Grace Abbott Prize to Catriona Kelly

Julia Mickenberg, UT-Austin & Chair, Prize Committee

 

The Grace Abbott Prize for the best book published in 2007-2008 on the history of children and youth went to Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (Yale UP, 2007) by Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford and author or editor of numerous books on Russian history and culture, including Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (2005). Children's World offers an engaging, compelling, and often surprising survey of childhood in Russia over 100 years of dramatic changes and transformations. Drawing on sources including literature; material culture such as toys, games, and furniture; architecture; educational materials; legal, medical and social welfare records; photographs; government propaganda; music; film; and scholarship in several languages; as well as an extensive oral history project involving a number of researchers and hundreds of interviews; Kelly's synthesis of these elements is nothing short of a tour de force. The book will be useful, certainly to scholars of Russian history and culture, but also a model for historians of childhood, especially those interested in the relationship between children's socialization and state imperatives. Julia Mickenberg served as chair of the 2007-2008 book award committee along with committee members Linda Gordon and Colin Heywood.

 

Best Article Prize to Susan J. Pearson; Honorable Mention to Marta Gutman

Tamara Myers, University of British Columbia

 

The committee for the 2007-08 SHCY best article award included Ning de Coninck-Smith (Danish University School of Education, Rebecca L. de Schweinitz (Brigham Young University), and Tamara Myers (University of British Columbia). The committee received 16 articles, many prize-worthy. After several rounds of discussion the committee decided to award the prize to Susan J. Pearson for “Infantile Specimens” with an honorable mention going to Marta Gutman’s  “Race, Place, and Play: Robert Moses and the WPA Swimming Pools in New York City,” Journal of Society of Architectural Historians (December, 2008). The committee found Pearson’s article superbly rendered: a pleasure to read, this article makes a significant contribution to children’s, women’s, cultural, and social history. In focusing on the emergence of the baby show in the nineteenth century, Pearson locates child body objectification in a large cultural frame that speaks to domesticity and motherhood, markets and consumption, spectacle and classification, while showing their interrelatedness. Gutman’s article was similarly impressive – well-written and carefully researched, it pays particular attention to children’s place in the history of urban swimming and leisure. Demonstrating how race and racism fundamentally shaped the location of New York City pools, Gutman’s work challenges its readers to integrate thinking about childhood, children’s space, neighborhood, race, and urban planning.