Editors' Note

Women, Gender, and the Political Economy of Borders

Historians have long chronicled the ways in which women have challenged the borders-public, private, social and political, economic and cultural, real and imagined-set up by structures rooted in the presumption of sexual and/or racial difference sponsored in turn by capitalism and its correlative discursive and material regimes. The articles in this issue showcase research and interpretive frameworks that nuance conventional wisdom about the porousness of apparently gendered domains in part by mapping the movement of women across a variety of borderlines, and in part by conjuring the combination of systematic and chaotic surveillance of such liminal spaces. In so doing, they enable us to see with particular vividness the canniness, determination, and even wit with which women have historically challenged the limits laid down to them by science, law, custom, expectation, and genre. What follows, then, is a series of articles that throw the political economy of borders into bold relief, allowing readers to appreciate anew how the tensions between agency and conformity, structure and contingency, and resistance and hegemony have left their mark on the women's histories recaptured here.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks opens this issue with an exploration of how a number of American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries pushed against what was perceived to be women's limited scientific capacity not just by doing science against the odds, but also by intruding into the bricks-and-mortar world of the natural history museum. Her cast of characters zigzags the country, from California to Washington DC, and their stories dramatize how entwined ideas about rationality were with white masculine privilege inside the confines of modern American science, whether as an intellectual or institutional project. Madsen-Brooks offers, as well, a workable and indeed a portable example of how standpoint theory can help to illuminate the historical significance of the work of women like Alice Eastwood and Agnes Chase, among the first to breach the walls of natural history and to forward it as a public/civic practice. Her use of Donna Haraway's situated knowledge arguments is subtle and effective-not least because it allows her to plot her account on a spatial grid that is not bound by a dichotomous public/private stricture, but engages science and women's capacity to harness it for their own usages from the standpoint of their own embodied subjectivities. Though they were successes by any standard, the real take-away here is the de facto flexibility of institutional borders and the capacity of some subjects, under specific circumstances, to work them effectively and to reterritorialize the terrains in which they labor in both the short- and the long-term.

Elisabeth McMahon and Corrie Decker offer us a different but equally compelling example of women's capacity for reterritorializing the political economy of work by tracking the history of female teachers and their relationship to the state in colonial Zanzibar. As is the case in many colonial contexts, the ground that teachers like Mrs. Johnson (headmistress of the first government girls' school) sought to gain for the training of female teachers was marked out by at least two powerful forces: the colonial state itself and the families of the elite native girls she wanted to educate-girls like Bi Salama, whose grandmother asked a critically important question about what such education would mean, "will you get work or will you get married?" In a brilliantly executed comparative turn, McMahon and Decker examine similar schemes in northern Nigeria, where the local political economy (we use the term here in its broadest metaphorical sense) cannot negotiate an enduring social contract with women teachers, in large measure because the colonial state there cannot read the class and status implications of their outreach only to the daughters of elite, tribal families. The authors know and cite the literature on this subject in other contexts as well, so that what we get here is a deeply contextualized and locally specific analysis of how teacher training exemplifies the disruptive space-making entailed by the collision of a variety of gender systems with colonial power. Hardly...