Two CSUH Professors Win Book Awards

Two history professors at California State University, Hayward have received awards for their non-fiction books.

Dee Andrews was awarded the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for her book, The Methodists and Revolutionary America (Princeton University Press, 2000).

The fellowship committee chose Professor Andrews' study from a field of 55 entries for its "thorough research, concentration on a significant historical subject, and use of rich human detail and contradiction."

The book will be issued in paperback in spring 2002.

Jessica Weiss, an assistant professor, received the Western Association of Women Historians' Sierra Book Prize this year for To Have and To Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (University of Chicago Press,2000).

The book examines such issues as parenting, women and work, ideals of family togetherness, sexuality, and lifestyle changes. Using oral interviews in the narrative of the book, Weiss demonstrated that the
popular "Father Knows Best" image does not represent the totality of people's experiences in the 1950s or after.

In To Have and To Hold Weiss undercuts the image of home-bound male-dominated women, demonstrating that women often were working outside the home and delaying pursuit their own dreams of further education and career development until their youngest children began school.

Kathie Sheldon, a committee member of the Western Association of Women Historians, said the book was chosen because it made us all think about the generation of the parents of the baby boom in a new, more complex, and more honest way.