CCWH Prelinger Award Winner

LINDA RESSE (2003)

The Coordinating Council for Women in History is pleased to announce that Dr. Linda Reese has been awarded the sixth CCWH-Prelinger Scholarship Award of $20,000. Reese, who completed the Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma in 1991, will use the Prelinger funds to complete the research on the history of the African American women of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory, 1840-1890. When the people of these tribes were forcibly removed from their homelands in the southeastern United States to a segregated western domain in the 1830s and 1840s, they took their approximately 10,000 African slaves with them. The end of the Civil War brought freedom to those slaves. Her book manuscript, Reese will trace the westward migration of the tribes, the experiences of the slave women in the new lands as these varied among the tribes, the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on family and work life for the newly freed women, their education experiences, and the new racial boundaries that shaped the lives of the freed women.

The award committee was intrigued by Reese's choice of topics, to consider gender in two groups that were disempowered by political, economic and social systems that shaped life in the nineteenth century. Traditionally the history of the Five Civilized Tribes tells of their anguish as they were forcefully removed from their native lands. Reese's research focuses on the "property" the Five Civilized Tribes took with them, specifically the slaves that they took with them when they were forced to move. The complexities of these relationships between the tribes and their slaves emerge from her work as she reveals the divergent patterns of slave keeping among the several tribes. The Choctaw/Chickasaw pattern duplicated southern planter control, where slaves were property, while the Cherokee held the middle ground, allowing intimacy across ethnic/economic boundaries that slavery created, and the Seminole/Creek pattern that allowed integration into tribal affairs. These divergent patterns shaped the freedwomen's lives in the nineteenth century and would transfer down across the generations.

Reese has already completed research on the Cherokee freedwomen and has published in the Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2002). In addition, she has published Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920. She has also published numerous articles, including "Clara Luper and the Oklahoma City Civil Rights Movement" which appeared in African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000; and "'Working in the Vinyard': African American Women in All-Black Communities," which was published in Kansas Quarterly. "Anna Lewis, Historian for the Oklahoma College for Women," is an article in progress for The Chronicle of Oklahoma.

The committee was also impressed by Reese's non-traditional life course and by her ability to find her way into the historical profession. As a young woman, she was encouraged to become a teacher because that was a "good job for a woman." She followed that path and was to be the first in her family to complete a college degree. But the pressures of the Vietnam War forced Reese and her family to set a course that slowed, sometimes stopped, her steps towards the doctorate that she completed in 1991. Now she is in the classroom where she provides a powerful role model for students from fourteen to sixty-five.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.