Our Spring 2021 issue returns to one of the central insights of feminism: the personal is political. The simple yet powerful observation cuts two ways. Not only are women's personal experiences shaped by the broader political context, they can in turn become the raw material out of which political consciousness and activism arise. In different ways, both of our two new document projects--one centered in the nineteenth-century East Coast, the other in the twentieth-century West Coast--show this dynamic at work.

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz's "Having It All: Lucy Stone, Motherhood, and the Woman's Rights Movement, 1851-1893" explores how the well-known woman's rights advocate Lucy Stone viewed and experienced marriage and motherhood. As a young woman, Stone pledged not to marry, fearing the loss of autonomy. Yet even though she and her eventual husband, Henry Blackwell, famously pledged to create a partnership of equals, the demands of motherhood proved incompatible with the public life she had hoped to maintain. Personal correspondence reveals how she reluctantly curtailed her activities and sought new ways of contributing to the moment through writing and editing. The project also traces how Stone's frustration and exhaustion led her to develop a critical analysis of the uncompensated domestic labor women performed in their own homes. In addition to personal letters, the documents featured include newspaper pieces and Stone's own writing in the Woman's Journal, the newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association that Stone edited from 1870 to 1893. Even before the pandemic, Stone's struggles over how to balance motherhood and activism would have struck many readers as all-too-relatable. But as Laughlin-Schultz notes in her introductory video, our current moment, which has forced droves of women out of the workforce to deal with the pressing demands of caregiving, makes this document project especially timely.

Our second document project, "The National Organization for Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and California NOW Chapters' Lesbian Feminist Activism," is by Haleigh Marcello. It demonstrates how the National Organization for Women (NOW) dealt with the question of lesbianism in the 1970s while pursuing its central goal: ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This overriding focus led many NOW chapters to shy away from addressing discrimination against lesbianism--an issue that many saw as too divisive at a moment when they sought to attract broad-based support. But in California, which ratified the ERA in 1972--quite early on--local NOW branches proved far more willing to prioritize lesbian rights. Marcello's project reveals how the local and state-wide branches at times diverged from, and at times reinforced, national political dynamics, revealing a complex portrayal of one of the most iconic organizations of the so-called second wave.

This issue also features a roundtable on the historic significance of Kamala Harris's election as Vice President of the United States, with commentaries by Brenda E. Stevenson (the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History at UCLA and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at Oxford University), Cathleen Cahill (Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University), and Seema Sohi (Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder). Collectively, they reflect on the significance of Harris's election in light of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment in 2020, the relationship between formal politics and grassroots mobilization, as well as the significance of the politics of representation and what that may or may not foretell in terms of policy and political transformation.

Our cover image, "That Little Girl Was Me," is inspired by the long legacy of Black women's activism that paved the way for Harris's election. The artist Bria Goeller's collaboration with Gordon Jones resulted in a portrait of Kamala Harris striding forward, with her shadow depicted in the form of Ruby Bridges, the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Louisiana in 1960. The image evoked Normal Rockwell's famous 1964 painting on segregation, "The Problem We All Live With," and Harris's famous defense of busing in a 2020 presidential primary debate, when she referred to her personal experience of desegregating California schools: "that little girl was me." The image took the internet by storm when it was first released. Some scholars argued that the image obscured the pain of young Black children by depicting a narrative of progress. Others pointed out Harris's past initiatives as California's attorney general, which criminalized parents whose kids struggled with school attendance. Despite these criticisms, for many, the image conveyed the connection between Harris's election and the historic struggle for civil rights. Ruby Bridges herself has thanked Bria Goeller and Gordon Jones for the artwork and proclaimed herself in alliance with Harris and President Biden "as a step into this Next Chapter of American History!"

Since our last issue, we have added to the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States 364 new crowdsourced biographical sketches, bringing its total to 2,950 sketches. As the OBD grows we add to our Writings of Black Women Suffragists, and you will find five new full-text sources in that Primary Source Set, and one new NAWSA source. We expect to add another 600 sketches to the database in future installments in June and December.

Finally, this edition includes seven new book reviews, for which we once again thank the contributors and our book review editors, Donna Schuele and Katherine Marino.

This year began with tumult and uncertainty but also with optimism. We offer this issue of WASM with the hope that our readers take heart in reflecting on women's historic and present gains.