At a time when U.S. military technology appears unassailable, the concerns of this issue of Feminist Studies may seem distant from the realities of world politics. Yet our authors show how women became symbolic of male fears, anxieties, or hopes under a variety of circumstances. Indeed, the unifying theme of this issue is that women are essential to the construction of masculinity, even when seemingly most reviled or remote from masculine concerns. This issue continues our exploration of the complexities of female-male relations in different times, classes, and cultures.

We begin with three articles on French history, ranging from a reconsideration of that most influential late-eighteenth-century thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau; to an analysis of the myths made by and about Flora Tristan, the well-known feminist socialist of the mid-nineteenth century; to the public (and historical) creation of the myth of the destructive harridan, the pétroleuse, in response to the failed revolution of 1871.

Paul Thomas's article demonstrates the degree to which Rousseau's supreme creation, the independent male citizen, was dependent upon and nurtured by the domesticated woman. Rousseau saw women as the privileged creatures who would save-and damn-men at a historical moment he described as a "moral emergency."

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Paul Thomas
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sexist?

Margaret Talbot
An Emancipated Voice: Flora Tristan and Utopian Allegory

Gay L. Gullickson
La Pétroleuse: Representing Revolution

Carol Barrett
Arguing the Curriculum: Coleslaw

Suzanne Stein
Me and Him

Christine Holmlund
The Lesbian, the Mother, the Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray's Recodings of Difference

Eléni Sikélianòs
Mnemosyne, I Call You Out

Julia Wrigley
Feminists and Domestic Workers (Review Essay)

Elisabeth Rose
Counting Thunder

Judith E. Smith
Family History and Feminist History (Review Essay)

Andrea Collins
After Picasso's The Minotaur Carries Off a Woman;
Iconostasis/Iconomania