Award Description
Named for the first woman to graduate from medical school and made possible by the generosity of Barbara “Penny” Kanner, Ph.D., these awards honor a publishable research report, thesis, dissertation, or published article relating to women, health, or women in health-related sciences.
Barbara “Penny” Kanner
received a Ph.D. in the Department of History at UCLA. Kanner (shown
at right with Kathleen McHugh) has taught at UCLA Extension, Mount
St. Mary’s College, Occidental College, and held a faculty appointment
at UCLA. She has been a Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of
Women since 1990. She authored a number of works on British women's
autobiographies including Women in Context: Two Hundred Years of British
Women Autobiographers, a Reference Guide and Reader (Prentice Hall,
1997). Her research interests also include bibliomethodology as an
analytical tool. In her essay, “Growing into History” in the book Voices
of Women Historians (Indiana UP, 1999), she noted that she endowed the
Mary Wollstonecraft Award at the Center for the Study of Women in 1983
after “seeing that professional encouragement for women graduate
students was pitifully inadequate in all disciplines.” More recently,
she generously endowed the George Eliot Dissertation Award and the
Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., Awards. She has served as President of the
West Coast Association of Women Historians and the Conference Group on
Women’s History.
