VOLUME 15

NUMBER 01

March 2011

 

Editors : Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin
Published by Alexander Street Press and the
Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender, SUNY Binghamton

 

In This Issue

This first issue of 2011 contains the full range of resources that we publish—two new document projects, book reviews, full-text sources, and News from the Archives.

The two document projects in this issue are part of a Japanese-American collaboration that we launched three years ago. The venture has drawn upon Japanese and American scholars to explore the interaction of women reformers from Japan and the United States since the Meiji Restoration in 1869. Utilizing Japanese- and English-language sources, the projects include English translations and scans of Japanese sources. Taeko Shibahara, a recent doctoral graduate of Doshisha University in Kyoto, is the author or our first project in this issue, a study of the interconnections between Japanese women peace activists and members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom between 1915 and 1935. The documents in this project show the influence of European and American women and at the same time the ways in which the Japanese peace movement had to negotiate its own national approach as Japan embarked on a militaristic course in the 1930s.

Esther Katz, Cathy Hajo, and Peter Engelman have co-authored our second document project, with the assistance of Rui Kohiyama who selected the Japanese-language documents for inclusion. The project provides an analysis of Margaret Sanger's speaking tour in Japan in March 1922. The English- and Japanese-language documents that they selected demonstrate how the Japanese government's attempt to suppress Sanger's speech created a public relations triumph for Sanger and birth control both in Japan and the United States. The documents also offer insight into Japan's evolving movement for women's rights and the West's perception of Japanese society.

This issue also marks the launching of a new publishing initiative, as we offer the first installment of what will eventually include 15,000 pages of documents related to the judicial movement in the United States examining Gender Bias in the Courts, 1983-2002. State courts and state bar associations typically sponsored the studies, more than eighty of which we will be reprinting at a rate of 3,000 pages per issue over the next two and a half years. This initiative gained strength from the work of state commissions on the status of women, whose publications we have collected in WASM Scholar's Edition. We are pleased now to supplement that database with these additional primary sources.

We round out this issue with an array of complementary resources, including seven book reviews and our regular News from the Archives. If you would like to write a review or have a title to recommend for review, please contact our book review editor Jeanne Petit . For those with announcements for the News from the Archives section, please contact its editor Tanya Zanish-Belcher .

Meanwhile, we are excited to announce the recent publication of our second, major online digital archive, "Women and Social Movements, International—1840 to Present." In early January we published the first portion of this new archive. It should reach its completed size of 150,000 pages by early 2012. It will include both published and manuscript materials generated by women's participation in international conferences and organizations over a period of 170 years, from missionary and abolition activities in the first half of the nineteenth century to women's NGO activism in the twenty-first century. We have also commissioned about thirty secondary articles by scholars working in fields related to the archive that will place the primary materials within a broader interpretive context and offer suggestions on how best to make use of these online resources.

Alexander Street Press is marketing this resource to libraries, offering both subscriptions or purchase plans. Your acquisitions librarian might be interested in either of these options. Please ask her or him to contact Eileen Lawrence at Alexander Street Press for subscription information and/or to request a free trial of this resource. We look forward to hearing your reactions to this major addition to Women and Social Movements.

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