CROSSING BORDERS:
TRANSNATIONAL ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF WOMEN

MARY P. RYAN and JUDITH R. WALKOWITZ
This issue of Feminist Studies presents a set of papers written by participants at a conference held at the University of Maryland in November of 1977.¹ More than 300 women and men from England, France, Amsterdam, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States met to discuss the theme of "Women and Power: Dimensions of Women's Historical Experience." To many of us this international assemblage was a rejuvenating occasion, infusing new ideas and energy into a scholarly and political enterprise which has consumed our attention for almost a decade. Historians from outside the United States were impressed and encouraged by the size and strength of feminist scholarship in North America, and by its ideological range and sophistication. American participants, for our part, were stimulated by our encounter with a contingent of highly sophisticated and politically conscious scholars from Western Europe. Typical of this international exchange of ideas was the workshop "Women and the State in the Third World" where concepts posed by American Marxists in an earlier session were applied to ancient civilizations in Africa and South America.'² Sometimes our mutual dilemmas found intimate and poignant expression as when a report on an attempt to recover the history of women in the working-class neighborhoods of the Third Reich reminded us of the fragility of women's culture everywhere and the urgency of women's resistance at all times.

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Mary P. Ryan and Judith R. Walkowitz
Crossing Borders: Transnational Advances
in the History of Women Introduction to this Issue

Barbara Taylor
"The Men Are as Bad as Their 7 Masters. . .":
Socialism, Feminism, and Sexual Antagonism
in the London Tailoring Trade in the Early 1830s

Margaret H. Darrow
French Noblewomen and the New Domesticity, 1750-1850

Mary P. Ryan
The Power of Women's Networks:
A Case Study of Female Moral Reform
in Antebellum America

Leonore Davidoff
Class and Gender in Victorian England:
The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick

John R. Gillis
Servants, Sexual Relations,
and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801-1900

Rayna Rapp, Ellen Ross, and Renate Bridenthal
Examining Family History

Elizabeth Fee and Michael Wallace
The History and Politics of Birth Control: A Review Essay