Editor's Note

We are especially proud of the geographical range of this issue of the Journal of Women's History. The numerical preponderance of Americans in the ranks of women's historians worldwide and the strength of the field of U.S. women's history means that U.S. citizens who study American history submit a very high percentage of the manuscripts we receive. So, it is a treat to offer this collection of articles and book review essays ranging from Australia to Norway, Romania to Madagascar, Ukraine to Italy, Germany to the Caribbean, England to Israel.

Yet, at the same time that we celebrate diversity of subject, I am struck by commonalities in the increasingly sophisticated manner in which we have to come to think of the field of women's history. In very different ways, the contributions to this issue reflect the tendency of recent women's history to look at how what seem to be contradictions or opposites in fact played out in a sometimes tortuous, sometimes perfectly coordinated, dance. For example, Molly McGarry shows how understanding antiobscenity legislation in the United States in the context of the rise of Spiritualism--obscene materials moving through the mail like bodies materializing in the parlor--helps us to understand past and present battles over sexuality. Maria Bucur analyzes the representations of queen-as-nurse and virgin-as-warrior in wartime Romania in order to make sense of post-World War I developments for women. Stacy Braukman and Michael Ross consider the history of the privy examination for U.S. women in the late nineteenth century, pointing out how difficult it is to evaluate the impact on women of this supposedly protective measure and to disentangle the interests of women and the interests of capital.

Line Predelli, analyzing Norwegian women missionaries in Madagascar, emphasizes the balance between accommodation and resistance that characterized the responses of Malagasy women. The concept of "missionary feminism," like Ula Taylor's notion of "community feminism," brings together seeming opposites. Amy Jacques-Garvey, Taylor tells us, combined nationalism and feminism (which Bucur's work shows seemed contradictory in the Romanian context) and redefined "helpmate" and "leader" as compatible roles for women. Likewise, Alison Bashford argues that "domestic science" captures the complexity of Australian nurses' responses to shifts from a profession based on charity to one grounded in science.

The two contributions to "Theoretical Issues" make clear the impact of poststructuralism in both Germany and Italy while sketching the nationally specific development of women's history in those two countries. In a provocative piece about a fierce debate in German women's history, Ralph Leck juxtaposes "cultural feminism" and "gender theory" and proposes the concept of "conservative empowerment feminism" as a means of understanding German women's history and, by extension, much more. Silvia Mantini, in a revised and updated translation by James Schwarten of a piece originally published in an Italian journal in 1997, sketches the twists and turns of Italian women's history. Both articles remind us how intensely political our work is.

We conclude with a book review essay by Gay Gullickson on representations of powerful (historical and fictional) women and single reviews by Heather Miller on twentieth-century American sexuality, Margaret King on wayward women in early modern Italy, and Marian Rubchak on the women's movement in Ukraine. We offer this last review of a book written in Ukrainian because, as with Mantini's piece, we aim to widen our conversations by bringing in information unavailable in English.

The differences in approach, sources, theory, perspective, and narrative style are, of course, as striking as the similarities highlighted here. We do not really live in a global village of women's history. But, perhaps, we are in some ways neighbors in a global city.

Leila J. Rupp
Editor

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