We will be live-tweeting @jhalldowd's address for the #2020SHA this evening, watch this space!
And we're off! Please consider this session at 9 am tomorrow and purchasing the book Sisterly Networks. #2020SHA 
The A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for Best Article in Southern Women's History goes to Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik @EGMasarik Congratulations! #2020SHA
The Ann Firor Scott Mid-Career Fellowship goes to Dr. Sarah Case! Congratulations! #2020SHA
Honorable mention to Dr. Lisa Tendrich Frank! @cliogator
Willie Lee Rose Prize for Best Book in Southern History by a Woman or Women go to Sarah Milov @allofmilov AND Jacquelyn Down Hall @jhalldowd ! Both excellent works. #2020SHA
The Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for Best Book in Southern Women's History go to @sejr_historian and @jhalldowd #2020SHA Congratulations!
#2020SHA Dowd Hall: "I see myself as part of a lucky generation" that was "swept along on historical currents that allowed us to do things that our mothers could not do" and paid that change forward.
@jhalldowd's story starts in Pauls Valley, OK in the midst of World War II. Her mother became pregnant at 19, and regretted marrying her dashing but domineering husband. But Dowd Hall was wrapped in the support of strong women, who taught her how to "resist the patriarchy!"
#2020SHA She knew that college would be her "way out" of a place that represented the sins of slavery, segregation, and the subjugation of Indigenous people. It took a long time to realize she was living on stolen land.
"You don't have to be liberal or radical to realize that [segregation] was not right," said @jhalldowd's mother. #2020sha
Dowd Hall's professor essentially handpicked a group of scholars and encouraged them to go to graduate school, but she had to save money first. Her job? A Delta airlines flight attendant! #2020SHA
Delta hired its first Black flight attendant in 1966. It took aggressive legal action and another decade for the airline to stop weighing its flight attendants.
Dowd Hall hopes that the small forms of resistance of 60s flight attendants helped lead to Sara Nelson (@FlyingWithSara) and the Association of Flight Attendants union. #2020SHA
At Columbia, she found out that her initial advisor didn't believe she could be an historian, so she switched to an advisor of the 20th C. Enter: the women's movement.
It wasn't until grad school at Columbia that @jhalldowd saw herself as a Southerner. Fellow students listened to her drawl and thought she spoke for the Deep South. She then describes Oklahoma's relationship to the "South" and her own identity. #2020SHA
The newly-married Halls moved to Atlanta to be closer to the Civil Rights movement. "Many from our generation knew little of the history of home-grown radicalism in the South" #2020sha
"The process of writing a dissertation was excruciating" as an academic in the middle of counter-cultural activists in Atlanta, especially when her advisor was up North!
I just heard Jacquelyn Dowd Hall saying that she "threw shade" on "great white men." 2020 is....good now???? #2020SHA
She got the oral history job....at the same institution in Chapel Hill that she had been "shading!" At the last minute, a man in the "boy's club" didn't take the job, and recommended that Dowd Hall look into it.
"The early years in Chapel Hill were just awful." She was Alice in Wonderland. "Never before did I have such a visceral feeling of being a female body out of place" #2020SHA
There was gossip about her appearing for her job interview in pants!!
There was gossip about her appearing for her job interview in pants!!
She joined the fight for women at UNC Chapel Hill who were denied tenure or "frozen out." They brought up a class action suit on wage discrimination. #2020SHA
1979. First book. Tenure. Separation. A new chapter begins! "Like a Family" was the result of "intense collaboration" that was "infinitely more fun." #2020SHA It taught me "not to be afraid of what I didn't know." Share ideas while they're "puny, vulnerable, half formed."
@jhalldowd believes her border state upbringing caused her to blur boundaries in her history work.
She strives to treat her students as "essential members of a multi-general community," traces this way of thinking back to her upbringing. #2020SHA
Moving advice from her mother: "Go ahead, take a chance, follow your heart, I've got your back." @jhalldowd #2020SHA
"Coming of age as a scholar within the SAWH, I witnessed and benefitted from what @GilmoreGlenda calls "an ethic of mutual mentoring and collaboration" --@jhalldowd #2020SHA
@jhalldowd is also active in helping to "win back" NC politics, and thanks her writing group for helping her through today's....political atmosphere... #2020SHA
@jhalldowd's fun archival discovery: she came across a union organizer named O. Delight Smith, and was the first person to work with labor spy reports found in a basement of an Atlanta textile mill!
@jhalldowd notes that she played a role in mentoring @GilmoreGlenda, SAWH's top honoree in our Mentorship Hall of Fame!
thesawh.org/sawh50/
thesawh.org/sawh50/
She reminds us that "many people had various lives along the way" to becoming successful historians. It's not just a straight and narrow line, life happens.
You heard it here folks: @jhalldowd experienced impostor syndrome. Take her advice: be brave! Don't be afraid to share imperfect work!
"Be kind. Be brave. Do the work." @jhalldowd creates mantras off-the-cuff! #2020SHA
Her mentor, Ken Jackson, is not only a Southerner, but from Memphis! Full circle! #2020SHA
That's all from us! Y'all have a good night! Here's the full thread. @UnrollHelper
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