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  • Editorial NoteProtest and Dissent in Twentieth-Century Women's History
  • Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert

This issue explores how twentieth-century women engaged in many forms of protest and dissent. It includes women who participated in boycotts and lobbying or fought for their rights in court, as well as "bad mothers," lesbian separatists, and leftist activists who defied conventional ideas about family and femininity. Some of these women worked for international peace and justice, others on behalf of the feminist movement, and still others to build women-only spaces outside of the patriarchal family. They expressed dissent on their bodies, in the radical press, and in the courtroom and bedroom alike.

We open with two articles that consider the "soft power" of women in transnational contexts, where they used cultural diplomacy to foster cooperation and mutual understanding in the interest of political and economic goals. In "How Could I Not Love You," Kazushi Minami describes how a range of American women challenged the policy of "containment and isolation" regarding China in the Cold War period. Acting as lobbyists and critics, these women indirectly influenced US foreign relations with China, bolstering support for the Sino-American rapprochement that culminated in the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. For example, the League of Women Voters (LWV), a white, middle-class women's organization, repeatedly lobbied the Nixon administration to urge for a new China policy. The LWV also educated its members and the general public on Chinese history and culture, organizing domestic conferences, circulating didactic materials, and hosting a range of community education programs. The organization aimed to provide US citizens with more neutral information about China in the emotional context of the Cold War. A different group of US women traveled to China in the 1950s and 1960s, including African American women of the left like Eslanda Robeson and Shirley Graham Du Bois. During their visit, they absorbed the "gender propaganda" supplied by the communist government regarding maternity leave, abortion, and women's education and healthcare. Leftist women of color critiqued the US feminist movement for ignoring questions of race while applauding the revolution's achievements for their female counterparts in China. According to Minami, this "facilitated the rise of a new discourse on Chinese socialism and feminism," one that idealized the East and criticized the West.

Nicole de Silva's "Fashioning Chinese America" also employs a transnational lens to document how women intervened in relations between the United States and China. Her article begins in San Francisco's Chinatown, [End Page 7] where women's protest manifested as a boycott of silk textiles sourced from China's Japanese adversaries during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). De Silva describes how Alice Fong Yu, a Chinese American clubwoman, "used the boycott to communicate the political acuity and cultural modernity of Chinese and Chinese American women." Such "commodity-based activism" spread beyond the Chinese American community as the boycott was taken up by other groups: students, celebrities involved in Hollywood's Anti-Nazi League, and white women who cast their stockings in bonfires and sensuously bared their legs at high society events. For Chinese American participants, however, the boycott's meaning transcended the call for economic disinvestment from Japan and shutting down the Japanese "war machine." It was also a means to "articulate national identities and contest racialized representations codified by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943)." As in Minami's article, the goal was to counter the negative stereotypes about China and its people that circulated among the US public. De Silva highlights the transpacific scope of this endeavor, which relied both on established techniques of US consumer-based activism and knowledge of "Chinese political culture and tradition." Yu hoped to counter racial stereotypes by situating China within "modernity" and Chinese women within "modern" women's political subjectivity. She moreover believed that nonviolent protest and the promotion of peace was women's work. The boycott registered that protest on women's bodies, highlighting their self-sacrifice by refusing to wear silk.

The three following articles emphasize the constraints of the traditional American family, along with the perils—and pleasures—of deviating from that norm. In "Politics and Parenting in...

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