A Place Where Women Can Feel Valued, or Why Academic Professional Associations Matter, Especially for Women

The Southern Association for Women Historians provided a place where female historians felt validated and emboldened. By providing this space over the past five decades, the SAWH has done two important things: advance the careers of individual female historians while encouraging, developing, and legitimizing the study of women’s history. In the process, as several of the scholars here have already suggested, the SAWH helped transform the historiography of the American South by refocusing many of the lenses that scholars have trained on the past. The history of the SAWH demonstrates the crucial role that scholarly professional associations play in shaping fields of knowledge and the careers of individual scholars.