Prof. Arianne Chernock Wins John Ben Snow Prize
Professor Arianne Chernock’s book, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism, is the winner of the 2011 John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies. Awarded annually for the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, the prize committee praised Chernock for presenting “a new vision of the Enlightenment adoption of the philosophies of toleration and equality that finally brings the debate on women’s status among eighteenth-century intellectuals out of the shadows. Long before the Seneca Falls Convention linked the American Abolition movement with women’s suffrage, the community of political and philosophical radicals in Britain–figures ranging from Thomas Paine to Joseph Priestly–connected the oppression of women to the oppression of slavery and the liberation of women’s status to the drive for “universal” male suffrage. In particular, the conservative neo-Aristotelian argument that females were “deformed” and somehow less human than males was challenged in print and at the podium by men who embraced Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth’s challenges to the status quo, advocated for women?s equality in education, and proposed a significant alteration of conventional sexual status. Chernock demonstrates that, although largely ignored by historians of the era, the radical Enlightenment adoption of women’s liberation fitted seamlessly into the rest of its political and social agenda.”
