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Awarded annually to an undergraduate in Yale College for the best essay that contributes to knowledge about women’s health. Essays may be in any field of the humanities or social, physical or natural sciences and may deal with any aspect of women’s physical or mental health.
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The deadline for Spring 2024 is April 14th.
Past Recipients
| 2024 | Jaime Levin Unraveling Coercive Sterilization Through the Lens of Medical Professionalism: A Case Study of Germany and the US |
| 2023 | Rachel Willis Dear Dr. Dickinson: Eugenics, Sexuality, & Pleasure in Early 20th-Century American Gynecology |
| 2022 | Morgan Baker “Strengthening in service of ourselves and others”: Essays on Decolonization, Black Feminism, & the Rehabilitation of Wellness Work |
| 2021 | Lena Gallager Exceptionally Vulnerable to Abuse: Native Hawaiian Women, Sexual Violence, and Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i’s Mainland Prisons, 1995-2009 |
| 2021 | Gwendolyn Wallace …stories that save our lives: Black Feminist Articulations of Sickness and Health in 1980s Fiction and Nonfiction Literature |
| 2020 | Rachel Dowe Moving Past Roe: Changing the Conversation in the U.S. to Expand Abortion Access |
| 2019 | Mykaela Johnson When Historical Scars are Still Open Wounds: The Ongoing History of the Medical Disregard of Black Women’s Pain During Childbirth |
| 2018 | Zachary Cohen For Bread and Roses: Economic Citizenship and Industrial Feminism in New York’s Factory Investigating Commission |
| 2017 | Laura Goetz Anemic Science: A Bio-Ethnographic Case Study on Asking Better Questions |
| 2016 | Rebecca (Becca) Bakal Making Birth Work: Empowering Women of Color through Doula Training |
| 2015 | Olivia Rosenthal The Road to Roe: Sterilization, Contraception, and Abortion in Charlotte, North Carolina, 1943-1974 |
| 2014 | Gabriel Murchison Clinics, Cancer, and Children: Lesbian Health in the U.S. AIDS Crisis |
| 2013 | Jennifer Shelby Prescribing Power and The Pill: Medical Authority in the Popularization of Oral Contraceptives in the United States of America, 1957 to 1965 |
| 2013 | Rachel Looff The “Dykes” Chapter: Response to “In Amerika They Call us Dykes” as a Representation of Lesbian Participation in the 1970s US Women’s Health Movement |
| 2012 | Katherine Orazem The Female Circumcision Controversy and the Politicization of Kikuyu Women |
| 2012 | Micha’le Ricara Simmons Transforming the Movement Through Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Equity at Planned Parenthood of Southern New England |
| 2011 | Ersilia DeFilippis The Legacy of Title IX: Disordered Eating, Injuries, and Role Conflict in the Female Collegiate Athlete |
| 2011 | Rhiana Gunn-Wright Breaking the Brood Mare:Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven |
| 2010 | Naomi Bland Plan B: The Collusion of the Birth Control Movement and the Uplift Movement Viewed through Works of Angelina Weld Grimke and Margaret Sanger |
| 2009 | Claire Purcell, “Change I Must”: Toward a Theory of Agency in Women’s Drug Recovery |
| 2008 | Sobia Sadat Sarmast Medicalization of Premenstrual Symptoms in the United States: 1929-1983 |
| 2007 | Emma Margaret Clune “The Truth Will Set Us Free:” Pro-Life Activist Rhetoric and Anthropological Ethics in New Haven, Connecticut |
| 2007 | Morgan Gabrielle Marshall Boyfriends, Friends with Benefits, and Flings: Young Women’s Negotiation of Sexual Health and Desire in Buenos Aires |
| 2006 | Melissa Ann Donais F.A.T. Girls: An Examination of Current Policies and a Policy Refommendation Regarding the Female Athlete Triad in Collegiate Sports |
| 2005 | Mirinda A. Gillespie Childbearing in Transition: Pregnancy, Birth, and the Postpartum in the Bushbuckridge Area of South Africa |
| 2005 | Zoe Blacksin |
| 2004 | Arielle Dana Levin-Becker |
| 2003 | Barbara Allison Wexelma Battle for Control: Health Insurance, Birth Control, & American Politics |
| 2002 | Laura Danielle Smolowe |
| 2002 | Alyssa Greenwald The Peculiar Disconnect: Gender Development and Female Political Participation in Thailand |
| 2001 | Stephanie Schmid Problematizing the Vocabulary of Violence Against Women: Searching for an Empowering Language- Rape Law & the Criterion for Consent as a Case Study |
| 2000 | Kusum Sara Mathews Balancing Baby, Breadwinning, and Bob: Martial “maturity” and the effects of multiple roles on women’s health |