© 2010 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has established three forms of professional recognition:
This prize is for a first book in any field of history written by a woman who is normally resident in North America. Books need not focus on the history of women, gender, or sexuality and many past winners have not. The following categories are not eligible for consideration: textbooks, juveniles, documentary collections, fiction, poetry, or collections of essays.
Announcements of the entry deadlines will be posted on our Blog in the spring of each year. Winners are announced in the summer and in a full-page advertisement in Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association.
For more information on the book prize please contact Professor Cody at lisa.cody@claremontmckenna.edu.
The prize is for an article in any field of history written by a woman who is normally resident in North America. Articles need not focus on the history of women, gender, or sexuality and many past winners have not. Entries may be submitted either by an author or by the journal. Journals are limited to three nominations. Jointly published articles are acceptable, as are articles that have appeared in collections. They must not be reprints of articles published in previous years. Journals should indicate in a cover letter that they are submitting articles for the prize competition, and include a contact phone number and e-mail address at the journal. Authors should include contact information in a cover letter.
Announcements of the entry deadlines will be posted on our Blog in the spring of each year. Winners are announced in the summer and in a full-page advertisement in Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association.
For more information on the article prize please contact Professor Barkley-Brown via email at barkleyb@umd.edu
The Coordinating Council on Women in the Historical Profession (CCWH) and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians co-sponsor annual competitions for a $1,000 Graduate Student Award to assist in the completion of dissertation work. The award is intended to support either a crucial stage of research or the final year of writing. The applicant must be a woman graduate student historian in a history department in a U.S. institution; must have passed to A.B.D. status by the time of application; may specialize in any field of history; may hold this award and others simultaneously; and need not attend the award ceremony to receive the award.
We regret that neither high school students nor undergraduates are eligible for this scholarship.
Application deadline is usually on or around Oct. 1 of each year. Please contact the CCWH for the most up-to-date information.
Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2008)
Susanne Freidberg, “The Triumph of the Egg,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008)
What is a “fresh” egg and how did Americans’ imaginings of what constituted a “naturally” fresh egg change over the the twentieth century? Reminding us that eggs were once a seasonal crop available primarily in the spring from local family farmers, Susanne Freidberg historicizes the concept of freshness through a focus on changes in the production and marketing of eggs. From early twentieth-century cold storage techniques which allowed eggs to be sold as “fresh” months after they were laid to New Deal era electrification projects which modernized hen houses, altering the birds’ life cycles, Freidberg traces the efforts of producers and marketers to have a year round supply of eggs, and of consumers to ensure fair prices and healthier standards. Engineering “seasonless freshness,” Freidberg argues, increasingly came to depend not so much on manipulating the egg after it left the hen house and more on manipulating the hens who produced them. Tracing the technological changes that eventually made hens “full-time, year-round workers” and egg production big business, pushing out many small farmers, Freidberg deftly pulls together histories of food production, food commerce, food consumption, civic activism, and regulatory change. Freidberg tells a story of the chicken and the egg which entwines what is happening in hen houses and in family kitchens with developments in research labs, warehouses and retail markets, and legislative chambers. The result is both a history of scientific changes and a fine social and cultural analysis which encourages us to wonder about our own conceptions of freshness in the contemporary global food market and provides a model of history study both methodologically sophisticated and marvelously engaging.
Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
Peace Came in the Form of a Woman is a beautifully written and scrupulously researched study of the gendered nature of interactions between indigenous groups and Spaniards in the Texas region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Barr argues that those interactions were shaped by native kinship patterns more than by European racial categories, and were governed by the gender ideals of each. Our committee especially appreciated Barr’s ability to depict indigenous perspectives on their encounter with the Spanish in their own right, and without anticipating the formation and arrival of the United States. Andrea Friedman, “The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism,” Journal of American History 94 (2007), 445-68. Andrea Friedman’s compelling article about an African-American army clerk and widowed single mother, who faced the loss of her job when called to testify in 1954 before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations, artfully connects one woman’s life to the complex political and ideological forces at play in American politics in the years after World War II. In lucid prose, and deftly deploying a multi-leveled analysis of gender, race and class iconography and politics, Friedman illuminates how limited were the possibilities for imagining the citizenship of African American women during the Cold War era.
Sandra Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (University of Illinois Press, 2006)
Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 Summer 2006
Srirupa Roy, ‘A Symbol of Freedom: The Indian Flag and the Transformations of Nationalism, 1906-2002,” The Journal of Asian Studies 65. no. 3 (August 2006)
Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of the Eighteenth Century Britons (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Wang Zheng, “‘State Feminism’? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies, vol 31, no 3 (Fall 2005): 519-551.
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004)
Toby L. Ditz, “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,” Gender & History 16:1(2004): 1-35
Sally McKee, “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete,” Past & Present 182 (2004): 31-53.
Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846-1948 (Duke University Press, 2003)
Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108:1 (February 2003): 84-118.
Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Duke University Press, 2003)
Samantha Power, A Problem of Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002)
Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28:2 (2002): 271-301.
Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791 (Duke University Press, 2001)
Sharon Marcus, “Haussmannization as Anti-Modernity: The Apartment House in Parisian Urban Discourse, 1850-1880,” Journal of Urban History 27:6 (2001)
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia University Press, 2000)
Nancy Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe” Comparative Studies in Society and History
Heidi Tinsman, (Honorable mention) “Reviving Feminist Materialism: Gender and Neoliberalism in Pinochet’s Chile” Signs.
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution 1868-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Lisa A. Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike,” American Historical Review 104:3 (1999)
Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries and Blood: Medicalization and Nation Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79:1 (1999)
Jill Lepore, Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf/Random House, 1998)
Julia A. Thomas, “Photography, National Identity, and the ‘Cataract of Times’: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan,” The American Historical Review (December 1998).
Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997)
Dorothy Ko, “The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth Century China,” The Journal of Women’s History (Winter 1997).
Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Cornell University Press, 1996)
Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
[honorable mention] Antoinette Burton, “A ‘Pilgrim Reformer’ in the Heart of the Empire: Behrami Malabari in Late-Victorian London,” Gender and History (August 1996) Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History (June 1996)
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (Yale University Press, 1995)
Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past and Present (November 1995)
Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Free Press, 1994)
Hitomi Tonomura, “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan,” American Historical Review (February 1994).
Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (University North Carolina, 1993)
Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936
Norma Basch, “Marriage, Morals and Politics in the Election of 1828,” Journal of American History (December 1993).
Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in 17th Century England (University of California, 1992)
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs (Winter 1992).
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991)
Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (1991)
Patricia J. Hilden, “The Rhetoric and Iconography of Reform: Women Coal Miners in Belgium, 1840-1914,” The Historical Journal (March 1990).
Jo Burr Margadent, Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic (1990)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812
Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and Narratives of War,” Journal of American History (March 1990)
Nancy Rose Hunt, “Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946-1960,” Signs (Spring 1990)