The summer issue of Pacific Historical Review is a special issue devoted to the theme of Feminist Histories. The special issue, which is temporarily available paywall-free, includes research articles, a forum on feminist history methods, and a response from historian Estelle B. Freedman. At PHR’s editorial offices at Portland State University, we caught up with the journal’s associate editor, Brenda Frink.

Let’s dive right in. Could you give us an overview of the material included in this special issue?

Sure, I’d love to. We have five research articles, a forum, and a response essay written by the historian Estelle B. Freedman. The article topics are actually quite wide-ranging. They include domestic workers in the anti-fascist movement, public monuments, the lesbian alternative press, and nineteenth-century political rhetoric about home-making. Notably, the authors engage with both progressive and conservative politics—for example, the two articles about public monuments discuss monuments to the civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune and also a campaign to build a northern monument to the composer of the southern song “Dixie.” We are lucky to have a talented group of historians here: Katherine Marino, Renee Romano, Kim Cary Warren, Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz, and Nicole Martin.

Next, the special issue includes a forum highlighting historians’ personal reflections on feminist history; and then it closes with Estelle B. Freedman’s response.

Freedman’s response essay thoughtfully weaves together decades of scholarship in women’s history and points to research directions for the future. It also ties together the special issue’s individual articles and essays.

How do these topics fit into the special issue title, Feminist Histories?

Great question. The special issue’s title isn’t meant to refer specifically to a history of feminists—some of the historical actors in this issue may have seen themselves as feminists, while others did not. Instead, it refers to history written from a feminist perspective.

This concept is expanded in the forum I mentioned, “Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods.” Here, four scholars unpack the question of what feminist history means for them. We have Judy Tzu-Chun Wu on writing Asian American and lesbian biography, Y. Yvon Wang on transgender history, Natalie Marine-Street on doing oral history at a large institution, and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on balancing activism and scholarship. These writers’ recommendations range from practical tips to more philosophical musings, and they draw on both personal and scholarly experience.

In your introduction to the special issue, you discuss some of PHR’s previous forays into women’s and gender history. Tell us about that here.

Yes, that was really interesting. Of course, the PHR has published many single articles in the history of women, gender, or sexuality—but for the introduction we decided to focus specifically on the special issues devoted to these topics.

All in all, we identified four previous special issues and one forum. These included Women in the American West (1980), Western Women’s History Revisited (1992), Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific (2000), “If Not Now, When?: Gender, Power, and the Decolonization of Women’s History” (2010), and Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2020). From the first, these special issues operated from the premise that women’s history needed to attend to intersectionality.

The introduction to the 1980 volume—Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller’s “The Gentle Tamers Revisited”—was foundational in the field of western women’s history and remains one of PHR’s most read articles today. What’s striking about rereading their words in the twenty-first century is that the type of history they call for, a nuanced history that not only includes women but also attends to other social categories, remains deeply relevant more than forty years later.

As for our new special issue on Feminist Histories, we are excited to add it to this long tradition of scholarship in the PHR.

We invite you to read the special issue for free online for a limited time:

Special Issue: Feminist Histories

Introduction
Feminist Histories: Introduction to a special issue of Pacific Historical Review
Brenda D. Frink

Articles
Rosa Rayside and Domestic Workers in the Fight against War and Fascism
Katherine M. Marino

“Much More than a Song”: The 1935 Campaign for a National “Dixie” Memorial
Renee C. Romano

Recasting Mary McLeod Bethune’s Legacy: Permanence in the U.S. Capitol and Memorializing the Present
Kim Cary Warren

“Separated, but far from alone”: Forging Lesbian Networks in the 1970s–1980s
Cameron Blevins, Annelise Heinz

The Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions: The American Home and Reconstruction Politics in the West
Nicole Martin

Forum: Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Y. Yvon Wang, Natalie J. Marine-Street, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Intersectional Feminist Biography as Method
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Between Inevitability and Surprise: Toward a Transgender Historical Method
Y. Yvon Wang

Notes from the Field: Toward a Feminist Practice of Institutional Oral History
Natalie J. Marine-Street

Working Out a New Relationship to Objectivity, Experience, and Engaged Scholarship
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Afterword
Afterword: Feminist Histories
Estelle B. Freedman

Print copies of the special “Feminist Histories” issue of Pacific Historical Review (issue 92.3), as well as other individual issues of PHR, can be purchased on the journal’s site. For ongoing access to PHR, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.

We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association