In This Issue

We are particularly pleased to publish this second issue of 2009, which contains (for the Scholar's Edition) our final installment to the database of publications by Commissions on the Status of Women. The Commissions' database for the Scholar's Edition of WASM now includes all the publications by all local, state and federal commissions on the status of women that we could locate in more than 300 repositories, a total of almost 1,900 publications. The database offers more than 90,000 pages of resources pertaining to the lives of American women since 1960. Check out our "Browse Graphs" feature to browse every chart included in these publications.

The document project, document archive, and review essays in this issue constitute a special issue devoted to women and social movements in Canada. They have been edited by four Canadian feminist historians, Lara Campbell, Nancy Janovicek, Tamara Myers, and Joan Sangster, who have written a thoughtful introduction, "Canadian Women in Context," which examines the historical and intellectual contexts of Canadian scholarship on women. Part of our commitment to increase the international dimensions of the web site, this special issue begins with a document project by Roberta Lexier examining the emergence of the women's movement at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in the late 1960s. Historians of second-wave feminism in the United States will be immediately struck by both the similarities to and divergences from parallel developments south of the border. The second major component of this issue is a document archive edited and introduced by Margaret Hobbs and Susan Wurtele. This archive focuses on the feminism of Violet McNaughton, longtime editor of the Women's Pages of the Saskatchewan farm newspaper, The Western Producer . It brings together more than 2,500 scanned pages from the "Mainly for Women" section of that paper between 1925 and 1939.

Four review essays complement the major projects and round out the specifically Canadian content in this issue. Krista Cooke examines the representation of women at Canadian public history sites, Cynthia Comacchio reviews recent works on women and families in Quebec history, Shirley Tillotson discusses recent trends in Canadian writing on women and social policy, and Linda Kealey engages three books that explore themes related to women, work, and immigration.

In this issue, we publish a number of historical book reviews to complement the appearance in recent issues of the Scholar's Edition of the biographical dictionary, Notable American Women . These reviews appeared in 1972, 1981, and 2005 and reflect scholarly reactions to the publication of the successive volumes of Notable . Readers will also be in a better position to appreciate the contributions of Notable by comparing the biographical sketches in that modern work with the two-volume 1897 biographical dictionary edited by Frances Willard and Mary Livermore, American Women - Fifteen Hundred Biographies with over 1,400 Portraits , which we reprint in this issue as part of the web site's full-text sources. Readers will find of interest Victoria Brown and Dan Covino's introduction to this reprinting, the essay, "How Did the Notable Characteristics of American Women Change, 1890-1970?"

In addition to this 1897 biographical dictionary, the full-text sources in this issue include our final installment of publications of the League of Women Voters, 1920-2000. These final additions include significant runs of three League journals, Bulletin , News Letter , and Trends (renamed Trends in Government in 1946), as well as a five-volume study of the League published in 1957. These new resources bring our publication of League materials to a total of more than 8,000 pages and we are grateful to the National LWV for granting us permission to reprint this sampling of their publications for scholarly use.

The last major component of the current issue (available through libraries that subscribe to the Scholar's Edition) includes our final installment of materials in our database of publications of State and Local Commissions on the Status of Women. We are adding roughly 18,000 additional pages to the database at this time, bringing its total to more than 90,000 pages in all. In addition to commission publications, we include at this time fifteen audio files of interviews conducted at the University of Wisconsin of Kathryn Clarenbach, the longtime director of the Wisconsin Commission on the Status of Women and one of the founders of the National Organization for Women. These audio files are complemented by a detailed index of the interviews that permits users to zero in on discussions of particular topics dispersed throughout the recordings. Finally, Kathleen Laughlin has written an introductory essay that places Kathryn Clarenbach and the Wisconsin commission within the broader context of the emergence of second-wave feminism in this period.

We also publish at this time our regular feature, News from the Archives, providing news about collections and projects of interest from archives and repositories. If you are affiliated with an archive or repository and would like to submit an announcement that you feel would be of interest to our readers, please contact the editor of the new section, Tanya Zanish-Belcher , Associate Professor and Head of the Special Collections Department and University Archives at Iowa State University.

As we publish this issue, we find ourselves deep in the work of preparing a second, major online digital archive, tentatively entitled "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2000." We will begin publication of this new archive in April 2010 and it should reach its completed size of 150,000 pages by the end of 2012. It will offer both published and manuscript materials addressing women's participation in international conferences and organizations over a period of a century and a half, from missionary and abolition activities in the first half of the nineteenth century to women's NGO activism in the 1990s. We look forward to learning of your reactions to this next major addition to the web site.

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