Recent events have caused many of us to recall, and to hope to revitalize, the long association between feminism and the cause of international peace. With the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a backdrop, the U.S. Congress took steps to reestablish a peacetime draft and debated for the first time whether women should be conscripted into the armed forces. The Pentagon received President Carter's support for a military "preparedness" plan predicated on the assumption that "limited" nuclear war is militarily feasible. Meanwhile, the lethal insanity of those who pretend control over atomic power was exposed when an accidental turn of a worker's wrench exploded a nuclear missile in Arkansas. Then, the conservative sweep of the U.S. election gave a "mandate" to a president and Congress elected on platforms that combined militant nationalism with antifeminism. While these threatening developments provoke U.S. feminists to reevaluate soberly our political prospects and priorities, women around the globe, and most visibly in Central America, are participating in armed resistance struggles. It is appropriate, therefore, that this issue of Feminist Studies presents a series of essays, poems, art work, and international reports that remind us, sometimes painfully, of women's special interest in matters of war and peace. These concerns, as well as the family reform movements discussed in another article, are the urgent personal politics of 1981.

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Janet Bruin and Stephen Salaff
Never Again: The Organization of Women
Atomic Bomb Victims in Osaka

Electa Arenal
Two Poets of the Sandinista Struggle

Claribel Alegría
Flowers of the Volcano

Gioconda Belli
To Comandante Marcos

Nancy Jay
Gender and Dichotomy

Susan Harding
Family Reform Movements:
Recent Feminism and its Opposition;
No More War: An Art Essay

Edith A. Jenkins
With Stones from the Gorge

Berenice Fisher
The Models Among Us:
Social Authority and Political Activism

Alice Wexler
Emma Goldman on Mary Wollstonecraft

Joyce Antler
Feminism as Life-Process:
The Life and Career of Lucy Sprague Mitchell