Editorial Note: Domestic Spaces, Black Internationalism, and Lived Experience

As this issue goes to press, we have just returned from the exhilarating 2018 meeting of the International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH), an organization with a global vision that matches the intellectual agenda of this journal. It is gratifying to see how many of the prominent themes at the IFRWH conference are also reflected in the submissions to the Journal of Women's History (JWH), which, since its founding in 1989, has showcased the international turn in women's history. Partnerships with organizations like the IFRWH, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians are a key component of the JWH's feminist praxis. We look forward to continued collaboration in these spaces with colleagues from across the globe.

The articles and review essays in this issue expand the horizons of women's history spatially, by mapping transnational geographies and networks; methodologically, by interrogating new sources; and historiographically, by elaborating canonical arguments. We begin with three articles that analyze the production of meaning in domestic space and lived experiences in the home. The first, by Cara Delay, explores the material culture of abortion in North and South Ireland between 1922 and 1949. While the image of "backstreet" abortions typically comes to mind when envisioning societies where abortion is illegal, in fact, the procedure often occurred in domestic spaces and within female networks, using common household items. In "Kitchens and Kettles," Delay argues for the "ordinariness of abortion," which, for many Irish women, "was woven into the fabric of everyday life." Despite the cult of domesticity and the sexually repressive ideal promoted by the state, many working-class women successfully managed their fertility through abortions performed by female relatives or neighbors in homes where a range of "everyday domestic health practices," including abortion, endured. Delay's findings contradict the notion of Irish sexual exceptionalism, revealing that women's reproductive lives in Ireland were not dramatically different than elsewhere in Europe.

Carolyn Lewis echoes some of Delay's observations about "women's domestic reproductive care" in her article on medical home birth in Chicago between 1932 and 1973. In "At Home, You're the Most Important Thing," Lewis shows how women of color and low-income white women chose to give birth at home, rather than in hospitals, not only because it was more affordable but also because they believed that the doctors and nurses who worked for the Chicago Maternity Center (CMC) treated patients with dignity and respect. While middle-class white women are often credited with catalyzing the resistance to hospitalization, poor women in Chicago who opted for medical home birth through the CMC did so well before the women's health and lay midwifery movements challenged "hospital-based obstetrical practices." Lewis's article, like Delay's, documents the voices and experiences of poor women regarding their fertility and the ways they expressed their right to decide where, and under what conditions, to determine the course of their pregnancies.

Hyaeweol Choi's "Transpacific Aspiration toward Modern Domesticity" also considers the home and domestic culture in a refreshingly innovative way. She argues that in colonial-era Korea, the idea of the "modern home" was a "key locus where national, colonial, and missionary projects converged." If the equation of domesticity with modernity is now a familiar argument in women's history, Choi complicates this relationship by revealing how the making of the modern home occurred within a "transpacific network" that included American Protestant missionaries and Korean nationalists, in addition to Japanese colonial authorities. Moreover, she points to the way home economics as a discipline fashioned this discourse, allowing Korean students to create, adjust, and indigenize modern knowledge about domesticity. Taken together, the articles by Choi, Lewis, and Delay artfully demonstrate how power is both reproduced and challenged in the contours of everyday life and, specifically, from within the physical and social architecture of the household.

The next three articles shift our focus to the role of women and their networks in black internationalist movements. Contributions by Rachel Sandwell, Laura Moore, and Imaobong Umoren explore...