On International Women’s Day at the Chellis house, Associate Professor of English and American Literature Marion Wells announced that Colleen Carroll ’12 had been unanimously chosen to receive the prestigious Fraker prize from a pool of 12 nominees. The prize was conceived in honor of Alison Fraker, who died in a tragic car accident just before she graduated from Middlebury. Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Chair, and Professor of Anthropology Ellen Oxfeld described Fraker as a “moving force behind getting women’s studies established in Middlebury.”
The Fraker Prize, established in 1990, is designated for essays on topics that pertain to either women’s or gender issues from any concentration in the Middlebury curriculum. The only restriction for the prize is that senior thesis work is not eligible for consideration. The openness of the criteria for this prize led to a wide range in the years and majors of nominees. These nominees ranged from a first-year who wrote her essay for her first year seminar to an essay from a senior neuroscience major’s first sociology class.
A committee of four faculty members is responsible for choosing the recipient of the Fraker Prize from the 12 nominees. In the first round, each essay had two committee readers. Then, each committee member chose two essays to proceed to the final round of deliberations. For the final round, the committee members read the final essays and discussed which should receive the prize. According to Wells, also acting as prize committee chair, the final deliberation lasted approximately one hour.
Oxfeld described the decision as “difficult because there were so many excellent entries [that were] not always easy to compare.”
Wells also commented that “all of the essays were extremely impressive,” but at the end of the committee’s meeting, Carroll’s essay titled, “Continuity and Rupture: Community-building and domesticity in missionary China,” was unanimously chosen to receive the prize.
Carroll wrote this essay for her winter term class “Innocents Abroad: American Travel Writing, 1818-1918.” Carroll, a joint American Studies and Geography major, chose this class because it was tailored to her academic interests and seemed “to fuse the two [departments].” She was looking forward to working in special collections, and travel writing also appealed to her because she had also just returned from studying abroad in Chile.
Andrew Wentink, curator of special collections and archives, taught the American travel writing course for the first time this winter. Wentink created this course to, “give students the opportunity to work in depth with primary source materials.”
He designated the final two weeks of his course as time for the students to work with their chosen primary source document and conduct research for their final assignment. Wentink estimates that “the average [amount] of work per week was easily 15 hours.”
Carroll described the research process as a “really fun [and] hugely different” experience because it involved starting with a primary source document rather than secondary sources. She knew from the beginning that she wanted to write a paper based on a woman’s diary. In the class Wentink had emphasized how “missionary manuscripts…were a great resource.” As a result, Colleen chose the diary of a female missionary, Mary Martin, as the core source for her paper.
Carroll’s topic evolved throughout her research process. Her original plan was to compare Martin and Martin’s husband’s diary. However, as she read the diary, Carroll “was struck by how a lot of entries could have been written by any woman at that time period in America.”
This observation led her to concentrate on the theme Carroll described as “transplanted domesticity as a way to create normalcy.” Her essay highlights the gender differences in missionary life, with the women isolated in their domestic spheres while the men traveled throughout China to perform their missionary work. She also addressed “points where [Martin] became aware of the outside Chinese environment” that changed Martin’s writing style and the structure of her life.
After reading Carroll’s essay, Wentink felt that the writing “had to be recognized” — that the spirit of the essay represented key feminist theories and had the advantage of being based on original primary source research. Wentink believe that it was Carroll’s original analysis of unpublished primary source material that “put her over the edge,” of the other nominees.
Carroll described being nominated as “an incredible honor,” and she learned that she was the recipient of the Fraker prize somewhat unconventionally. While she originally intended to miss the prize ceremony for a van licensing class, she received an e-mail telling her that she should attend the ceremony as she had won the prize.
Carroll described winning as “humbling” after hearing the other nominees presenting their work. Committee members were quick to emphasize the strength of the pool of nominees, but when it came to announce the prizewinner there was no contest. According to Wells, the unanimous decision to award Carroll the prize was based on “her original research [which] offered a sophisticated analysis of primary source material [and] the gender issues involved.”
Student wins annual Fraker Prize
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