Editor's Note

We were recently informed of the first reported female casualties of the U.S.- and British-led war with Iraq; with other reports from the battlefront, we now see female soldiers being taken as prisoners of war and also performing heroic actions to save their fellow combatants. It leaves me wondering how the enduring public/private dichotomy can function in the twenty-first century, both during war and after. This issue is particularly resonant for those of us preoccupied by these concerns, and demonstrates the long-standing power of such institutions as religion, education, and the state—as well as women's efforts to change them.

We begin our summer issue with two responses to our last issue's retrospective on the international aspects of the concepts of private and public. Mary Ryan argues that rather than discard the notions of private and public, we need to refine these categories of women's experience because they serve as useful markers from which historians of women's history can begin a fruitful dialogue. Joan Landes presents a different perspective, arguing that these concepts have always been a contested terrain explored through various ideological and disciplinary perspectives. She defines this contestation as an "account of embodied subjectivity, which does not lose sight of the social interaction and communicative processes."

From the continued theoretical debates, we proceed to historical studies of women in situations that often contested the notions of public and private. We begin with an article by Judith P. Aikin on the theology of childbirth in early modern Germany. Her fascinating contrast explores male devotional texts that focused on the need for female suffering during childbirth and differences seen in Aemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt's text, which gave a more supportive and caring view of parturient pain. Aikin examines the theological struggle that publicized women's private pain of childbirth. Because Aikin generously provides many original German passages in her footnotes, her article also provides another way of "Getting to the Source."

Next, we have an article by Carolyn J. Eichner that analyzes the role of socialist women during the Paris Commune of 1871. Through her examination of two women, Paule Mink and André Leo, each with different ideological perspectives on the role of violent revolution, we see the breadth of female participation in a very public struggle. Indeed, these women were considered so subversive that they were monitored by the French police for decades after the end of the Commune. Brian D. Bunk also explores the role of women during revolution, but turns our attention to the Spanish Civil War and the ways that collective memory operated to recall the activism of Aida Lafuente. Although Lafuente was a combatant on the side of the insurrection, her participation and death deeply conflicted with the dominant paradigms of womanhood in Catholic Spain. Hence, even within the opposition to Franco, her memory was transformed into a model that reflected traditional notions of proper gender behavior than her factual participation.

We then turn to the posthumous publication of Mary Procida's study of how cookbooks mediated the socially unacceptable space of the imperial kitchen with the needs of British soldiers and wives in India. In this exciting contribution, Procida uses cookbooks to demonstrate how Indian and British people negotiated these colonial circumstances. This fascinating study provides important insights regarding the need for the private world of the household to accommodate the reality that single men and women fresh from England needed critical information to maintain their status and sovereignty within the home. To round out our compilation of articles, Susan Zeiger provides a fascinating account of U.S. teachers' campaign to prevent mandatory military training for boys in the public schools in the World War I era. Zeiger recounts the feminist and pacifist activities of Fanny Fern Andrews, who opposed radical and public confrontations by school teachers to promote peace. The formation of the American School Peace League helped legitimate Andrews's cautious approach to pacifism in the schools, but created tensions between...