(Left to right) Nupur, Sam & Mridula Chaudhuri, 2012 WAWH Conference
The Gita Chaudhuri Prize is an annual $1000 prize that recognizes the best monograph about the history of women in rural environments, from any era and any place in the world, published by a WAWH member. Books should be submitted based on publication date rather than copyright date.
The book must be a single-authored monograph based on original research. Anthologies and edited works are not eligible. The book must have been published in one of the three years prior to the prize. Books may only be submitted for consideration once. Books cannot be submitted a second time as paperbacks or new editions. All fields of history are eligible. Entries must be in English. Award bylaws are available.
The Committee shall use the following criteria in selecting recipients: originality of conception and analysis, wide research and careful documentation, and clarity of expression.
A rural community is defined by a group of people who:
- live in a given geographical area with its own natural resources serving as a major bedrock support to produce agricultural crops and food products (grains, meat, fish, poultry, egg honey etc.),
- may make profits from surplus goods taken to markets, which may include making handicraft works (potteries, needleworks, quilts, paintings on a canvas etc.) as marketable commodities.
The committee is especially interested in projects that include rural women who:
- create local employment opportunities for others,
- service others within the community for maintaining daily lives,
- build a prosperous future for themselves and their children while raising their families, and
- work in small or large ways for the well-being of the community members while advancing in their own lives
To apply for the Gita Chaudhuri Prize, please visit our WAWH 2021 Prize Submission Form here.
For questions about the Gita Chaudhuri Prize, 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
Cynthia Prescott
Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019)
From the Award Committee:
Our committee deliberated over several strong choices and ultimately decided to rank Pioneer Mother Monuments as the most deserving of the Gita Chaudhuri Prize because of its original conception and analysis, impressive research, effective use of sources, and attention to rural women, even if in ways that romanticized settler colonialism. This eloquently written investigation of the process of mythmaking explores how gendered and racial narratives about “pioneer” commemoration combined with notions of region, nationalism, and art to compel artists and boosters to erect hundreds of permanent markers across our shared landscape. Monument makers sought to recreate and celebrate the idealized white rural woman in cities as well as rural communities. Not only does author Prescott investigate the creation of the monuments, including who erected them and what they sought to portray, but she also focuses on the public reception of them and how that memory changed over time. The visible bronze and stone statues today symbolize how communities embrace the myths, and “choose to erase the inconvenient truths, of our settler colonial heritage” (Prescott, 7).
2019
Sara Egge
Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (University of Iowa Press, 2018)
2018
No award given.
2017
Sarah Carter
Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016)
From the Award Committee:
Sarah Carter’s ambitious study of British women’s empire building on the Canadian plains takes a truly multi-national approach to questions of women’s place on the land, dealing as it does with policies and ideologies in Britain, Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere. It does an impressive job of examining the concept of “whiteness,” and it appropriately fits the spirit of the Chaudhuri award, focusing as it does specifically on “WOMEN in rural environments.”
Honorable Mention: Veronica Castillo-Muñoz
The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017)
From the Award Committee:
While building on recent scholarship from and about both northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, The Other California makes original contributions to our understanding of intergroup relationships as mediated by women, the value and meaning of women’s labor in rural, agricultural communities over time, and the active participation of women in migrations, revolutions, and movements to claim and reclaim land. Indeed, it provides a comprehensive, gendered account of the history of the Baja California region.
2016
Karen Hansen
Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890 – 1930 (Oxford University Press, 2013)
2015
Grey Osterud
Putting the Barn before the House: Women and Family in Early Twentieth-Century New York (Cornell University Press, 2012)
2014
No award given.
2013
No award given.
2012
Nwando Achebe
The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011).
2011
Janet Casey
A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 2009).
2010
No award given.
2009
No award given.
