Editor's Note

It is with great pleasure that I begin my co-editorship of the Journal of Women's History. I look forward to working with a fantastic editorial group at OSU. Stephanie Gilmore has been a wonderful help to me as I begin to take an active role in the operations of the journal. This summer, she singlehandedly managed the office with great skill as Cherisse Jones was on a summer fellowship, Charlotte Weber won Ohio State University's coveted Presidential Fellowship, and Leila Rupp moved to Santa Barbara. Neither Jones nor Weber will be returning, and we would all like to take this opportunity to express our thanks for their collegial and professional contributions to the journal. In September, Gretchen Voter, an incoming graduate student, became a managing editor and is working with Stephanie, Leila, and myself.

The fall issue is an exploration into the nature of feminism, historical practice, and gendered negotiations. At a time of extreme international tensions when negotiations seem to have collapsed, it is important to understand how feminism, despite its penchant for combativeness, has always nurtured negotiations of all kinds. We begin with Nwando Achebe's account of how she tackled multiple identities of feminist, daughter, wife, member of the African Igbo community and historian. Aware that her professional training had not prepared her for dealing with these multiple realities, she realized that they became an issue as she conducted oral interviews for her research on Ahebi Ugbabe's life and transformation into a man. To get a woman's perspective on a woman who interacted more with men, whom should she consult, and how should she listen? Her insights should be useful to all who engage in oral history.

Then we go back to early modern Venice. Laura McGough analyzes how propertied non-elite women left money to female asylums and convents as part of a strategy to regulate familial disputes with their husbands and agnatic and cognatic kin. In return for the use of the money, these establishments distributed the inheritances in ways that enabled the donors to deal with issues that would have been difficult to negotiate in any other way. These bequests enabled the institutions to participate in the formation of the political state as representatives of female, rather than patriarchal, interests.

The next three articles examine negotiations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Satadru Sen challenges the notion of Indian male passivity within colonial India and uses the case of nineteenth-century British efforts to limit female infanticide. In this piece, Indian male patriarchs welcomed the opening of the "Indian" home or zenana to government appointed midwives to support British contentions that infanticide stemmed from collective practices of traditional groups and expensive marriage costs. Men also negotiated the empire's concern through contests in which they discussed the nature of infanticide.

Shifting to the United States, Lynn Sacco's article on incest focuses on U.S. medical discourse on gonorrhea in young girls and how the possibility that the infection stemmed from rape or incest was limited to cases of poor, non-white girls. Daughters of middle- or upper-class white families must have caught the disease from toilet seats or other non-sexual sources of contamination, even when fathers were ill with the same disease. Although scientific knowledge regarding gonorrhea clearly indicated that the bacteria die quickly in the open air, doctors refused to recognize sexual assault and blamed the rates of infection on general unsanitary conditions. It took modern feminist campaigns to renegotiate the scientific explanation for gonorrhea in young girls.

The last article places the issue of negotiation as a specific feminist historical practice. Fiona Paisley traces the ways that Australian feminists served as mediators between East and West as they participated in the Pan-Pacific Women's Conferences that began in the late 1920s. As white women citizens of a Pan-Pacific nation, they found themselves linked to both the European and U.S. feminist notions of civilization and the Asian movement to integrate new groups...