The winner of the 2024 SSA Best Book Prize is Denisa Nešťáková with her submission Be Fruitful and Multiply: Slovakia’s Family Planning Under Three Regimes (1918-1965). Published by Verlag-Herder Institut, Marburg, 2023.
The decision of the prize committee was unanimous. Nešťáková’s well-researched and highly readable social history of family-planning makes an important contribution to the study of how the state and other public actors such as the Church impact and control the privacy of individual family decisions as well as the intimacy of sexual life. It also highlights, once again, how important Slovakia as a society, a culture, a political idea and a national imaginary is to a broader understanding of European history, European and Western society and culture and of course politics. From her rich archival data – supported notably with over 50 illustrative figures – really brings alive the three crucial and unique time periods of post-war Czechoslovakia, the Slovak State of 1939, and the state socialist experiment after 1945. Yet in each one, Nešťáková argues that nepotism, double-standards, and political pragmatism were always present and certain parts of society were able to gain access to birth control even while these same circles were officially fighting against them. Her study will no doubt be essential reading for experts of the area but also for scholars in gender studies, sexuality and rights around reproduction – a question so critical for our present time.
The prize is in the amount of $200. The prize committee consisted of Edward Snajdr (Chair), Susan Mikula, Greg Ference and Mark Stolarik.
The committee commends Denisa on this achievement and wishes her all the best in their continuing scholarly endeavors!
Ed Snajdr
Chair, SSA Prize Committee
11-21-2024
Slovak Studies Association 