Journal of Women's History

Co-edited by Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Email address: womenshistory@uiuc.edu

Spring 2007

The Journal of Women’s History is in its third year at the University of Illinois, and we continue to seek submissions on a range of subjects animating women’s and gender history. In particular, we are interested in enhancing the Journal’s consideration of international, transnational, and global issues, from pre-modern times through the recent past. As scholars of regions and subjects outside of Euro-America, our commitments grow out of a belief that the world of women whose histories the journal has been dedicated to making visible must continuously be enlarged, even as new subjects—both individual and thematic—continue to emerge, and as historians work to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. We speak here not as advocates of presentism, but as scholars who believe that it is the responsibility of historians to recognize the pressures of the present on the writing of the past, especially in a context where women and their histories are continuously invoked as the bases of new national, imperial, and global political agendas. We invite submissions from scholars teaching and writing outside of the U.S., including those who operate outside the discipline but whose research and methods engage directly with the problems of “history.” We also encourage submissions from practitioners of transnational and comparative histories, fields that have been led by historians of women and gender in ways not always recognized.

We are very pleased to announce that volume 18, issues 3 and 4 (Fall and Winter 2006) were a double special issue on women, material culture, and consumption. On offer there are essays addressing topics that range from the fate of nabobinas in late eighteenth-century Britain to the impact of the washing machine in Cold War Chile to housewives’ associations in Australia before 1950. The special issue is book-ended by an introduction from Clare Crowston, who served as guest editor, and a summary comment by Victoria de Grazia, whose recent book on twentieth-century European consumption of the U.S. is also reviewed, together with a number of books that address material culture in all its historiographical variety.

Our forthcoming issue 19:1 is a tribute to the late Susan Porter Benson. The issue celebrates Benson’s many contributions to women’s and gender history as well as public and labor history. A set of four articles, including one of her own, “What Goes ’Round, Comes ’Round: Secondhand Clothing, Furniture, and Tools in Working-Class Lives in the Interwar USA,” reflects Benson’s pioneering impact on research involving gender, service work, consumption, and working-class life.

Among our other forthcoming articles are:

  • Kathleen Smythe’s “African Women and White Sisters at the Karema Mission Station, 1894-1920”
  • Nandita Prasad Sahai’s “The ‘Other’ Culture: Craft Societies and Remarriage of Widows in Early Modern India”
  • Charles McGraw’s “‘The Intervention of a Friendly Power’: The Transnational Migration of Women’s Work and 1898 Imperial Imagination”
  • Carrie N. Baker’s “The Emergence of Organized Feminist Resistance to Sexual Harassment in the U.S. in the 1970s”
  • Elizabeth Sinn’s “Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in 19th-Century Hong Kong”

With issue 17:4, we introduced a new feature—History Practice—that will appear regularly in upcoming volumes. History Practice is devoted to the many and varied practices of women’s history. It includes short individual pieces, as well as full roundtable forums that explore cutting edge questions surrounding the practice of women’s history—from the archive to personal narrative work, from grant-writing and publishing to teaching, from activism and community service to campus and department politics. Our first History Practice asked colleagues to reflect upon the ways in which their teaching of gender and women’s history has been impacted by war. The second History Practice, with contributions from scholars based in the United States, Africa, India and Japan, focuses on women historians and conditions of work in the twenty-first century. Our third, which derived from a Berkshire conference panel of the same theme, highlights the benefits and limits of transnationalism for women’s and gender history. We welcome suggestions for future History Practice themes.

The Journal also regularly features “The Book Forum,” a special section of short essays that engage a major scholarly monograph or collection in the field of women’s and/or gender history. We invite reviewers who work outside the temporal or spatial frames of the book in question to assess its importance—in terms of methodological innovation, theoretical significance and empirical discovery—to their own fields of research and teaching. We spotlight books that have had a significant impact on women’s history within the past decade, as well as new titles whose thematic concerns, method, and theoretical groundwork speak to a broad and diverse women’s history audience. Our first Book Forum featured Leslie Peirce’s Morality Tales: Law and Gender in Ottoman Court of Aintab (California, 2003); our second focused on Elizabeth Pleck and Cele Otnes’s Cinderella Dreams (California 2003). Future “Book Forums” will highlight Tani E. Barlow’s The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Duke, 2004) and Judith Bennett’s History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Pennsylvania, 2006).

We hope that whether you are a just beginning your career as a historian or are a senior scholar in the field, you will consider submitting your work for consideration at the Journal of Women’s History. Please see our website for submission guidelines and contact us at womenshistory@uiuc.edu if you have any questions.

Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton, Editors
Marilyn Booth, Book Review Editor
Amanda Brian, Sandra Henderson and James Warren, Managing Editors