Editorial Note: Politics, Activism, Race

The study of politics, activism, and race is certainly not new to historians of women. Indeed, many among the first generation of women's historians in the United States found their way into academia through their work as activists in the civil rights and women's rights movements of the 1970s. Sara Evans, Renata Bridenthal, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Judith Bennett, and Deborah Gray White, to name just a few pioneers, brought to their scholarship personal experiences and passionate commitments that influenced their selection of research topics. Some of the best scholarship produced by this early group of professional women's historians probed the very themes that organize this collection.

What we have here, then, is an issue that advances the decades-long project of re-envisioning political history by moving women—and in many cases race—to the center of inquiry. It also examines the symbiosis between the personal and the political as well as between the experiences and commitments of individuals and the movements they created, joined, and led. The seven articles published here take us from the post-Civil War United States to 1950s Mexico with several stops along the way to explore race and gender dynamics in labor struggles and movement politics. They shed new light on some of the ways that white middle-class women have employed and even bolstered their own public authority at the expense of other women, especially women of color. They also remind us of the promises and perils for women of mixed-sex organizing and invite consideration of an expanded understanding of politics to include demands and strategies not normally considered political, even by historians of women. In line with new scholarly trajectories in political and social history, they explore women's efforts to exercise citizenship rights with and without the right to vote.

In this issue, our second as editors of the Journal, we continue to draw on the wide array of articles and book reviews bequeathed to us by our immediate predecessors, Jean Allman, Antoinette Burton, and Marilyn Booth. The cutting-edge scholarship featured here coalesces around the theme of "Politics, Activism, Race" which emerged organically from recently accepted articles. We publish the best work submitted to the Journal, but our goal as editors is also to assemble issues that create thematic coherence where we can find it. The Journal, then, reflects the state of the field not just as we see it, but as it is being shaped by scholars who submit manuscripts to us and the many talented individuals who review those manuscripts for us.

We lead off with Vanessa May's path-breaking article, "Standardizing the Home? Women Reformers and Domestic Service in New Deal New York," which takes on that bugaboo of New Deal policy—the omission of society's most vulnerable employees from many of its regulations and protections. Agricultural workers and domestic servants loom large among excluded groups; according to standard interpretations, this is because they were predominantly African American and southern politicians lobbied to omit them. However, as May shows, many northern female reformers who ordinarily advocated laws to regulate wages, hours, and working conditions opposed similar legislation for domestic workers. They argued that government should not invade the privacy of the middle-class home even as they supported regulations that would subject the very bodies of domestic workers to health exams and tests for venereal diseases. As May argues, these reformers were protecting not only their privacy and their power as employers but also their public authority as spokespeople for working women. "Inviting the government to regulate the middle-class home," she explains, "would acknowledge that white women reformers possessed no special authority when it came to social justice for the disadvantaged." Despite claims made by black women and also white women in the Women's Trade Union League that homes were workplaces and, like any industrial site, capable of endangering the well-being of laborers, middle-class homes remained unregulated largely due to the resistance of middle-class white women, many of whom were also progressive reformers. A comparative study would reveal similarities between the women...