Annual Book & Article Prizes

 

Book Prize:

The Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, which carries a $1000 award, is a prize 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 women's history. Only books published in 2009 will be considered. The following categories are not eligible for consideration: textbooks, juveniles, documentary collections, or collections of essays. Submissions must be made before January 15, 2010. Please do not send any submissions to the Berkshire Conference main address.

Directions for submitting books for the Berkshire Conference First Book Prize

 

Article Prize:

The Berkshire Conference Article Prize, which carries a $500 award, is awarded for an article in any field of history published in 2009 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. Articles need not focus on women's history. Submissions must be made before January 15, 2010. Please do not send any submissions to the Berkshire Conference main address.

Directions for submitting articles for the Berkshire Article Prize.

Prize recipients are generally notified in early Summer of the next calendar year

 

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Previous Berkshire Prize Winners:

 

2008 Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial
China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

With this magnificent book, Weijing Lu has changed both what we know about gender in history and how we know it. Strictly speaking, brides whose betrothed died before consummating their marriage were not required by Confucian morality to remain chaste, but many opted to do so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lu is the first scholar to examine the internal contradictions of the cult of the faithful maiden in any language. Her meticulous archival research reveals its centrality to male philological scholarship. Even more impressive is her skillful excavation of the motivations and desires of these maidens from male-authored texts. In so doing, Weijing Lu has made gender indispensable for our understanding of the psychology of male learning and female agency. We commend Lu’s daring to ask big historical questions, scrupulous research, fine historical imagination, and clarity of writing.

Susanne E. Freidberg, “The Triumph of the Egg,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 2 (2008): 400-423.

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.

 

2007 Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Andrea Friedman, “The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism,” Journal of American History 94 (2007), 445-68.

2006 Sandra Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and 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 and Srirupa Roy, 'A Symbol of Freedom: The Indian Flag and the Transformatios of Nationalism, 1906-2002," The Journal of Asian Studies 65. no. 3 (August 2006).

2005 Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of the Eighteenth Centruy 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.

2004 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects:  Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton University Press; and Ruth Rogaski, Hygenic Modernity:  Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, University of California Press.

Toby L. Ditz for "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, and Sally McKee, for "Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete," Past & Present 182 (2004):  31-53.

Martha Hodes, "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story," American Historical Review 108:1 (February 2003): 84-118.

2002 Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Duke University Press)

Samantha Power, "A Problem of Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books; (Paperback:HarperCollins Perennial)

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.

2001Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791 (Duke University Press)

Sharon Marcus, "Haussmannization as Anti-Modernity: The Apartment House in Parisian Urban Discourse, 1850-1880," Journal of Urban History 27:6 (2001)

2000 Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (University of North Carolina Press) and Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia University Press)

Nancy Caciola, "Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe" Comparative Studies in Society and History and Heidi Tinsman, (Honorable mention) "Reviving Feminist Materialism: Gender and Neoliberalism in Pinochet's Chile" Signs

1999 Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution 1868-1898 (University of North Carolina Press)

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) and 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).

1998 Jill Lepore, Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf/Random House).

Julia A. Thomas, "Photography, National Identity, and the 'Cataract of Times': Wartime Images and the Case of Japan," The American Historical Review (December 1998).

1997 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press). 

Dorothy Ko, "The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth Century China," The Journal of Women's History (Winter 1997).

1996 Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Cornell University Press). We also awarded a special honorable mention to Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (University of North Carolina Press).

Antoinette Burton, "A 'Pilgrim Reformer' in the Heart of the Empire: Behrami Malabari in Late-Victorian London," Gender and History (August 1996) and Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History (June 1996).

1995 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work : The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (Yale University Press).

Susan Mosher Stuard, "Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery," Past and Present (November 1995).

1994 Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare

Hitomi Tonomura, "Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan," American Historical Review (February 1994).

1993 Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 and 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).

1992 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in 17th Century England

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs (Winter 1992).

1991 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 and Nancy Leyes Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America

Patricia J. Hilden, "The Rhetoric and Iconography of Reform: Women Coal Miners in Belgium, 1840-1914," The Historical Journal (March 1990).

1990 Jo Burr Margadent, Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic and 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) and Nancy Rose Hunt, "Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura's Foyer Social, 1946-1960," Signs (Spring 1990).