Professor Lisa Cody's book Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford University Press, 2005), has won the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians, and has been shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize, to be announced in July.
The Sierra Prize is awarded annually to the best book published in the past year in any field of history by an association member. The Whitfield Prize, established in 1976, is considered the most prestigious in Britain for the first book in any field of British history.
Birthing the Nation also received the 2005 History Honor Society's Phi Alpha Theta Prize for best first book in any historical field. In addition to the Sierra Prize, Cody has earned recognition for several of her journal articles, including last year's Walter D. Love Article Prize for British History and the Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize for women's history in 2002 and 2005.
Birthing the Nation integrates previously overlooked themes concerning sex and gender into a larger narrative of British political, economic, and social development.
In Cody's telling, says Jessica Weiss, assistant professor of history at California State University, East Bay, and 2007 Sierra Book Prize chair, "reproduction and birth become central to an understanding of 18th-century Britain, placing gender and medical history at the center of the historical stage. Its scope, rigor, creativity, and analytic verve make it the Sierra Prize selection for 2005."
The book, says Weiss, is full of lively anecdotes pulled "from a variety of sources that are smartly analyzed and clearly connected to the narrative, creating a compelling case for public fascination with seemingly private bodily matters." She describes the book as "thoroughly and imaginatively researched, and spanning gender, medical, scientific, and political history. Lisa Cody vividly tells the story of the triumph of male midwives and so-called rational science over female midwives and experience."
Cody is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe colleges and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at Stanford and on the Denison University faculty. Cody has also served as history department chair.