Wake Up Women: American Women, Activism, and Engagement at Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation

Roughly 40,000 Americans attended Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. Of those 40,000, it was the American women who proved most vocal in their support, and who received the lion’s share of press attention. Why were American women so enamored with the Queen? What brought them to London? This talk will look beyond the alleged “queen craziness” of American supporters and consider some of the serious personal, ethical and political calculations that drove female support for the mid-century monarchy. As I will show, the festivities were entertaining, yes, but they also afforded American women a range of public and professional opportunities, and permitted them a rare moment to flaunt their talents, celebrate their contributions, air their grievances, articulate their goals, establish international networks, and imagine alternative futures for themselves. I will illustrate these dynamics through the case study of Geneva Valentine, a Black real estate agent from Washington, DC, who used the coronation to advance her civil rights agenda. Through her coronation journey, we gain a sense of how royalism could form an important cover for postwar activism.

 

 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 was 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 recently appeared 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.