We are delighted to announce the joint winners of the WHN/WHAI book prize for 2025:
Sarah Crook, Unhappy Mothers: Women, Motherhood, and Social Change in Postwar Britain (Manchester University Press) and
Samuel Rutherford, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860-1939 (Oxford University Press)
On Sarah Crook’s book, the judges commented:
The judges are delighted to reward this impressive monograph with the WHN book prize, shared with Samuel Rutherford. At the intersection of social history and history of medicine, Unhappy Mothers brings rich archival and conceptual insights to scholarship on social/psy science expertise and motherhood in modern Britain. Its clarity of contribution, acute sense of change over time, and ability to illustrate the complex nature of public authority and expertise make it a powerful contribution to women’s and gender history. Crook places women’s testimony at the book’s heart, historicises how such testimony emerged and offers sustained attention to the varieties of experience of motherhood in children’s infancy and early years.
And on Samuel Rutherford:
This is a powerfully argued, analytically ambitious landmark research contribution that the judges are delighted to honour with the WHN book prize, shared with Sarah Crook. By bringing together histories of women’s entry into higher education with histories of gender and heterosociality, Rutherford brilliantly teases out both intellectual and social change. He argues that heterosexuality became a dominant social script and experience in mid twentieth-century Britain, at the expense of diverse other social and pedagogical models. Spanning universities in England and Scotland, this history of the expansion of higher education for women offers rich entry points into social change, state power and intimate life across eight decades.
A special commendation was given to Emily Gee, Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman (Liverpool University Press).
Each of our winners was awarded £250 in prize money.
We would like to thank all the entrants for the 2025 book prize. It was a very strong field. And special thanks to our judges: Lucy Delap (chair), Virginia Davis, Laura Gowing and Lyndsey Jenkins.
