At the Turn of the Millennium

In the spring of 1995, the women's history group at Ohio State University, consisting of Susan Hartmann, Claire Robertson, Stephanie Shaw, Birgitte Søland, and me, decided to put in a bid to edit the Journal of Women's History.¹ Our vision was to continue the tradition of publishing and reviewing feminist scholarship about women. We thought of the contested term "feminist" as meaning the recognition that gender is an important category of analysis; an assertion that women have been historically disadvantaged relative to men of their race, class, ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, or nation; and a commitment to changing the structures that systematically privilege men over women. We recognized the multiple perspectives captured by the term "feminisms." But we also believed that the divide between "women's history" and "gender history" that still bedeviled the field at that time could be and in fact was bridged by work on women that was sensitive to the particular historical constructions of gender that shape and are shaped by women's experiences (recognizing the complexities and controversies of that last term).²

We hoped to build on the strength of the Journal as handed to us by its founders and first editors, especially its transnational reach and the publication of provocative dialogues on conceptual frameworks in women's history. We sought to facilitate interaction among different national fields of women's history by seeking out explicitly comparative and transnational scholarship, by organizing thematic issues that juxtaposed scholarship on different nations and regions of the globe at different points of time ("Sexing Women's History," "Women and Twentieth–Century Religious Politics: Beyond Fundamentalism," "Marginalizing Economies: Work, Poverty, and Policy," "Ages of Women: Age as a Category of Analysis in Women's History," "Women and the State," "Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries," and "Women's Labors"), assigning thematic book review essays that asked scholars to venture outside their own geographical and chronological expertise, and by attending to books published in languages other than English. We even printed documents in our "Getting to the Source" section in French (Les sages femmes d'Athènes) and Hungarian (A radikál Magyar hölgyek kivánatai).³ The effort to nurture comparative and transnational history grew not only out of my own historical interests (and decades–old hopeful pronouncement that comparative and transnational scholarship was the wave of the future), but also the explicitly comparative structure of our women's history field at Ohio State and our collective commitment to fighting national parochialism.

The dialogues, or what Claire Robertson liked to call "multilogues," that we organized on theoretical issues in the field we also sought to make comparative. Commenting on Judith Bennett's brief for continuity in women's history, now elaborated into her new book, we called on perspectives from African, European, and U.S. history.⁴ In rethinking the concept of public and private, so central to the development of the field of women's history, we invited responses from English, Brazilian, and Middle Eastern women's historians, as well as a sociologist.⁵ In our final issue, we published Gerda Lerner's reflections on the state of U.S. women's history, with commentaries from younger scholars working in different chronological periods and areas of concentration.⁶

Along the way, we took advantage of editing the Journal across the turn of the millennium to reflect on the past, present, and future of women's history in a variety of ways. Perhaps inspired by all the uproar over the impending Y2K (remember that term?), we also tried to attend to new technologies and to think of creative ways to facilitate communication across differences. One of our innovations was to sponsor e–mail conversations and then edit and publish the transcripts as a way of capturing some of the freshness of actual dialogue about a topic. Our first transcript was a roundtable conversation in response to Toni McNaron's Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia, among a diverse group of graduate students contemplating their futures.⁷ Our next was a conversation across three "generations" of women...