Editors' Note

Five years ago, almost to the day, we penned our first "Editors' Note" for the Journal of Women's History. The journal had arrived at the University of Illinois from Ohio State University only a few short months before. We were still overwhelmed by the details, by the daily mechanics, by the enormous intellectual responsibility of what we had taken on, but we were also wide-eyed with energy and excitement as we looked forward to the possibilities and challenges ahead. One of our primary goals, before the boxes from Ohio even arrived, was to enhance the journal's coverage of international, transnational, and global issues by working to enlarge the world of women whose histories the journal worked to make visible. In those early days, this was not always easy. We sometimes had to stretch, pull, and tug—beg and borrow even—to assemble an issue that was geographically and temporally diverse and yet cohered thematically or methodologically. We must say that this issue, which inaugurates our sixth and final year as coeditors, required little stretching or begging and yet it reaches from India to Romania, from Britain to Cuba, and, as importantly, places U.S. women's history in a transnational frame. We have our authors, our patient and generous reviewers, and our Editorial Board to thank for whatever progress we have made on this score over the past five years.

This issue opens with a wonderful collection of articles that bring refreshing new perspectives to the study of women and revolution. Jennifer Guglielmo's "Transnational Feminism's Radical Past: Lessons from Italian Immigrant Women Anarchists in Industrializing America," reconstructs the diasporic world of Italian women radicals who struggled for women's emancipation, but not from within modern nation states, whose borders they consistently defied, nor through the conventional avenues of trade unions or cross-class alliances with middle-class women. Their little known story is one of collective direct action, which stretches from Italy, to Brazil and Argentina, to Paterson, New Jersey and New York City. Guglielmo's account challenges us to look to the margins for some of the most "visionary ideas of human liberation," as she reconstructs a powerful history of transnational feminism that is not Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but radical and working class.

Jill Massino's "Something Old, Something New: Marital Roles and Relations in State Socialist Romania" takes a different approach to women and revolution as it explores gender roles in postrevolutionary, state socialist Romania. Here the concern is not with women confronting the state, but with the state confronting both women and men as it worked to refashion gender roles along socialist lines. Based on a careful reading of propaganda and legislation and on interviews with Romanian women and men, Massino contends that, contrary to much extant scholarship that argues for women's continued subordination under state socialism, there were significant changes, especially in the gendered dynamics of households. She provides evidence that men participated more fully in household activities, including childcare, but that these shifts were not simply due to the efficacy of propaganda and legislation. Women's increased participation in the labor force often necessitated men's assumption of domestic duties. Johanna I. Moya Fábregas's "The Cuban Woman's Revolutionary Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State's Gender Ideology, 1950–1976," explores a set of questions similar to Massino's, but in the context of revolutionary Cuba, where the state also sought to reconstruct gender politics in order to facilitate women's incorporation into the labor force and into the revolution. But in a world in which women were understood primarily as mothers, wives, and homemakers, the state deployed familiar, patriarchal language in its efforts to reconfigure gender roles. In the end, this language did facilitate the emergence of a New Woman—a caregiver and revolutionary leader—but it also reproduced the very patriarchal structures it sought to undermine.

Our second section focuses on passion and sexuality and includes the work of three scholars who use very different kinds of sources to excavate the personal, the passionate, and the erotic. Marilyn Morris leads off with "Negotiating Domesticity...