Southern Association for Women Historians

History

In December 1969, a group of women historians associated with the American Historical Association formed an independent association, the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession. At a November 1970 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, several women who had attended that previous meeting formed the Southern Association of Women Historians in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1983, it was renamed to the Southern Association for Women Historians. Their first conference was in 1988 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The conference has been held every three years since then. The talks at these conferences have been well received. In 1989, they established the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for the best scholarly article on Southern women's history, and in 1992 established the Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Prize for the best graduate student paper submitted to their conference.