One of the most influential accomplishments of Second Wave feminism was its emphasis on “our bodies” as intimately but also politically “ourselves” in ways that would revolutionize family planning and healthcare for women. On the other hand, individual autonomy, feminism repeatedly reminded us, was always achieved or constrained in specific social contexts. This issue of Feminist Studies features essays revisiting these central themes of earlier feminisms in differing global and historical contexts. One cluster of articles returns to history to find the historical agency of women in constraining encounters: colonial Swedish accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Native women, the legends of Sacagawea, and the delicate drawings of Estelle Ishigo, documenting her imprisonment with her Japanese American husband in the U.S. concentration camps during World War II. Another cluster of articles focuses on the body and healthcare systems as sites of political contention: through family planning and sterilization abuse, through the incongruity between the language of choice and the experience of involuntary pregnancy loss, through the habitual treatment of women patients in upscale New York hospitals, and even through the deployment of maternity metaphors in late-nineteenth-century British fiction by women.

{ READ MORE as PDF }

Gunlög Fur
Reading Margins: Colonial Encounters in
Sápmi and Lenapehoking in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Laura E. Donaldson
Red Woman, White Dreams: Searching for Sacagawea
(Review Essay)

Jane Dusselier
Embodied Identity? The Life and Art of Estelle Ishigo
(Art Essay)

Brenda R. Weber
“Were Not These Words Conceived in Her Mind?”
Gender/Sex and Metaphors of Maternity at the Fin de Siècle

Linda Layne
A Women’s Health Model for Pregnancy Loss:
A Call for a New Standard of Care

Naomi Weisstein
The House of Love, or My Dangerous Hospital Adventure
(Commentary)

Srimati Mukherjee
When It Is Green and Not Blue (Fiction)

Christina Ewig
Hijacking Global Feminism: Feminists, the Catholic Church,
and the Family Planning Debacle in Peru

Front Cover:
Estelle Ishigo, Untitled, ca. 1944.
Watercolor. 21 x 16 inches.

Back Cover:
Estelle Ishigo, Untitled, ca. 1942-45.
Watercolor.

Images from the Estelle Ishigo papers (Collection 2010).
Department of Special Collections,
Charles E. Young Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.