Editor's Note

In this, the penultimate issue edited by the Journal staff at Ohio State, we contemplate some of the thorniest issues associated with feminist inquiry: what is the nature of modernity and how have women responded to these challenges? One reason these questions are so difficult to answer is that the debates often lead feminists down extremely troubling paths, ones that show female support for political and religious groups that are anathema to liberal and socialist feminism. How can these groups of women claim to promote modernity and equality for women? In recent years, modernity has been defined, or left undefined, in so many feminist studies that the nature of change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been debated in the context of women's bodies and rights. Whether talking about lowering the infant mortality rate, providing access to safe methods of birth control or abortion, defining the nature of marriage and its relationship to reproduction, or contemplating the future of the family and the nation, debates in favor of and against measurements of progress (my personal definition of modernity) have relied on the control or liberation of the female body as a major technique. Can conservative women (or men) participate in that goal?

We begin with Diana E. Wright's study of female crime in early modern Japan. Wright proposes a sociological, rather than an ideological explanation for the attention given to female criminals during the Edo period (1603-1868). The inability of the state to control social and economic conditions after the eighteenth century made it difficult for the poor to survive. This reality, rather than Neo-Confucionist philosophies, made many people, including female criminals, more visible to authorities. Punishments exacted control over women's bodies, but, as Wright convinces us, they derived less from patriarchal imperatives than previously assumed.

Carolyn Comiskey's account of botched cosmetic surgery in 1926 Paris provides us with a unique lens onto debates about modernity. Who was at fault—the woman trying to appear modern and more beautiful with thinner legs, or the surgeon who believed that his skills were equal to the dreams of his patient? This story resonates today as full-body plastic surgeries are demonstrated on television to offer hope to women whose ages, bodies, and faces do not fulfill the modern dream.

Malek Abisaab offers an intriguing study of female labor activism in colonial Lebanon in the 1940s. He argues that female factory workers joined in protests at the Lebanese tobacco monopoly's factory—an act usually associated with anti-colonial male forces—and during the strike took control of the laborers' debates. Why were women workers erased from this history? Were they incapable of linking themselves to nationalism? Not according to the evidence Abisaab encountered. This vision of modernity is more comforting to feminists and places a feminist face on anti-colonialism in Lebanon.

The other articles in this issue raise more troubling issues regarding female activism and modernity. They ask a question that, on the surface, appears to be an oxymoron: can conservative women, even fascist women, act in ways to empower themselves and other women and thereby be considered feminists? What is the litmus test for feminism involving women who clearly oppose liberalism yet challenge traditional roles for women in religious and political environments, and, in some cases, support female collaboration that cuts across class and ethnic lines?

Vivian Deno begins the debate by asserting that early U.S. female Pentecostals challenged male patriarchs who dared to interfere with women's rights to worship. Rather than forcing other women to accept a narrow view of female religious rights, female leaders in the early twentieth century paved their own route to greater equality in religion. Women such as Florence Crawford used the Bible to empower themselves, arguing for greater authority, although such challenges did not go uncontested.

We conclude with a special section on women and the political right—a timely and provocative issue. In these articles, the authors state their own feminist credentials in order to separate themselves from the conservative women they study. Julie Gottlieb returns to the topic of fascist women in Great...