One of the many reasons Feminist Studies is read so widely is the contemporaneous nature of the scholarship it publishes. Whether the research is drawn from the complex past or the shifting present, the articles that appear in these pages address social and political issues that intimately and significantly affect women in the United States and around the world, making emphatic yet again that not only is the personal political, but also that the political itself constitute the experience of the everyday and the personal. This issue of Feminist Studies underlines Eva Feder Kittay’s urgent description, in her essay in this issue, of the present as a defining moment for feminism, “standing on a precipice, and with it the gains that women have made.”

Rhoda M. Williams and Carla L. Peterson’s article, “The Color of Memory: Interpreting Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Policy from a Nineteenth-Century Perspective,” offer an important contribution to the current national debates on race, the economy, and social policy. The article historicize the present dismantling of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and affirmative action programs in the context of the formation of a “racialized citizenship” in the nineteenth century. Noting the saliency of such racialized citizenship discourse to “the blackening of gender deviancy” in the attacks on welfare mothers, it argues that welfare reform constitutes a “racialized and gendered class war,” in which the histories, narratives, and lives of African American women and families are again occluded, and offers a reasoned and passionate defense for more just America.

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Rhonda M. Williams and Carla L. Peterson
The Color of Memory: Interpreting Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Policy from a Nineteenth-Century Perspective

Eileen Boris
Scholarship and Activism: The Cast of Welfare Justice (Introduction)

Eva Feder Kittay
Dependency, Equality, and Welfare

Sonya Michel
Childcare and Welfare (In)Justice

Gwendolyn Mink
The Lady and the Tramp (II): Feminist Welfare Politics,
Poor Single Mothers, and the Challenge of Welfare Justice

Felicia Kornbluh
The Goals of the National Welfare Rights Movement:
Why We Need Them Thirty Years Later

Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith
Economic Restructuring, Household Strategies,
and Gender: A Case Study of a Rural Community

Karen M. Booth
National Mother, Global Whore, and Transnational Femocrats:
The Politics of AIDS and the Construction of Women
at the World Health Organization

Becky Gould Gibson
Studies of the Virgin: Icons in Series (Poetry)

Lindiwe Zulu
Role of Women in the Reconstruction and Development of the New Democratic South Africa

Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich
Feminist Attacks on Feminisms: Patriarchy's Prodigal Daughters (Review Essay)

Bell Gale Chevigny
Research A Love Story (Fiction)