2009 Dorothy McGuigan Prizes for
Best Essays on Women
Each year the Women’s Studies Department awards prizes for the best undergraduate and graduate essays on women written at the University of Michigan. The prizes honor the memory of Dorothy Gies McGuigan, a distinguished alumna of the University of Michigan who taught in the School of Business Administration and the Residential College. Dorothy McGuigan was an early supporter of the Women's Studies Program and a founder and member of the editorial board of the University of Michigan Press series on Women and Culture.
Undergraduate Winner, Amy Wilson
“Deeds Not Words: Perspectives on Emmeline Pankhurst”
The winner of the undergraduate Dorothy McGuigan Award is Amy Wilson, a junior in Women's Studies and Creative Writing. In her essay Wilson synthesizes historical and biographical writings about the noted British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. Wilson notes the irony in the fact that, while Pankhurst was criticized for using militant tactics to win women's rights, most writers insist the she was a timid woman who owed her accomplishments entirely to men in her life -- her husband or her father. As Pankhurst herself observed, “How different the reasoning is that men adopt when they are discussing the cases of men and those of women.” Wilson shows that the narratives put forth by Pankhurst’s biographers sometimes reveal more about their sexism than about their subject or her political acumen. The Women's Studies Undergraduate Committee selected this essay from a deep and impressive field of entries, citing its sophisticated synthesis of multiple sources, historical focus, and lucid, well-crafted prose.
Graduate Winner, Ann V. Bell
“Positioned through Exclusion:
How women of low socioeconomic status negotiate experiences of infertility in the context of structural inequality”
Ann V. Bell, a Women’s Studies certificate student from the doctoral program in Sociology, is the winner of the graduate McGuigan Award. Her essay has honed in on an understudied issue, which puts fertility and new reproductive technologies - and their intersection with social class - front and center. As such, this work constitutes an original contribution to knowledge. Her paper illuminates how the women studied modify discourses of motherhood to locate themselves as women who could be competent mothers while simultaneous struggling with the idea that motherhood is accessible only to those with adequate wealth. She also shows how these women construct effective alternative ways of experiencing the joys of mothering. This works is original in that it extends feminist attention, in Bell’s terms, to “non-motherhood” which has been ignored in the feminist literature. The Women’s Studies Doctoral Programs Committee, representing the four joint Ph.D. programs, unanimously selected this essay from an impressive set of submissions, recognizing it as reflecting the outstanding quality of theoretical and methodological training our graduate students receive.
