Journal of Women's History articles from March 2003

Journal of Women's History archives from March 2003

Editor's note.
March 22, 2003... Last November, in California, a group of women from West Marin stripped off their clothes and lay down in a meadow to spell out the word "Peace" with their bodies. It was both a traditional and untraditional protest over the threat of a United...

Women's history in the new millennium: rethinking public and private.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2003... Perhaps no concept has been more influential in the field of women history than that of the distinction between public and private spheres. We have elaborated exceptions to the assumption that female was to private as male was to public,...

Gender and the "great divide": public and private in British gender history.
March 22, 2003... ... with the advance of civilization the lives of human beings are increasingly split between an intimate and a public sphere, between secret and public behaviour. And this split is taken so much for granted, becomes so compulsive a habit, that...

Making the private public: a Brazilian perspective.
March 22, 2003... A former slave woman worried about her reputation, a middle-class woman frightened about the spread of syphilis, a wealthy woman who dramatized her plight by selling sweets--these Brazilian women demonstrate that the categories of public and...

Refashioning the concept of public/private: lessons from dress studies.
March 22, 2003... As a veteran of the U.S. women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s, I welcome this retrospective on public/private because I have worried about the fading of a concept that was at the heart of second-wave feminists' political project...

Public and private in Middle Eastern women's history.
March 22, 2003... It is remarkable that the conceptual framework of public and private spheres has never dominated Middle Eastern women's history. Given the media's sensationalist fascination with Muslim women's veils, one might have expected a vigorous...

The birth of the New Order state in Indonesia: sexual politics and nationalism.
March 22, 2003... Introduction The Indonesian New Order state has, for over thirty years, waged a war of sexual imagining, posing the government against communist whores" by launching a campaign that depicted the army under General Suharto as the virile...

"Leisure is a foe to any man": the pleasures and dangers of leisure in Atlanta during World War I.
March 22, 2003... In the years during and after World War I, female reformers mobilized efforts around two seemingly disparate socio-political issues--concern over the growing heterosocial leisure culture and the call to arms for domestic war work--allowing them...

Writing out of the margins: women, translation, and the Spanish enlightenment.
March 22, 2003... Eighteenth-century Spanish bookworm Maria Romero Masegosa y Cancelada devoured Madame de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peuvienne (1747). How could she not? It has all of the elements of a compelling narrative--a mysterious heroine, a tragic love...

The future of women's history.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2003... In line with our ongoing interest in the past, present, and future of women's history, we grabbed at the chance to publish the transcript of an exciting panel discussion on U.S. women's and gender history in the new century. Nancy Cott took...

Considering the state of U.S. women's history.
March 22, 2003... Nancy Cott: We are going to get a range of views on the state of the field. I think this is a propitious time to consider this subject. It has been just about thirty years that the contemporary field of women's history has been in...

Tackling the contested categories: culture, race, and nation in American women's history.
March 22, 2003... Reading the panel discussion has reminded me of my debts to the pioneer scholars in the field, and it has also helped me to see my specific location in the field of women's history. Unlike the scholars on the panel for whom their introduction...

Room in back: before and beyond the nation in women's and gender history.
March 22, 2003... At the 2002 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, a roundtable session entitled "Gendering Colonial America, Making Women's History Colonial" was full to overflowing. Latecomers stood in the back and crowded into every corner. Granted,...

Interdisciplinarity and institutional change.
March 22, 2003... I am writing from the perspective of a third-wave feminist who has been fortunate to reap the harvest of scholarship created by the field of women's history. I have not, however, had the privilege of sharing in the experience of the vital...

Catching it all on the web: crafting cohesive American women's history in the age of the internet.
March 22, 2003... I agree with much of what the panelists have said, and particularly identify with Kathryn Kish Sklar's optimism about the ways American women's history is reshaping the study of American history and Nancy Hewitt's excitement over the continuing...

Regenerating women's history.
March 22, 2003... When I composed my reading lists for my comprehensive exams, Leila Rupp shocked me with recollections of her single-page list of published sources on women's history. Mine went on for five single-spaced pages and seemed little more than a...

Madame Rose: a life of Ernestine L. Rose as told to Jenny P. d'Hericourt. (Getting To The Source).
March 22, 2003... Introduction and Comments on Source Biography Ernestine Louise Susmond Potowski Rose was a celebrated nineteenth-century orator who introduced the subject of women's rights into American reform discourse in the mid-1830s, over a decade...

Regulation and the nation: comparative perspectives on prostitution and public policy.(5 books on prostitution)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... David J. Pivar. Purity and Hygiene: Women, Prostitution, and the "American Plan," 1900-1930. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. xxi+283 pp. ISBN 0-313-32032-2 (cl). Katherine Elaine Bliss. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public...

Gatekeeping and remaking: the politics of respectability in African American women's history and black feminism.(3 books on African American women and politics)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xiii + 335 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-2637-5 (cl); 0-8078-4966-9 (pb) Patricia Schechter, Ida...

Religion and biography: re-visioning feminism in the gilded age.(Mrs. Stanton's Bible; Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton's Bible. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. xi + 288 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3191-3 (cl). Fran Grace, Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xiv + 374 pp.; ill....

Religion, agency, and power in Jewish gender studies.(Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy; Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Frankel, Jonathan, ed. Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy (Studies in Contemporary Jewry). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiii + 394 pp. ISBN 0-195-14081-8 (cl) Nadell, Pamela S. and Jonathan D. Sarna, eds. Women and...

Dissertations in women's history.(Bibliography)
March 22, 2003... Allison Scardino Belzer, "Femininity Under Fire: Women in Italy during the First World War," Emory University, 2002, 285 pp. Kimberly Diane Boles, "Possessing the Holy: Private Churches and Private Piety in Late Antiquity," Princeton...