The production, suppression, and exploitation of emotions play roles in two clusters of articles in this issue of Feminist Studies. The first cluster consists of three essays focusing on early modern European women. Together, these three pieces take issues that reverberate into the present while also rewriting historical and literary critical feminist discourses about the period before industrialization. Two other essays attentive to twentieth-century American women's reproductive experiences make up the second cluster. These two articles explore how women's emotions have been variously ignored and subjugated to medical authorities or produced and manipulated for political purposes.

The articles in the early modern European women cluster were first presented in workshops at the November 2000 conference, "Attending to Early Modern Women: Gender, Culture, and Change," at the University of Maryland, College Park. The conference sponsor, the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, allowed us to solicit articles from conference participants for this cluster and we are delighted to have had the opportunity to work in collaboration with them.

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Frances E. Dolan
Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture

Carrie F. Klaus
Architecture and Sexual Identity: Jeanne de Jussie's Narrative of the Reformation of Geneva

Sarah M. Dunnigan
Undoing the Double Tress: Scotland, Early Modern Women's Writing, and the Location of Critical Desires

Cathleen Calbert
The Museum of Tragedy (Fiction)

Kristin Barker
Birthing and Bureaucratic Women: Needs Talk and the Definitional Legacy of the Sheppard-Towner Act

Leslie J. Reagan
From Hazard to Blessing to Tragedy: Representations of Miscarriage in Twentieth-Century America

Pamela Carter Joern
Wonderful Words of Life (Fiction)

Joya Misra
Caring about Care (Review Essay)

Laurie Lamon
Poetry; A Wonder (Poems)

Pamela L. Caughie
Graduate Education in Women's Studies: Paradoxes and Challenges (Introduction to Forum)

Judith Kegan Gardiner
Paradoxes of Empowerment: Interdisciplinary Graduate Pedagogy in Women's Studies

Pamela L. Caughie
Professional Identity Politics

Sally L. Kitch
Ph.D. Programs and the Research Mission of Women's Studies: The Case for Interdisciplinarity

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
The Number One Question about Feminism

Anne Mamary
Interventions: An All-Woman First Year College Seminar

Rebecca B. Rank
What You Can't Tell Just by Looking at a Girl
(After Her Mother Leaves) (Poem)

Anna Hiddleston
There Is a River in Painting That Flows Infinitely toward Us: The Art of Agnès Thurnauer (Art Essay)

Cover Art

Maria Sibylla Merian.
Plate 18, Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Surinam, 1719. Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
© Maria Sibylla Merian.