Sara A. Whaley Awards 2009

Michelle M. Dowd, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Miliann Kang, University of Massachusetts, Amherst The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work

Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Palgrave Macmillan (April 14, 2009)

"In this richly drawn and fascinating study, Dowd makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the variegated forms of early modern women's working lives during a period of enormous social, religious, and economic change... By juxtaposing texts written by and about female servants, midwives, and educators, she affords her readers multiple perspectives on working women as both subjects and objects of discourse." — Natasha Korda, Associate Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

"Dowd offers an innovative reading of women's work... with its careful attention to the various ways in which the efforts of female workers appeared in early modern texts, Women's Work advances our understanding of the relation between literary form and social content during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."— Douglas Bruster, The University of Texas at Austin and author of Shakespeare and the Question of Culture

"Both careful and provocative, Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture advances our understanding of the complexly intertwined histories of women, work, social change, and literary form."— Frances E. Dolan, author of Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy

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The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work  University of California Press; (February 15, 2010)

Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing-achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons overwhelmingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.

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Sara A. Whaley Award 2008
Prize Winner:
Carrie N. Baker
The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment

"Carrie Baker's important new book shows how women changed the world, or at least the conditions of working women in the United States. Carefully researched, clearly written, tough and smart, The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment is an important contribution not only to the understanding of how limits on sexual harassment were enacted, interpreted, litigated, and addressed, but also to our understanding of the potential of women working together to create a new status quo where only a short time ago, none seemed imaginable. It is both educational and inspirational."
— Susan Estrich, USC Gould School of Law

"In this deeply-researched study, Carrie Baker explores the intertwined efforts of working women, women of color and feminists to name the problem of sexual harassment. She examines with sensitivity and insight the courageous individuals and organizations that spoke out against this insidious form of discriminatory violence in the 1970s and inspired legal as well as cultural sanctions against it by the 1980s. A must read for activists as well as academics."
—Nancy A. Hewitt, Rutgers University

"Carrie Baker...has written an extensively researched book that explores the legal and cultural struggle that laid the groundwork for the Hill-Thomas confrontation. She shows how women from different racial and economic backgrounds came together in what was an extraordinarily diverse grassroots social movement."
—Suzanne Wilson, Northampton Daily Gazette

"Baker traces the rise of the social movement against the sexual harassment of women during the 1970s, which brought the issue to the US Supreme Court during the 1980s. Some of the landmarks of the journey are early legal victories, blue- collar workers and hostile environment sexual harassment, and entering the mainstream."
—Book News, Inc.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award 2009

Maria Eugenia Cotera, University of Michigan Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González and the Poetics of Culture

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González and the Poetics of Culture
University of Texas Press (December 1, 2008)

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women--from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization--into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.

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Gloria E. Anzaldúa Awards 2008

Prize Winner:
Amira Jarmakani
Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S.
Palgrave Macmillan (April 1, 2008)

This is an outstanding, truly innovative, and very timely project that explores predominant images of Arab women in U.S. popular culture.--Nadine Naber, Program in American Culture and Department of Women's Studies, University of Michigan

Imagining Arab Womanhood examines orientalist images of Arab womanhood in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century, exploring, in particular, representations of belly dancers, harem girls, and veiled women. Through semiotic analysis, Jarmakani demonstrates that these images have functioned as nostalgic placeholders for pressing, yet unarticulated concerns about shifting spatial and temporal realities within the contexts of expansionism/modernization and imperialism/late capitalism. Calling these representations cultural mythologies, Jarmakani maps them onto dominant American narratives of power and progress, insisting on an analysis that understands them to be artifacts shaped by the interests of the American contexts in which they circulate. Imagining Arab Womanhood is a vital addition to conversations about representation, race, and gender.

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Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award 2008
Honorable Mention:
Cari M. Carpenter
Seeing Red

In Seeing Red, Cari M. Carpenter examines anger in the poetry and prose of three early American Indian writers: S. Alice Callahan, Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca. In articulating a legitimate anger in the late nineteenth century, the first published indigenous women writers were met not only with stereotypes of “savage” rage but with social proscriptions against female anger. While the loss of land, life, and cultural traditions is central to the Native American literature of the period, this dispossession is only one side of the story. Its counterpart, indigenous claims to that which is threatened, is just as essential to these narratives. The first published American Indian women writers used a variety of tactics to protest such dispossession. Seeing Red argues that one of the most pervasive and intriguing of these is sentimentality. Carpenter argues that while anger is a neglected element of a broad range of sentimental texts, it should be recognized as a particularly salient subject in early literature written by Native American women. To date, most literary scholars—whether they understand sentimentality in terms of sympathetic relations or of manipulative influence—have viewed anger as an obstacle to the genre. Placing anger and sentimentality in opposition, however, neglects their complex and often intimate relationship. This case study of three Native American women writers is not meant to fall easily into either the “pro” or “anti” sentimentality camp, but to acknowledge sentimentality as a fraught, yet potentially useful, mode for articulating indigenous women’s anger.