The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) is proud to recognize Dr. Jennifer Randles as the 2016 recipient of the Jessie Bernard Contribution to Feminist Scholarship Paper Award, which is given to a graduate student or new professional who has published or is about to publish a paper using feminist frameworks and methodologies in research. Her paper is titled "Redefining the Marital Power Struggle Through Relationship Skills: How United States Marriage Education Programs Challenge and Reproduce Gender Inequality."

Dr. Randles is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. She earned a master's and Ph.D. in sociology with an emphasis in family, gender, and public policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor's degree in sociology and political science from Austin College. Dr. Randles' primary research interests include low-income families, marriage, gender, family policies, and feminist qualitative research methods. Her first book, Proposing Prosperity: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America will be published by Columbia University Press in December, and her current research is an ethnography of responsible fatherhood programming.

Dr. Randles will be recognized for her achievements at the 2016 NCFR Annual Conference, Nov. 2-5 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Jessie Bernard, the namesake of the award, is a former NCFR Board of Directors member and a pioneer in the field of feminist family studies. She declared herself a feminist in 1970 and is known for her celebrated description of "his" and "her" marriages.

The National Council on Family Relations is the premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. NCFR has a membership of more than 3,000 family researchers, practitioners and educators. For more information on the National Council on Family Relations or its scholarly publications, visit the NCFR website at ncfr.org.