Editor's Note

Editor's Note At the second European Social Science History conference in . Amsterdam in March 1998, which I was fortunate enough to attend, I was struck by how truly comparative and international the field of women's history is becoming. At the same time, just writing the phrase "truly international" reminds me of the limitations of our global reach, for this was how the women I have studied in transnational organizations in the years before the Second World War described what they hoped their groups would become by recruiting sections outside of Europe and the "neo-Europes" (European settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia). Of course the conference had more modest aims. But it was heartening that women's history research on such topics as prostitution and welfare policies is proceeding in many national contexts and, implicitly or explicitly, taking on a comparative hue. The Journal of Women's History from its inception has tried to cast its net broadly and to recognize that the creation of women's history (or women's histories, as we are increasingly wont to say) is an international project. One of the primary goals of the current editorial team is to accentuate the benefits of comparative and international approaches. This issue of the Journal, which continues to benefit from decisions the previous editors made, nicely illustrates the possibilities and promise of comparative women's histories. Three of the articles deal with women's sexuality in diverse times and places. We begin with Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez's comparison of Spanish Catholic and Nahua (Aztec) religious and gender ideologies in sixteenth-century New Spain. Women's excessive sexuality posed a particularly dangerous threat in the eyes of the Franciscans who hoped to convert and "civilize" the Nahua. Here we see how integral women's sexuality was to the imperialist project. Likewise, Deborah Symonds views women's sexuality (and its reproductive consequences) in eighteenthcentury rural Scotland as firmly bound up with economic and ideological developments. And Marilyn Hegarty, drawing our attention to the simultaneous mobilization and containment of women's sexuality in the United States during the Second World War, also links sexuality to a larger political project. In these three different contexts, not only is women's sexuality labeled dangerous, but we see the ways that a facet of women's experience generally deemed "private" is shaped by and in turn shapes economic, political, and ideological—very "public"—developments. 1998 Editor's Note 7 Two other articles take up questions of female authority and feminism that resonate across national borders. Angela Woollacott explores the shift from a moral to a professional basis for women's authority in First World War Britain, showing us the gendered and "classed" nature of the authority that reformers, policewomen, and social workers exercised. Much the same process can be seen in other parts of the industrialized world. Kate Wittenstein shows how the work of American psychoanalyst Beatrice Hinkle in the early twentieth century anticipated developments in the internationally influential strand we call "French feminism." Lena Sommestad and Sally McMurry give us the only explicitly comparative work in this issue. Their exploration of the rise of the industrialized dairy industry in Sweden and New York is a perfect illustration of the potential of cross-national comparisons. Focusing on the choices farm daughters made in the context of differing levels of wealth and opportunity, they show us how a global process can have vastly different consequences for women on the ground. Our contribution to "Getting to the Source" in this issue comes from Rudolf Dekker who, in a translation by Marybeth Carlson, shows how the scholarship on women in the Netherlands in the medieval and early modern periods both joins and diverges from the historiography on women in other countries. The fact that he views Dutch historical writing from such an implicitly comparative frame is more typical than not of those writing about small countries too often pushed to the margins, a point reinforced in the joint review essay by Anne Epstein and Birgitte Soland. Yet, the story of this review essay reveals the difficulties of producing comparative women's histories. We had no luck finding a book reviewer...