Outstanding Achievement in Slavic Women's Studies

Barbara Alpern Engel (University of Colorado-Boulder).

Editor and translator of Five Sisters: Women against the Tsar, co-editor of Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, author of Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia and, most recently, of Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914, Barbara Engel has been a prolific and leading scholar in Slavic Women's Studies for over a decade. She has worked hard within AAASS and the AHA on issues of women's professional growth and has served on the Steering Committee for AWSS. But, in addition to our substantial admiration for Barbara's achievements as a scholar and teacher, the committee wanted to honor her for her generosity to so many of us within and beyond AWSS.

Best Book in Slavic Women's Studies

Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay, and Kathryn Pinnick. No More Heroines? Russia, Women and the Market (Routledge Press, 1996).

A splendid mix of imagination, clarity, and discipline. Particularly impressive is the collaborative authors' use of interviews, case-studies, and economic analysis. They present a focused and persuasive account for Russian women's strategies for dealing with gender-marked post-Soviet unemployment.

Best Book by a Woman in Slavic Studies

Adele Lindenmeyr. Poverty is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia. (Princeton University Press, 1996).

A book that won praise as meticulously researched, creatively conceived, and wonderfully absorbing in its writing. Poverty is Not a Vice uses the topic of charity work to discuss larger questions of public institutions, patterns of voluntarism, and the creation of civic society in Imperial Russia. It sets a new research agenda for our study of social history in this period and was described by prize committee members as required reading for anyone interested in Imperial Russia.

Best Article in Slavic Women's Studies

Louise McReynolds. "`The Incomparable' Anastasia Vialtseva and the Culture of Personality," in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, eds. Russia * Women * Culture (Indiana University Press, 1996).

An essay that takes up an unexplored area to show social and economic changes through the lens of one woman's reputation. We learn much about Vialtseva herself, but also about her career as a paradigm for women at the turn of the century, and about the ways in which a celebrity's life illuminates daily life for other women at the time. The committee admired the compelling writing and intelligent and original analysis, but most of all the way in which the essay opened up an aspect of cultural history little studied previously.