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The launch of Journal of Women's History occurred as Americanist women's and gender history was undergoing a profound transformation caused by increased analytical attention to "race" and ethnicity. Within a year of the Journal's emergence, Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois published the first edition of their landmark anthology, Unequal Sisters, in which they encouraged Americanist women's and gender historians to eschew "biracial approach[es]" and embrace a "kaleidoscopic" angle of vision that would permit "many pasts . . . [to] be explored simultaneously." This article reviews Americanist gender scholarship on race and ethnicity that has been produced over the last twenty-five years. Work on race, ethnicity, and gender has revealed sundry social, political, cultural, and economic dynamics within U.S. history. It is arguably the case, however, that Americanist women's and gender historians could productively analyze multiple racial and ethnic groups together on a more sustained basis.
The Journal of Women's History stressed from the very outset that its contents would address commonalities as well as differences among and between women in a range of historical contexts. The decision on the part of editors Joan Hoff-Wilson and Christie Farnham to publish work "broadly representative of national, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual groupings," moreover, resulted in analyses of women of color in American history being consistently featured during the Journal's first year.1 Theda Perdue's landmark article about Cherokee women and "Indian Removal" from the southeastern United States appeared in the inaugural issue, which also included commentary by Nell Irvin Painter about women's history and theory. Painter cautioned that "European styles of analysis" had to be "balanced against their silence on... the existence of race as a potent social and economic category and the relationship between race and class." The Journal's second issue contained an incisive review essay about Puerto Rican women and feminism by Altagracia Ortiz, while the third issue included groundbreaking articles about free and enslaved black women during the antebellum period by Loren Schweninger and Thelma Jennings respec- tively.2 Gerda Lerner's "Reconceptualizing Differences Among Women" appeared in the third issue as well; there, Lerner trenchantly maintained that, "liberal pluralism" was fundamentally flawed in its inability "to ac- count for power, dominance, hegemony" Women's historians had to move beyond the "additive," "make 'difference' central to......