Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award

The Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award is an annual $400 award given to honor a book, book chapter, article, or electronic media that has been verifiably published or posted in the two years prior to the award year and which illustrates the use of a specific set of primary sources (diaries, letters, interviews etc).

Award bylaws are available (revised 2012).

To apply for the Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award, please visit our WAWH 2021 Prize Submission Form here.

For questions about the Kanner Award, please contact the Current Chair.

WAWH is working to re-endow its awards and prizes. Please consider a donation, of any amount, to support any of our eight awards and prizes. Donate now!

Previous Recipients

2020
Katherine M. Marino
Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2019)

From the Award Committee:

Feminism for the Americas distinguishes itself by using a wide range of multilingual primary sources drawn from the author’s exhaustive research in two continents. Most impressive was Marino’s use of letters written by six activists from South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Feminism for the Americas is a well-written and argued book, which demonstrates the author’s solid contextual knowledge. Decentering U.S. women in transnational history, Feminism for the Americas emphasizes South American and Caribbean women’s leadership in the Pan-American women’s movement. It explores Popular Front Pan-American feminism in the 1930s and 1940s, which incorporated feminist labor concerns with the demands of equal rights. Marino’s work makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of transnational movements and international feminism; it demonstrates how South American and Caribbean women forged global feminism – a fight for women’s rights and human rights on a global scale – out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism.

2019
Miroslava Chávez García
Migrant Letter Writing Across the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018)

2018
Lynne Marie Getz
Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers and Writers: A Family Journey through American History (University Press of Kansas, 2017)

2017
Doreen Mattingly
A Feminist in the White House (Oxford University Press, 2016)

From the Award Committee:

This book is a biography and a political, organizational and historical discussion combined, of one woman, the various civil groups she was associated with and the White House where she served as aide to the President. It is first of all a very timely book that details and makes accessible the inner workings of the White House during the Carter years. This historical account of the positions, the importance, the power and the infighting of aides to the President gives insights into the ways we can interpret and understand not only the Carter years but also what is happening in the current administration.

The book is very well written, makes use of an archive of personal and public sources and is based on collaborative research with students and exchange with the researched person. The reason I rank Doreen Mattingly’s book first lies in these academic merits but also in the urgency that a reconsideration of feminist politics in government has gained in contemporary US politics.

2016
Sharony Green
Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015).

2015
Kathleen B. Jones
Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt (Thinking Women Books, 2013).

2014
Andrea Germer
“Visible Culture, Invisible Politics: Propaganda in the Magazine NipponFujin, 1942-1945”

2013
Lois W. Banner
MM–Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe (Harry N. Abrams, 2011).

2012
Nwando Achebe
The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011).

Honorable Mention
Elizabeth Heineman,
Before Porn was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago, 2011).

2011
Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds.
Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, (University of Illinois Press, 2010).

2010
Melissa Lambert Milewski
Before the Manifesto: The Life Writings of Mary Lois Walker Morris, (Utah State University Press, 2007).

2009
No Award Given.

2008
No Award Given.

2007
Christine Bard, Annie Metz et Valérie Neveu (dir.)
Guide des sources de l’histoire du feminisme, (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006).

Karen Offen (above) and Helen Chenut accept the award for Bard, Metz, and Neveu from Maria Elena Raymond, Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award chair.

2006
Ronald Loftus
Telling Lives: Women’s Self Writing in Modern Japan, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

2005
Allison Booth
How to Make it as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to Present, (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

2004
Lynn Hudson
The Making of Mammy Pleasant: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco, (University of Illinois Press, 2002).

2003
Sheridan Harvey, et al., Eds.
American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women’s History and Culture in the United States, (Lebanon, NH: University of New England Press, 2002).

2002
No Award Given.

2001
No Award Given.

2000
No Award Given.

1999
Karen J. Blair
Northwest Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources on the History of Oregon and Washington Women, 1787-1970, (Washington State University Press, 1997).

1998
No Award Given.

1997
Mary Lynn McCree, Nancy Slote, and Maree De Anguary
The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide, (Indiana University Press, 1996). [see: The Jane Addams Project]

1996
No Award Given.

1995
Candace Falk
Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources, (Chadwyck-Healy, 1995). [Full text online]

1994
Yaffa Claire Draznin
“My Other Self”: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis, 1884-1920, (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.)