Women Winners of the Bancroft Prize: The AHA offers twenty book awards, yet, perhaps by virtue of their abundance, none can match either the professional distinction or the monetary value of the Bancroft Prize.
Awarded annually by Columbia University, the Bancroft is worth $4000 to the authors of works in American history and diplomacy. Since it was inaugurated in 1948, the Bancroft has been awarded to ninety-three books, all but nine of which were written by men. Of the nine women authors who have won the Bancroft (listed below), seven were recently asked about their perceptions of the prize, their reaction to winning it, and its impact on their careers.
The seven—Dorothy Borg, Frances FitzGerald, Jacqueline Jones, Suzanne Lebsock, Mary P. Ryan, Elizabeth Stevenson, and Jean Strouse—are evenly divided between those who considered the award a tremendous professional honor and those who were unaware of it before they became recipients. Typical of the latter is the comment ”I’d never heard of it before I won it,” a consequence of the range of professions and disciplines from which the prize committee receives entries each year. Historians perceive the award as one of the highest honors they can receive for their work. Two recent recipients who are members of the professoriate, Jacqueline Jones and Suzanne Lebsock, note that it is an acknowledgement not only of their own work in the field of women’s history, but also of the significance of women’s history itself.
Reactions to winning the Bancroft ranged from apathy to amazement. For one winner the presentation ceremony was an ordeal not worth repeating, while for others the prize came as a complete but welcome shock.
The prize does bestow a certain amount of visibility on the recipient, a visibility Elizabeth Stevenson and Jean Strouse—both writing as independent scholars when they won the Bancroft—agree helped further their careers. They discovered that being named a Bancroft Prize winner opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed. For Ms. Stevenson that meant a number of fellowships enabling her to continue researching and writing and eventually “being pushed into teaching” at Emory University, while for Ms. Strouse “The professional recognition and honor . . . have added immeasurably to my reputation and confidence as a writer” and contributed to her decision to pursue her interest in history.
Visibility can help in other ways: Mary Ryan found that “it makes a publisher more willing to put you in paperback [and] give you a little more advertising” and, says Elizabeth Stevenson, “it helps get publishers to pay attention to you.” The range of reactions to the prize and what winning it means is indicative of the eclecticism it fosters. Although the actual focus is fairly narrowly de fined, books are entered by a myriad of publishers, authors, and others, drawn by its reputation and the demonstrated willingness of the prize committee to honor the work of non-historians and nonacademics. Not that the Bancroft is by any means some annual yardstick of what is good history; as one winner notes, “Not every good book published in any given year wins.”
1956 Elizabeth Stevenson, Henry Adams. Institute for the Liberal Arts, Emory University
1960 Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley. Deceased
1963 Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Current position unknown
1965 Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938. East Asian Institute, Columbia University
1973 Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Writer, New York City
1981 Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography. Writer, New York City
1982 Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
1985 Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860. Department of History, Rutgers University
1986 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. Department of History, Wellesley College
Librarian of Congress: Daniel J. Boorstin received one of Japan’s highest dec orations, the “First Class of the Order of the Sacred Treasure,” in a June 9 ceremony at the Embassy of Japan. Nobuo Matsunaga, Ambassador of Japan, presented the award.
Instituted in 1888, Daniel Boorstin’s award was for his contributions to the development of the National Diet Library of Japan and cultural exchanges between Japan and the United States.
