Editors' Note

This issue of the Journal of Women's History is dedicated to Susan Porter Benson, in celebration of her life and her many contributions to women's and gender history. Sue passed away on 20 June 2005 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. A member of our Board of Editors, she was a pioneering scholar in the fields of women's and gender, public, and labor history. She taught at the University of Warwick (1984), the University of Missouri–Columbia (1986–1993), Yale University (1998), and, most recently, the University of Connecticut (1993–2005). In an academic work culture that seems to value only individual effort and singular achievement, Sue was a tireless collaborator who gave selflessly to many a collective endeavor—from her work on public history with the Radical History Review Collective, to the Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians, to her NEH-sponsored efforts to bring the humanities to textile workers.

Sue's prize-winning first monograph, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (University of Illinois Press, 1986), was absolutely path-breaking; it was the first to place service work and gender at the heart of historical inquiry. Her subsequent projects—on gender, consumption, and working-class life in the United States between the two World Wars—resulted in an equally field-defining set of articles and papers and in the forthcoming monograph Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar USA (Cornell University Press, 2007).

In this issue, we celebrate Susan Porter Benson's work with a set of articles—one of her own, "What Goes 'Round Comes 'Round: Secondhand Clothing, Furniture, and Tools in Working-Class Lives in the Interwar United States," and three by young scholars whose perspectives on gender, service work, and consumption have been profoundly shaped by Sue's pioneering work: Val Marie Johnson's "'The Rest Can Go to the Devil': Macy's Workers Negotiate Gender, Sex, and Class in the Progressive Era"; Donica Belisle's "Negotiating Paternalism: Women and Canada's Largest Department Stores, 1890–1960"; and Katrina Srigley's "Clothing Stories: Consumption, Identity, and Desire in Depression-Era Toronto." The collection is eloquently introduced by Sue Levine in "The Culture of Consumption Reconsidered: Essays in Tribute to Susan Porter Benson." These individual papers were originally presented at a session on "Sites of Consumption," chaired by Levine, at the "Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working Class History in North America and Beyond" Conference (Toronto, ON, Canada, 29 September–2 October 2005). The session was dedicated to Susan Porter Benson, who had been slated to serve as the session commentator. We would like to thank Sue Levine, as well as Eileen Boris, Franca Iacovetta, and Tina Simpson, for helping us to assemble the work for this tribute.

Susan Porter Benson was an "Americanist" by historical training, but she always read widely—across geographical, political, and chronological boundaries—and consistently set her work in dialogue with debates far outside the field of U.S. women's history. In celebration of that spirit, sin fronteras, we feature in this issue scholars in dialogue across national boundaries. In "Babies Across Borders: Problems for Women's History in the Study of Transborder Adoption," five scholars participate in a fascinating roundtable discussion about adoption across borders, providing new insight into questions of motherhood, race, and nation. In our third History Practice, nine historians debate the question of "Gendering Trans/National Historiographies" from their own specific "national" locations. And finally, of course, this issue concludes with a superb set of four book review essays that share a transnational focus on race and gender: Lee Joan Skinner's "Identity, Nation, and Revolution in Latin America"; Kim Warren's "Gender, Race, Culture, and the Mythic American Frontier"; Dawn Rae Flood's "Deviance Gendered, Criminology Exposed"; and Elizabeth A. Bohl's "Bodies that Deviate: From the Anomalous to the Wayward in Recent Studies of Race, Gender, and Nation."

In the many tributes, celebrations, and memorials that have marked Sue's passing over the past year, one word has appeared repeatedly—generosity. Susan Porter Benson had a generosity of spirit that knew no bounds...