Editor's Note

Editor's Note Born from the women's movement—or at least from questioning restraints and restrictions on women in times and places before the emergence of organized activism—women's history has always made connections to the present. Perhaps most famously in the Sears case, which pitted an interpretation of structural constraints on women's labor against an analysis of women's occupational choices based on family responsibilities , "academic" debates have spilled over into fierce struggles over law- and policy-making.1 Most of the articles in this issue (although we did not plan it that way) make connections to contemporary political questions . The first three articles deal with a topic much in the news these days: the dismantling of the public track of what Sonya Michel calls the "public-private welfare system" in the United States. From Barbados in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries to New York at the turn of the nineteenth century to the debate between two groups of U.S. reformers committed to improving women's experiences of reproduction and childrearing in the years between the two world wars, we see the complex ways that state welfare policies have multiple intentions and complex consequences for women's lives. These three articles reveal the persistent , if shifting, designation of some people as the "deserving poor" and others as the "undeserving." And they point out the varying but everpresent political and social purposes behind these categories. In the case of Barbados, Cecily Forde-Jones shows us that poor relief for white women helped to bolster white supremacy by both punishing sexual transgressions across racial lines and distinguishing among the poorest members of society on the basis of race. Forde-Jones's work also serves as an illustration of the complex interactions of gender, race, and class, reminding us of the need to move beyond describing differences among groups of women to understanding the relationality of difference. Emily Abel directly engages the contemporary struggle over welfare in her consideration of New York City charity at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Forde-Jones, who tells of poor Barbadian women refusing to apprentice their daughters, Abel emphasizes the agency of women with limited choices. When charity workers attempted to institutionalize ill or disabled family members so that poor women in New York City could leave home to work, the recipients of charity rebelled. Abel analyzes women's strategies of resistance, and insists on our need to rethink the value of traditional female "caring," which poor women saw as a right 1998 Editor's Note 7 rather than a burden. Both Forde-Jones's and Abel's articles foreshadow our forthcoming special issue on Women and Poverty, which will appear in early 2000. Robyn Rosen's examination of the conflict between birth controllers and maternal welfare advocates in the interwar years also helps us to understand the contemporary U.S. welfare system. Because maternalists looked to the state and birth controllers hooked up with physicians, who saw the state as an adversary, women with similar goals found themselves on opposite sides of a political struggle. Rosen reminds us of the importance of this history for understanding how the U.S. welfare state came to reinforce women's traditional role as mothers and yet reject the notion of women's right to reproductive freedom—a balance very much affected by race and ethnicity. Contemporary feminist debates about reproduction and sexual difference are brought to mind by George Robb's exploration of the work of Frances Swiney. Swiney was a feminist-spiritualist eugenicist in Edwardian England who argued for a moral and spiritual motherhood that would transcend sexuality and reproduction. Believing that women had reached the highest stage of development, Swiney asserted that men were but a temporary evolutionary device whose time had come to an end. Her arguments for female superiority are reminiscent of some twentiethcentury radical feminist discourse, and her belief in white supremacy reminds us of the potential compatibility of feminism and racism. The impact of religion on women's lives—brought to the headlines by events as disparate as the edicts of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the proclamations of the recent U.S. Southern Baptist...