Editors' Note and Acknowledgements

Editors' Note and Acknowledgements "Yes, Virginia, there is a women's history." For over a quarter of a century women's history has been a mainstay of the new research on women in a struggle that has moved it from patriarchal to poststructural modes of analysis. This scholarship was appropriately first published in largely interdisciplinary journals as many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences began to study women seriously for the first time—as individuals and as groups, using gender, race, and class as categories of analysis. The number of these publications is no longer sufficient to accommodate the geometric increase in research and writing in women's history. In fact, the question has arisen whether women's history will remain simply a subfield of the discipline waiting to be integrated into the mainstream (an aim almost universally endorsed twenty-five years ago), or whether it is now in the process of becoming an "alternative" form of history. Perhaps, as Gerda Lerner and others have suggested, integration may not now be the primary or, at least, the only goal for many historians of women. The restructuring of history itself may well be on their minds. The time has come to consider this supposition (once again) for ourselves and for the profession. After all, women's history is almost unique among the various new fields which have developed since the Second World War in that it came into existence with a very large number of trained female scholars who were ready and eager to make women (i.e., themselves) the subject matter of research. In 1935 Carl L. Becker could confidently assert that "everyman" was "his own historian," but by 1986 Mary Beth Norton could just as confidently assert that Clio was becoming a feminist with "well over 1000 women and men in the United States alone working almost exclusively in women's history." Given the added impetus of the political and socioeconomic agenda advocated by the Second Women's movement, this demographic and intellectual self-interest among women historians of women all over the world may well be on the verge of transforming the discipline of history. With the help of our U.S. Board of Associate Editors and our International Board of Advisers, to whom we are already much indebted, the JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY will explore this possibility and other significant developments that lie on the horizon of this vibrant field of intellectual inquiry as it enters the twenty-first century. With this inaugural issue we are introducing several features that, with your help, will become permanent and valuable ones for readers far beyond 12 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING the borders of the United States. Possibly the most important one will be a series of Theoretical and Methodological Dialogues on the Writing of Women's History. The translation of a provocative essay written collectively by ten French academics, first published in Annales, Economies, Societies, Civilisations and reprinted with permission, provides the initial format for a discussion of issues by a group of historians from the United States. We would like to thank Eleni Varikas and Kathleen Barry for bringing this article to our attention and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation for funding the translation. The translation proved a difficult one, because we wanted to make its ideas accessible to an Englishspeaking audience without violating the integrity and complexity of the original French. All of the commentators had access to the essay in French in addition to a literal translation by Françoise Mennechet. Their quotations refer to the latter. Christine Delphy, Karen Offen, and Michelle Perrot checked this translation to assure that it reflected French feminist nuances and contained as few contre sens as possible. The final translation and the one provided here is a slightly freer version by Camille Garnier which is designed to be more accessible to our readers while retaining the accuracy and sensitivity to language of the literal translation. (Please submit unpublished methodological and theoretical essays in English or those previously published in other languages to our Bloomington, Indiana, editorial office for consideration, along with suggestions for commentors.) We think that it is not only important to...