Editor's Note

Editor's Note With this issue of the Journal of Women's History, we expand our ongoing consideration of the many ways we research and write women's history by introducing a section we call "Theory in Practice" with an inaugural contribution from Lisa Duggan. Our idea, the brainchild of Associate Editor Birgitte S0land, is to ask historians who explicitly utilize theory in their empirical work to write about that process: to reflect on what theory brings, what difficulties they experience, what advantages accrue. The literature on theory, or conceptual frameworks, in women's history is already substantial, but we have much less empirical work that applies theory. And we have almost no literature that links theorizing and the actual "doing" of history. In hopes of stimulating our thinking about the use of theory in practice, we launch this new section. Duggan here places her forthcoming book, Sapphic Slashers, in the context of the "theory wars" and considers what poststructuralism means for her work on the Alice Mitchell case and the construction of "the lesbian" in the United States, 1880-1930. We invite readers interested in contributing future pieces on diverse theoretical perspectives to contact us at the Journal. This issue, which continues to benefit from editorial decisions made at Indiana University, also contains empirical articles on a range of topics. We begin with a glimpse into Uzbek society in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Soviet government sought to undermine Islam and incorporate Uzbekistan into the new communist state; Shoshana Keller's research represents the opening up of the history of Soviet Central Asia, too often ignored in the traditional concentration on Soviet Russia. Then Bruce Fehn takes us into the United Packinghouse Workers of America in the 1950s, where African-American women unionists made good use of their experience in community struggles and took advantage of a progressive union leadership to build an interracial coalition to fight against racial and gender discrimination . Next Suzanne Thurman shows us two Shaker women in the mid-nineteenth-century United States who challenged the orthodox leadership by calling for changes in the system of celibacy that lay at the core of Shaker life. Now lingering for awhile in the same time and place, we find further resistance to women's traditional roles. Sarah Allaback tells the story of the founding and spread of U.S. design schools for women, which moved from domestic to public spaces, provided a new kind of education for women, and sought to carve out a female profession that linked art and industry. Elizabeth Munson and Greg Dickinson analyze the strategies Antoinette Brown Blackwell employed in her attempt to 1998 Editor's Note 7 assert women's authority in the public sphere. Finally, we shift to a contemporary story with Belinda Carstens-Wickham's explication of the gendered imagery dominating cartoons depicting the "unification" of East and West Germany in 1989. The methods or approaches the authors wield in these articles are diverse, reflecting the connections the field of women's history makes with other disciplines. Our contributors hail from the fields of art and architecture , rhetorical and cultural studies, and German literature, as well as from history; and their works are shaped by these disciplinary differences. For instance, Allaback argues for the importance of women's role in creating a national aesthetic in the United States, Munson and Dickinson examine the rhetorical strategies, including the transition from religiously based to scientific authority, Blackwell utilized, and Carstens-Wickham explores both visual and textual discourse. Yet certain basic questions tie together research that otherwise has little in common. Several of these articles focus on the complex nature of women's power. Keller gives us no easy answer to the question of what was "good" for Uzbek women in the 1920s and 1930s. Government representatives , both male and female, sought to "liberate" women, and we are treated to the spectacle of Uzbek women gathering in public, stripping off their veils, and tossing them onto bonfires. In the process, these women risked violence, even death. Thurman shows how power was central to the Shaker heresy of Roxalana Grosvenor and Fidelia Grosvenor; ironically , their proposals for change in the system of celibacy...