Editor's Note

Ever since 11 September, it seems impossible to begin anything—a wel come speech, a newsletter column, an editor's note—without reflecting on the meaning of those cataclysmic events for the subject at hand. It is a bit like the millennium, but more so: a surfeit of references, but hard to resist adding another. So here goes mine.

It was hard not to notice that gender—but not women—was central to the terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban regime. I have to admit to being tempted to view the war on terrorism, as well as terrorism itself, from the perspective of the history of the international women's movement I have studied. My Dutch friend Mineke Bosch, an expert on the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in the years before the Second World War, e-mailed me to say that she thought often of "our dear old lady friends from the past," as she so nicely put it. She had begun to think that "their theories about the moral superiority of women and the natural beastliness of men are perhaps not so stupid after all! For where are the women in the New War?"

Where indeed (with the exception of Condoleezza Rice and some U.S. women in the military)? I have both resisted and been drawn to such a view. We know, of course, that it is not so simple. I understand the revulsion expressed by Timothy Stewart-Winter, in the newsletter of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, at potential analyses of what was "queer" about the terrorist attacks. ¹ He dreaded talk of such things as "the twinness of the Twin Towers" when "so many bodies were still being pulled from the rubble," since the destruction "seemed to obliterate difference, including sexual difference." All of this has made me think a lot about the meaning of the post-9/11 world for women's history.

In that light, this issue raises all sorts of questions about gender and other categories of difference. Suellen Hoy's analysis of a Catholic girls' high school in a Chicago neighborhood that became predominantly African American in the 1950s is a story of race, class, and religion, as well as gender, and all of these factors are crucial to understanding the importance of Loretto Academy in the history of the civil rights movement. Heather Fowler-Salamini explores the interaction of gender and class in the activism of Mexican women coffee sorters, raising questions about consciousness and identity as peasants became urban workers in a volatile revolutionary situation. The situation of these Veracruz women contrasts markedly with that of the women agricultural workers Beatrice Farnsworth analyzes. These poorest of rural workers did not respond to the attempts of the Soviet regime to unionize them in the mid-1920s, but then neither did the revolutionary state put sufficient effort into understanding and attempting to mobilize them. Read together, Fowler-Salamini's and Farnsworth's articles foster thought about how and why women workers are successfully organized.

Turning to rural women in a different regional and temporal context, W. Flagg Miller analyzes the poetry of Yemeni women as a form of activism. His attention to the discourses of tribalism, Islamism, and nationalism has great resonance in our current world situation. On a very different subject, Joanne Wright reexamines the political thought of Thomas Hobbes in the context of both intellectual history and English Civil War women's activism. She suggests that Hobbes's thought was more positive for women than scholars have tended to recognize. Certainly the question of women's place in civil society, as the public attention granted Afghan women under the Taliban in the aftermath of the attacks points out, is of more than historical interest.

In this issue, we also offer another contribution to our series, "Women's History in the New Millennium," a retrospective on Barbara Welter's classic article, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820...