Our Spring 2022 issue focuses on the history and politics of motherhood, reproduction, and public policy in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Taken as a whole, the issue raises themes that remain extremely pressing today: the lack of childcare as a social necessity for fostering greater female participation in the workforce; the difficulty of fostering an intersectional politics that can adequately address the situation that African American women face as workers and caregivers; and the ongoing attacks on Roe v. Wade by anti-choice activists who now appear on the cusp of achieving their goal of overturning this critical legal precedent.

In our first document project, "Securing Childcare during World War II: The Case of San Diego," Kyle Ciani offers a ground-level view of how this particular city—which quickly emerged as a center of wartime industry—contended with the challenges of meeting the childcare needs of a diverse population that included both newcomers (or "in-migrants") and long-time residents. Through the project's 27 documents, Ciani illuminates the complex and decentralized web of childcare services, while offering a vivid portrait of an urban center that was bursting at the seams. She shows how private organizations and public agencies cooperated to build a network that offered a wide array of different service, from foster care homes to onsite daycare centers. Parents also turned to families, friends, and neighbors, especially if they needed care for infants and children under the age of two. Revealing parents' interactions with social workers and other authorities, the documents also demonstrate how the struggle to secure adequate childcare was exacerbated by other wartime challenges, such as the high cost of living, rapid rate of inflation, and severe housing shortage.

In the second document project, "Revisiting the President's Commission on the Status of Women through the Activism of Dorothy Height, and Reconsidering Her Part in the Emergence of New Forms of Black Women's Activism, 1961-1966," Kathryn Kish Sklar and Keisha Blain analyze Height's political engagements in the early 1960s to underscore her innovative intersectional initiatives. As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Height played a crucial role in the Civil Rights Movement, while also serving on the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). Focusing simultaneously on the need to combat racial discrimination while providing social support for poor and working-class families, she proposed new political alliances and intellectual synergies between labor feminists and civil rights issues. Historians of U.S. women will find much of interest here, including attention to Height herself, a figure who has not yet received her due, and a reassessment of the PCSW and its final report (The American Woman), which Sklar and Blain suggest has been misrepresented as undercutting the needs of working women. The document project also advances a fascinating and revisionist interpretation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous 1965 report, The Black Family: The Case for National Action. By labeling the Black family a "matriarchy" and hijacking the PCSW conversation, Moynihan made it harder for Height to convey her message about meeting the needs of Black women by enhancing the status of Black men. All these policy issues remain active today and invite our deeper understanding of their history.

This issue also features a roundtable, "On the Threshold of a Post-Roe Era? The Past and Future of Abortion Rights in the United States." As the U.S. awaited the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization—the case concerning a Mississippi law that bans the vast majority of abortions after fifteen weeks—we faced the very real possibility that Roe and its guarantee of the right to abortion prior to fetal "viability" will be overturned. Now, given the recent leak of the opinion drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, that possibility seems a virtual certainty. Three leading experts on the history of abortion and the politics surrounding it—Karissa Haugeberg, Rickie Solinger, and Mary Ziegler—offer thoughtful commentaries on how we arrived at this point and what we can likely anticipate going forward.

Our cover features a drawing of civil rights and women's rights activist Dorothy Height by Julie Gough, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Bristol, England. In August 2015, she began Illustrated Women in History, a blog designed to celebrate and build awareness of the many important but largely overlooked women in history. Her portrait of Height is from a series of twenty illustrations that she completed for Black History Month in 2016.

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