In 2019 the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) established an annual prize for documentary editors, scholars, and students at midpoint of a military history project heavily dependent on documentary editing and document sources. The prize honors the life and work of Sharon Ritenour Stevens (1950-2013), Associate Editor of the Papers of George C. Marshall at the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. Preference is given to projects on women in uniformed military service or in various military support services (such as the USO) or on the home front during wartime. Advanced students, scholars (including independent scholars), and editors may apply by the 1 November 2024 deadline.

The two-part prize of $1500 seeks to facilitate the use of documentary sources for a project or doctoral dissertation at its research stage. It consists of $1,000 toward travel to collections, reproduction of sources, or other costs associated with utilization of documents in research, along with $500 to support the prizewinner’s participation in the annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing. Given current pandemic restraints on travel, recipients may use the prize for alternative methods of research. Winners are required to report on their work in person or virtually at our scholarly conference. The prize also includes a year’s membership in ADE.

On her own time and money, Sharon also labored on a biography of Lt. Col. Susanna P. Turner, a protégé of George C. Marshall and a member of the first Officers Candidate School for the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) in 1942, as well as one of ten women selected for Command and General Staff School. Unfortunately, this biographical project never reached fulfillment. The Ritenour Stevens prize seeks to aid scholars and editors working in fields allied with Sharon’s interests but for whom institutional support such as sabbaticals and release-time or research funds is not available.

Specifically, her interests were:

• Uniformed women’s roles in military conflict, declared or undeclared
• Women’s history
• Military history

At the conclusion of the award period, recipients should provide a one-page (250 words) report to the ADE Council on their use of the prize. A version of this report may be considered for publication in the association newsletter and on the ADE website.

Six ADE members comprise the prize committee: Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, chair;  Philander Chase, Martha King, Kristen Lee Griffin, Riley Sutherland, and Rachel Love Monroy. Queries may be sent to CDBL@Brown.edu.

2020 – Kristen Lee Griffin, a former Army medic and an instructor of history in the University of Georgia system, is starting a Ph.D. program in women’s studies and military history. Griffin works at the intersection of military, women’s, and documentary history with a research focus on the admittance of women to the U.S. military academies in the 1970s. She is now a member of the prize committee.

2021 (two prizes) — Manaswini Ramkumar, a PhD student in International Relations at American University’s School of International Service, does elite interviews with retired and active officers of the Indian military and consults resources in archives in India to explore how the Indian military service protected democratic institutions/protocols during Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” regime. Manu is examining internal correspondence among senior military leaders, military memoirs, training and doctrine manuals and newspaper reports about the 1975-1977 Emergency in three major archives in India. The resulting dissertation will be entitled “Call of Duty: Military Responses to Undemocratic Leadership.

— William A. Taylor, a professor of Global Security Studies at Angelo State University, Texas, studies the development of the All-Volunteer Army Force (AVF) in 1973. The planning for that contingency created a space for more women to serve in all the services, including, eventually, in combat, he posits. His project, a published volume documenting the creation of the AVF along with presentation of narrative sources, is an important addition to undergraduate teaching sources in military history. The resulting book appeared in 2023 as The Advent of the All-Volunteer Force: Protecting Free Society as part of Routledge’s “Critical Moments in American History” series in 2023.

2022 — Kelley Fincher, a fourth-year graduate student in history at George Mason University, is researching women’s unpaid “domestic labor” in the US military for a dissertation entitled “‘All Personnel Profit’?: Domestic Labor of Military Families in the Post War and Cold War Eras.” Her work explores daily life and household burdens of American military families in the conscription era following the Second World War. She works with military base archives, military base newspapers and newsletters (often edited by military spouses), as well as informal documents such as scrapbooks created by spouses.

2023 — Riley Sutherland, a recent M.A. graduate in history from the University of South Carolina and staff member of the Pinckney Papers at that institution, uses official pension records to reconstruct how women served, formally or informally, during the Revolutionary War. As a beginning PhD student in history at Harvard, she is continuing to use pension files to study Revolutionary War veterans’ and widows’ experiences of disability and care work.

2024 — Marie Robin, a fourth-year graduate student in history at Columbia University. Ms. Robin researches the complex interplay between violence, sex, and warfare during the wars for independence in Vietnam (1946-54) and Algeria (1954-62). Uniquely bilingual in English and French and competent in Arabic and Vietnamese, she is accessing new documentary sources in Algeria, Vietnam, and France for an analysis of the Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels, BMC), the French system of military prostitution.