2011 Hagley Prize Winner

The 2011 Hagley Prize has been awarded to Susan Ingalls Lewis for her book, Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885. Dr. Lewis is an associate professor at SUNY, New Paltz. The award was presented at the Business History Conference annual meeting on Saturday, May 2, 2011 in St. Louis, Missouri. The Hagley Prize Committee members are Donald C. Jackson, (Chair) Lafayette College; Jocelyn Wills, Brooklyn College, CUNY; and Gerben Bakken, London School of Economics. The committee’s citation reads as follows:

In Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885 (Ohio State University Press, 2009), Susan Lewis casts her scholarly eye at the place of women in the business and life of a major 19th Century commercial center. The role of women as factory workers in early industrialization is well appreciated by historians; and the primacy of women in the progressive reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries is also firmly established in the fields of social, cultural and political history. But the contributions of 19th Century women as entrepreneurs and business operators is something often dismissed as mere anomaly, something that exists solely at the margins of a political economy dominated by a notion of "separate spheres," where men were businessmen and women were not. Lewis takes on this orthodoxy and, through detailed examination of city directories, R.G. Dun credit reports and myriad other sources, brings to life some 2,000 women who directly participated in – and helped define – the business life of Albany, New York during the heart of the 19th century. What emerges is a path-breaking analysis that challenges a wide range of assumptions so often made regarding women and their place in the world of commerce.

But this book is not merely about women and their place within small business and the larger economy. It also charts the everyday realities that have long guided, but until recently remained hidden from, narratives of American life. In Lewis' work, we gain insight into the resilience of the family economy during a period of tumultuous change and the ways that the labor of unexceptional people fueled capitalist expansion. First and foremost Lewis reminds us that business is a social and cultural institution reaching into every aspect of daily life, and that creative archival work can recover the ways in which ordinary people have coped with the vagaries – and the promise -- of the market. In this, Lewis engages essential historiographical debates that resonate among women's, business, social, and cultural history.

A carefully and imaginatively researched text, one of the great strengths of Unexceptional Women is Lewis’s success in taking a mountain of seemingly dry, prosaic data and using it to bring life to people whose lives left only modest marks in more traditional sources. This type of historical writing is perhaps easy to conceive, but to succeed on the scale achieved by Unexceptional Women is truly exceptional. In recognition of this accomplishment the committee is proud to award Susan Ingalls Lewis the 2011 Hagley Prize.