This issue of Feminist Studies shows how pervasively women's reproductive roles have been and still are manipulated and interpreted, particularly in twentieth-century U.S. society, and how women are negotiating choices about reproduction and sexuality, work, sport, and art. These actions have political implications for all involved-individuals, groups, and institutions. Even though feminists have broadened the frame of reference in embracing the totality of women's lives, a current mainstream preoccupation with the biological threatens to bring us back to square one. However, this is a new square, as the articles in this volume point out: "new" because as things change, they may reconstitute into new, more devious, and more subtle forms of inequality. As the authors of these essays warn us, there is a need to stay vigilant.

Rickie Solinger's timely lead essay about the politics of hospital abortion committees provides a historical perspective to this controversial topic. Before World War II, Solinger shows, physicians remained flexible about hospital abortions, even though abortion was outlawed, because they gave priority to maternal health. After the war, however, the claims of the fetus were advanced separately from, even in opposition to, those of the mother, who was recast solely as a carrier or container. Medicine became legalized and the law became medicalized. Physicians replaced mothers as guardians of the unborn, and abortion decisions turned from serving women's health to effacing women, whose morality was reduced to service to the fetus and who were themselves reduced to being solely their uteri.

{READ MORE AS PDF}

Rickie Solinger
"A Complete Disaster": Abortion and the Politics of Hospital Abortion Committees, 1950-1970

Alice Adams
Out of the Womb: The Future of the Uterine Metaphor

Linda M. Blum
Mothers, Babies, and Breastfeeding in Late Capitalist America: The Shifting Contexts of Feminist Theory

Lyn Lifshin
My Mother's Address Book; My Mother Who Can't See (Poetry)

Faulkner Fox
Pirate; Self (Fiction)

Nancy E. Rose
Gender, Race, and the Welfare State:
Government Work Programs from the 1930s to the Present

Susan K. Cahn
From the "Muscle Moll" to the "Butch" Ballplayer: Mannishness, Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S. Women's Sport

Tee A. Corinne
Art Essay

Mark Breitenberg
Anxious Masculinity: Sexual Jealousy in Early Modern England

Susan McC'ary
Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s (Review Essay)