Considering their history of prominent female monarchs, how did the British justify denying women the vote?

by FaceofMoe

Knowing what little I do about the women's suffrage movement, both in the US and abroad, I'm shocked that giving women the vote faced such strong, often violent opposition in the UK. How did men, many of who probably identified as proud supporters of the monarchy, justify their misogyny in light of the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and Victoria? Surely if women can be afforded the most powerful role in the nation, they can be trusted to be equal participants in the democratic process.

amp1212

Short answer:

As much political anthropology as history, the nature of the "monarch" is quite distinct from the sex of the person who inhabits that position; you are inferring that a female monarch was understood to be "as much a woman" as any other by her subjects. In the case of, say, Queen Elizabeth I, her actual gender and her regal position belong to two quite distinct domains, which for the most part did not mix in either her understanding or the public's.

Discussion:

In one of her most celebrated speeches, at Tilbury [1588] -- confronting the likelihood of naval invasion by Spain -- Elizabeth I says

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm: to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

There's a lot to think about there. The nature of the monarchy is a king; that kingship just happens to be embodied at that moment in the body of a "weak and feeble woman"; who summons her kingly nature on behalf of the nation.

I should note that while doubt has been cast on occasion as to the authenticity of the speech -- were these really Elizabeth's words?-- the texts of it we have are near contemporary, they first appear a few decades later in collections of her documents, for others of which we have more proofs of authenticity. So even if you take the side of skeptics that these were men projecting their own ideas onto Elizabeth, it is at a minimum a public political sentiment reflecting the gendered understanding of the monarchy, in the days of a great and admired queen. And for all that caveating, present historical opinion leans pretty strongly it being authentically Elizabeth's words. There are other occasions where we have contemporary attestation to her use of references to a king to refer to her own person, viz

Having told her at some point that she was well advertised of every thing that happened in the world, she replied that her hands were very long by nature and might, an nescis longas Regibus esse manus . . .

The latin is from Ovid = "Don't you know the King's hands are far reaching?" (there's also a very clever Helen/Paris story to the Ovid line that is particularly apposite to this conversation with a French ambassador; Elizabeth was remarkably gifted with rhetoric). In any event, we have enough evidence to say that Elizabeth saw in herself a kingly nature, all sorts of connections to her father, Henry VIII both explicit and subtle; the burden of the distaff vessel of kingship being that she needed to be seen to be as chaste as her father was not.

The complexity of the "nature of the King" was investigated in Ernst Kantorowicz' celebrated work The King's Two Bodies [1957] exploring medieval kingship. Kantorowicz argued (very influentially, this is considered a classic work) that the king was understood as two distinct entities in one:

  • the "body natural" - the actual physical person, which might have a sex, perform human biological functions, and
  • the "body politic" - the king as the essence of the nation, something that is separate from and essentially unrelated to the first. The exclamation "the King is dead, long live the King" is held to reflect that, that the body politic of kingship never dies, even as the particular bodies twinned to it do.

"Everyday" women did not have this dual nature, so the example of female monarchs did not necessarily suggest political emancipation for women. In fact, the people who advocate suffrage are typically anti-Monarchists, and/or free thinkers . . . think of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Olympe de Gouges, or Germaine de Stael. A reverence for monarchy, even when the monarch is a woman, is a socially and politically conservative tendency, not a gateway to progressive thinking about the possibilities for more emancipated women's roles in society. In short, the monarch is a king even when the she was a woman; and her female sex did little to coax a different view.

Victoria is a more modern, more bourgeois, less mystical sort of monarch. She happened to be personally opposed to women's suffrage, and expressed that view in one of the more strident things she ever said about anything, in a letter of 1870:

The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Lady Amberley ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different—then let them remain each in their own position. Tennyson has some beautiful lines on the difference of men and women in ‘The Princess’. Woman would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex?

So, generally, whether we're speaking of Elizabeth I or Victoria, while both were admired for some similar and some quite different reasons; neither necessarily inspired sentiment for women's suffrage.

References:

Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology [1957]

Martin, Christopher. “The Breast and Belly of a Queen: Elizabeth After Tilbury.” Early Modern Women, vol. 2, 2007, pp. 5–28. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23541474.

Green, Janet M. “‘I My Self’: Queen Elizabeth I's Oration at Tilbury Camp.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 1997, pp. 421–445. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2543451.

Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. [1992]

Johnson, Jerah. “The Concept of the ‘King's Two Bodies’ in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4, 1967, pp. 430–434. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2867645. [this is a fascinating bit of literary political analysis in the Kantrowicz vein , looking at the often thought mysterious lines in Hamlet "The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body"]