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 2022 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

2021
Erika Denise Edwards
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women and the Construction of a White Argentine Republic (University of Alabama, 2020)

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

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)

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.)