, they manage to materialize a range of historical subjects—the shopkeepers of early modern Nantes, the craftswomen of Rajasthan, the East African mission girls and women of Karema, the working-class women of the interwar YWCA, and the women organizers of the postwar U.S. national Democratic party—whose stories have not been told. Those stories, in turn, remind us of what the stakes of acknowledging gender as a constituent of power rather than the constitutive one; they offer evidence, in other words, of how critical decentering gender can be for the production of genuinely new knowledges in and for "women's" history.

Gayle K. Brunelle uses the case of Jehanne Le Roy, a sixteenth-century French tavern keeper, to open out onto the larger history of women's work in the subeconomies of early modern Europe and to dramatize how laboring women made their way through them in order to make their livings and, in the process, to forge identities every bit as professional as their counterparts in the guilds. Drawing on records of municipal councils where women like Le Roy defended themselves (she was accused of serving wine during the celebration of mass) and railed against their fate at the margins, arguing outright against their accusers even when they faced fine or imprisonment. The widowed craftswomen in Nandita Prasad Sahai's article were constrained in different ways, by caste rather than by class, but by caste operating in the context of a conjugal system whereby their labor was entailed by their marital status. These women's voices are not evident in the petitions, which privileged the testimony and claims of male relatives. But through her careful, even painstaking, reconstruction, Sahai conjures a comparatively joyless world for craftswomen who lost their husbands, even as she concludes by seeing more continuities than divergences across caste when it comes to historicizing kinship systems in the context of Indian domesticity on the threshold of modernity.

Kathleen Smythe's article also addresses the impact of status hierarchies on gender roles, this in the context of East Africa. Her article tells the story of a different kind of European missionary than we are accustomed to encountering: the White Sisters of the Trinity, many of whom came from rural France and even Canada, lacked formal education and left working-class families behind in search of evangelical opportunity in Africa. Despite their subordination to the White Fathers, the running of the mission school was almost completely at their disposition—though less surprisingly, the Sisters' sense of racial and religious superiority meant that they delegated much of the manual labor of the complex to their African pupils. Even those training for the novitiate were still given menial tasks. Meanwhile, as Smythe also shows, flexible gender norms in some African communities, as with the Fipa, enabled girls' attendance at school—with the result that they learned how to read and write and count and, for some anyway, to become catechists and religious leaders in their own right. The workingwomen in Dorothea Browder's article used their class status in the YWCA somewhat differently: they insisted on putting the political rights of working people at the center of the organization's Christian Purpose project, in part to forward a progressivist social justice agenda. Those "working girls" recruited by middle-class reformers drew them into debates about labor organizing and labor laws—debates that were far from their own original convictions about the work of evangelization but which...