CCWH Prelinger Award Winner

CATHERINE FOSL (2005)

The Coordinating Council for Women in History is pleased to announce that Catherine Fosl has been awarded the eighth annual CCWH-Prelinger Scholarship Award of $20,000. Dr. Fosl is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication and Women’s-Gender Studies, at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Fosl is the author of Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1989) and Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). She will use the award to work on her latest project on the “Fairness Campaign,” centered in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Fairness Campaign is a local gay rights movement, founded in the 1960’s by activists in the southern civil rights movement and second wave feminism. Fosl sees this work as “a case study of one local sexuality rights movement that contains important connections to racial, gender, and economic justice movements regionally and nationally, both historically and contemporarily.” The awards committee was impressed with the nuances and layers of Fosl’s study. Not just an institutional history of the Fairness Campaign, this project will study the “intersectionality” of southern history, the civil rights movement, women’s history and gender studies. Based on both oral histories of participants in the movement and archival research, Fosl seeks to extend research on women’s activism beyond the feminist movement and to place it within a multi-generational framework within the social reforms of the twentieth century.

In keeping with the guidelines of the Prelinger Award, Dr. Fosl’s career path has not been traditional. She grew up in rural Georgia, reared mostly by grandparents, only one of whom had gone to high school. After graduating from Georgia State, she worked two years as a newspaper reporter and then returned to school for a master’s in social work. It was during this period that Fosl started working with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), whose history she was later to chronicle, supporting herself now with a series of part-time jobs. At the age of thirty-three, a single mother with a four year old son, Fosl entered Emory University’s doctoral program in history. Ten years later, in 2000, at the age of forty-three, she received her Ph.D.

In addition to acting as the associate legislative director for the WILPF, Fosl also worked for the National Association of Social Workers on legislative affairs dealing with women’s, peace and justice issues. She also worked on the creation of Women’s Studies Programs at Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, and at the University of Louisville.

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The Coordinating Council for Women in History, an organization for women in the historical profession, is committee to exploring the diverse experiences and histories of all women. Its primary goals are to educate men and women on the status of women in the historical profession and to promote research and interpretation in the areas of women’s history.

Information about the Prelinger Prize and other CCWH awards is available here.