Introducing Frontiers:
A Journal of Women Studies
Frontiers is one of the oldest and most respected academic feminist journals in the United States. Founded in 1975, it is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary journal of scholarship, creative work, and personal essays.
Frontiers has made its mark as the feminist journal that most consistently offers multicultural work in language accessible to a wide audience within and without the academy. Frontiers is best known for its pioneering special issues on the past and present lives of women of color in the American West; these issues featured Chicanas/Latinas, Asian/Pacific American women, and Native American women. The journal today retains this focus while expanding its geographical and comparative reach. Topics of recent special issues include place, migration, and domestic colonization.
Frontiers is currently housed at Arizona State University. The journal is published three times a year by the University of Nebraska Press.
Mission & History
Frontiers began publication in 1975 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The original Editorial Collective (the advisory board of the host institution) chose the title “Frontiers” to signal that the journal would push the boundaries of feminist scholarship within a national context. But because Frontiers began in the West and has remained in the West (moving to the University of New Mexico, Washington State University, and to Arizona State University), and because of its name, many readers assumed that the journal specialized in feminist studies of the region.
Frontiers initially resisted such a focus, but under the impact of two interrelated, scholarly developments, the journal gradually embraced the study of women in the U.S. West. In the first place, the past two decades have seen the emergence of a number of ethnic/racial fields of study, such as Chicana/o, Native American, and Asian American Studies, which are frequently concerned with events and issues located in the West. Second, the development of the New Western history has moved study of the region from the dusty shelves of antiquarianism to the cutting edge of scholarly inquiry. Much of what is new about New Western history is its embrace of ethnic/racial history and, to a lesser extent, the study of gender. As a result, Frontiers has published many pieces regarding Western women. Frontiers has not identified itself as a “Western” journal; rather, the journal has explored issues of regional import within a global context. As Susan Armitage, the journal's editor for much the 1990s at Washington State University wrote, “Frontiers wants to cross borders, wherever they may be.”
Frontiers moved to Arizona State University in 2002, where its co-editors, Susan Gray and Gayle Gullett, continue the journal's traditional emphasis on border crossings. However, aided by support from Arizona State University - located in the heart of the U.S. Southwestern Borderlands and dedicated to fostering regional cultural vitality and global engagement - the journal now systematically and rigorously explores the multiple dimensions of border crossings.
Frontiers both embraces the West and moves beyond national boundaries. The journal publishes work that examines relationships among place, region, and topics of longstanding concern to feminist scholars - gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. Frontiers focuses on the multicultural West, the borderlands within and between nations, and transnational aspects of the regional West, from the ancestral lands of Native Americans to ties with the Americas and the countries and peoples of the Pacific Rim.