Rebecca Sharpless: Celebrating 50 Years of the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH)

Today we welcome a guest post from Rebecca Sharpless, professor of history at Texas Christian University and past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH).

The Southern Association for Women Historians, founded in 1970, supports the study of women’s history and the work of women historians. The SAWH especially welcomes as members all women and men who are interested in the history of the U.S. South and/or women’s history, as well as all women historians in any field who live in the U.S. South.

See the guest post below to read about the history of the SAWH as the Association commemorates its fiftieth anniversary.

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The Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH) came about in 1970, when a group of women met in a basement room near the boilers of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville during the Southern Historical Association (SHA) annual meeting. Frustrated because they were not accepted onto panels or committees of the SHA, the women sought to establish a regional affiliate of the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession. Their early goals were to look at women’s roles in the profession and to get women’s history into school curriculums. They pressed forward with another meeting the following year, concerned about the role of women in the academy in the South, the status of women in the SHA, and identification of archival sources on women’s history. And they persisted, becoming a formal organization in 1974.

From the beginning, the SAWH has emphasized mentoring graduate students and encouraging and recognizing scholarship on and by southern women. The Willie Lee Rose Prize, for the best book by a southern woman historian, and the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, for the best book on southern women’s history, were first awarded in 1987. The A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize, for the best article in the field of southern women’s history, began in 1989. The best graduate student paper submitted at the triennial conference receives the Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Prize, established in 1992. And the Anne Firor Scott Mid-Career Fellowship, which provides funding for a second book or equivalent project, began in 2007.

Half a century of collegiality, encouragement, and recognition have made better the work and lives of innumerable scholars of southern women.

The SAWH sponsors two kinds of meetings. At the SHA each year, the SAWH address and reception are often the highlights of the meeting, and the graduate student and member breakfast connects new scholars with older members. The SAWH often sponsors a workshop as well. The multi-day triennial Southern Conference on Women’s History started in 1988, with panels and plenary speakers showcasing the newest and best work in southern women’s history. The meetings have occurred on university campuses across the South in efforts to be affordable to all attendees. The next conference, originally scheduled for 2021, has been pushed back to 2022 because of the pandemic. Between 1994 and 2009, the University of Missouri Press published seven volumes of essays based on conference presentations.

For more about the history of the SAWH, see Clio’s Southern Sisters: Interviews with Leaders of the Southern Association for Women Historians, edited by Constance Schultz and Elizabeth Hayes Turner (University of Missouri Press, 2004), and Sisterly Networks: Fifty Years of Southern Women’s Histories, edited by Catherine Clinton (University of Florida Press, 2020).

Members of the SAWH are thrilled to commemorate our fiftieth anniversary, even if it has to be virtual. Half a century of collegiality, encouragement, and recognition have made better the work and lives of innumerable scholars of southern women. Cheers!

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Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, as well as a forthcoming history of Southern baking.

The University of North Carolina Press congratulates the SAWH on fifty years! As they celebrate this milestone, we also want to celebrate our books that have been recognized through their book prize program.