At a time when women were, in many cases, expected to conform to traditional roles of a housewife and homemaker, Elizabeth was ascending the throne of a powerful country. In the words of one psychologist interviewed for a 1953 Los Angeles Times article, for the first time “the women of America have found a heroine who makes them feel superior to men.”
Author Archives: Arianne Chernock/Boston University
Arianne Chernock’s research focuses on modern British and European history, with an emphasis on gender, culture, politics, and the monarchy. Her first book, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford University Press, 2010), examined the forgotten but foundational contributions of men to the creation of the “rights of women” in Enlightenment Britain. The book won the 2011 John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Articles based on this project appeared in the Journal of British Studies, Enlightenment and Dissent, and the edited collection Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Palgrave, 2005). Her second book, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women’s Movement, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. The book explores women’s rights campaigners’ engagement with Queen Victoria – and the backlash that their engagement precipitated. Material from this project has been published in Victorian Studies, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, and in the edited collection Engendering Women’s History: A Global Project (NYU Press, 2013). Chernock is currently pursuing two new projects. One is a study of transatlantic theater in the interwar period. (An article on Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina is forthcoming in Twentieth Century British History.) The other – Wake Up, Women – is a group biography of women involved in Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Chernock will be using their stories as entry points into a broader reconsideration of women’s aims and ambitions in the immediate postwar period.
In her capacity as a historian of monarchy, Chernock has published numerous opinion pieces and editorials, and provides frequent commentary to a range of print, radio and television outlets. She is a regular contributor to WBUR’s Cognoscenti.
Chernock’s research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Phi Beta Kappa, Huntington Library, the Humanities Foundation at Boston University, and the American Philosophical Society. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Modern Monarchy (UK).
Chernock co-organizes the British Study Group at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Her research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, Phi Beta Kappa, Huntington Library, the Humanities Foundation at Boston University, and the American Philosophical Society.