The Mail on Sunday: No miniskirts. No railing about being a working mother.

Leading historian AMANDA FOREMAN explains why the Queen was a true feminist icon who changed the world for millions of women – in very surprising ways.

The Mail on Sunday

September 17, 2022

Ask someone for the name of a famous feminist and no doubt you’ll get one of a few prominent women batted back to you. Germaine Greer. Gloria Steinem. Hillary Clinton. But Elizabeth Windsor? That would be a no. She looked the opposite of today’s powerful women with her knee-length tweeds and distinctly unfashionable court shoes.

I, though, argue differently. As a historian with a particular interest in female power, I believe one thing above all puts the Queen in a special category of achievement. Not the length of her reign. Not even her link to the courageous wartime generation. No, it is her global impact on the cause of gender equality that should be remembered, all without donning a miniskirt or wailing MeToo. All without spilling emotions, making herself a victim or hiding the effects of age and motherhood.

I believe the Queen is the ultimate feminist icon of the 20th Century, more a symbol of women’s progress in this century than other icons like Madonna or Beyoncé could dream of. Females everywhere, particularly those past menopause, have much to thank her for.

But when it has been previously suggested the Queen was a feminist, or that women should celebrate her life, critics have bitten back sharply.

In 2019 Olivia Colman, who portrayed the Queen in the Netflix drama The Crown, provoked equal cheers and jeers for describing her as ‘the ultimate feminist’. A few years before, Woman’s Hour chief presenter Emma Barnett had her intellectual credentials questioned for calling the Queen a ‘feminist icon’.

They justified the view for different reasons. For Colman, it was because the Queen had shown a wife could assume a man’s role while retaining her femininity. The argument went in reverse for Barnett: the Queen had shown her gender was ‘irrelevant to her capacity to do her job’.

Yet no King would ever have his masculinity and the definition of manhood so conflated in the same way. It’s doubtful anyone will question whether King Charles defines the essence of what it is to be a man.

In the midst of all the grief for the Queen, we should remember at the beginning of her reign Elizabeth’s potential power to effect change provoked as much unease as it did anticipation. In a patriarchal world, female empowerment is a force to fear. After all, we never talk about ‘male empowerment’, do we?

Our two other long-lived queens, Elizabeth I and Victoria, had the same scrutiny. Foreign affairs, great questions of state, probity in government, what did that matter compared to the burning issue of what it meant to have a woman placed above the heads of men?

It was not easy for Elizabeth II to escape from under the shadow of Queen Victoria, the figurative mother of the nation.

Initially, it wasn’t even clear she wanted to. Though the command for brides to obey their husbands had not been part of the Book of Common Prayer since 1928, Elizabeth included it in her wedding vows.

Aged 25, she was a mother-of-two when she made her accession speech before the Privy Council. Accompanied by her husband, Elizabeth looked even younger than her years, surrounded by a roomful of mostly old men. But after the Privy Council meeting, the comparisons with Victoria stopped. And you can begin to see her innate feminism come to the fore. Elizabeth did not lose her self-confidence in between pregnancies and pass over the red boxes or deputise Philip to meet her Ministers. Far from it. She took on the role of sovereign and Philip accepted his as the world’s most famous house-husband.

In reality, there were few actions or speeches of the Queen’s that could be classed as declaratively feminist – such as the time she drove Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around Balmoral in her Land Rover when Saudi women were forbidden to drive, going at such breakneck speed while chatting that the Prince begged her to slow down.

Or her few comments about the work of the WI, or the potential to be tapped if only society can ‘find ways to allow girls and women to play their full part’.

No, instead of examples like these, the Queen was a feminist for reasons most women can instantly relate to: first, she established clear boundaries between the demands of her job and those of her family.

Society still expects wives will drop everything for the family, no matter how consuming their careers, so husbands can go to work. Not once did the Queen say or imply she ought to shift her weekly audience with the Prime Minister, or cancel the ribbon-cutting of a hospital because of some domestic concern.

Second, society judges working mothers much more harshly than working fathers, giving the latter a free pass if their job is important enough but condemning the former as a terrible person if her children don’t turn out to be outstanding successes. The Queen’s fitness as sovereign has never been tied to her fitness as a mother. Although she always made her family a part of her life, Elizabeth did not allow it to define her as Victoria did.

Third, society makes middle- aged women feel that they are invisible. Their opinions stop mattering, contributions don’t count and their bodies, according to fashion designers, don’t exist. Whispers that the Queen ought to abdicate began in her 50s. By 1977, her Silver Jubilee, critics wondered what she was good for now her youth and figure were in the rear-view mirror.

In answer, she embodied the reverse of Invisible Woman Syndrome. By refusing to countenance abdication, she showed what a working woman looks like past menopause. Rather than shrinking, she revved up a gear and demonstrated a woman’s age has no bearing on her agency and authority.

Her fabulous colour sense and ability to match dresses to the mood excited intense interest – but this didn’t make her a feminist icon. In an age when a woman’s sexiness is her currency, and empowerment judged by how much of her body she exposes, she refused to make any concessions to fashion.

This was a confident femininity, an inner feminism based on absolute assuredness of who she was and why she mattered. For over five decades, the Queen showed what strength and purpose look like on the body of an older woman.

The next three generations of monarchs are due to be Kings. To some extent, the old way of doing things will return. So, it is up to us to honour Queen Elizabeth’s memory by following her example.

She tore up the rule book on gender roles without society falling apart or families breaking down. Despite heavy restrictions on what she could do as a woman let alone a Queen, she forged her own path – and invited the rest of us to follow.

Stepping out of the Shadows

Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes, review — finally having her moment.

Her mother and sister were once better known, but this fine biography shows just how remarkable the women’s rights activist was.

The Times

September 22, 2020

After decades of obscurity, Sylvia Pankhurst is finally having her moment. This is the third biography in seven years — not bad for a woman who spent much of her life being unfavourably compared with her more popular mother and sister.

The neglect is partly owing to Sylvia’s rich, complex life not being easily pigeonholed. Although she played an instrumental role in the suffrage movement, she was first and foremost a defender of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised. Her political choices were often noble, but lonely ones.

Sylvia inherited her appetite for social activism and boundless energy for work from her parents, Richard and Emmeline. A perpetually aspiring MP, Richard cheerfully espoused atheism, women’s suffrage, republicanism, anti-imperialism and socialism at a time when any one of these causes was sufficient to scupper a man’s electoral chances. Emmeline was just as politically involved and only slightly less radical.

Sylvia’s mother, the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst
ALAMY

Despite financial troubles and career disappointments, the Pankhurst parents were a devoted couple and the household a happy one. Sylvia was born in 1882, the second of five children and the middle daughter between Christabel (her mother’s favourite) and Adela (no one’s favourite). She craved Emmeline’s good opinion, but was closer to her father. “Life is valueless without enthusiasms,” he once told her, a piece of advice she took to heart.

Sylvia was only 16 when her father died. Without his counter-influence, the three sisters (and their brother, Harry, who died of polio aged 20) lived in thrall to their powerful mother. After Emmeline and Christabel founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 — having become frustrated by the lack of support from the Independent Labour Party — there was no question that Sylvia and Adela would do anything other than sacrifice their personal interests for the good of the cause. Sylvia later admitted that one of her greatest regrets was being made to give up a promising art career for politics.

She was imprisoned for the first time in 1906. As the tactics of the WSPU became more extreme, so did the violence employed by the authorities against its members. Sylvia was the only Pankhurst to be subjected to force-feeding, an experience she likened to rape.

“Infinitely worse than the pain,” she wrote of the experience, “was the sense of degradation.” Indeed, in some cases that was the whole point of the exercise. While not widespread, vaginal and anal “feeding” was practised on the hunger strikers. Holmes hints, but doesn’t speculate that Sylvia may have been one of its victims.


Pankhurst died in Ethiopia in 1960 after accepting an invitation from Emperor Haile Selassie, pictured, to emigrate to Africa
PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY

Ironically, Sylvia suffered the most while being the least convinced by the WSPU’s militant tactics. It wasn’t only the violence she abhorred. Emmeline and Christabel wanted the WSPU to remain an essentially middle-class, politically aloof organisation, whereas Sylvia regarded women’s rights as part of a wider struggle for revolutionary socialism. The differences between them became unbridgeable after Sylvia founded a separate socialist wing of the WSPU in the East End. Both she and Adela, whom Emmeline and Christabel dismissed as a talentless lightweight, were summarily expelled from the WSPU in February 1914. The four women would never again be in the same room together.

Sylvia had recognised early on that first-wave feminism suffered from a fundamental weakness. It was simultaneously too narrow and too broad to be a stand-alone political platform. The wildly different directions that were taken by the four Pankhursts after the victory of 1918 proved her right: Emmeline became a Conservative, Christabel a born-again Christian, Sylvia a communist and Adela a fascist, yet all remained loyal to their concept of women’s rights.

Once cut loose from the Pankhurst orbit, Sylvia claimed the freedom to think and act as her conscience directed. In 1918 she fell in love with an Italian anarchist socialist refugee, Silvio Corio, who already had three children with two women. Undeterred, she lived with him in Woodford Green, Essex, in a ramshackle home appropriately named Red Cottage. They remained partners for the best part of 30 years, writing, publishing and campaigning together. Even more distressing for her uptight family, not to mention society in general, at the advanced age of 45 she had a son by him, Richard, who was given her surname rather than Silvio’s.

Sylvia Pankhurst, here in 1940, became a communist after the victory of 1918
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Broadly speaking, her life can be divided into four campaigns: after women’s suffrage came communism, then anti-fascism and finally Ethiopian independence. (The last has received the least attention, although Sylvia insisted it gave her the greatest pride.) None was an unalloyed success or without controversy. Her fierce independence would lead her to break with Lenin over their ideological differences, and later support her erstwhile enemy Winston Churchill when their views on fascism aligned. She never had any time for Stalin, left-wing antisemitism or liberal racism. In her mid-seventies and widowed, she cut all ties with Britain by accepting an invitation from Emperor Haile Selassie to emigrate to Ethiopia. She died there in 1960.

The genius of Holmes’s fascinating and important biography is that it approaches Sylvia’s life as if she were a man. The writing isn’t prettified or leavened by amusing anecdotes about Victorian manners, it’s dense and serious, as befits a woman who never wore make-up and didn’t care about clothes. To paraphrase the WSPU’s slogan, it is about deeds not domesticity. Rather than dwelling on moods and relationships, Holmes is interested in ideas and consequences. It’s wonderfully refreshing. Sylvia lived for her work; her literary output was astounding. In addition to publishing her own newspaper almost every week for over four decades, she wrote nonfiction, fiction, plays, poetry and investigative reports. She even taught herself Romanian so that she could translate the poems of the 19th-century Romantic poet Mihail Eminescu. It doesn’t matter whether Sylvia was right or wrong in her political enthusiasms; as Holmes rightly insists, what counts is that by acting on them she helped to make history.