Not just the Victorians but also any pre-feminist era Queen or Empress (Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, etc.). My understanding is that it was perceived as improper for a woman to participate in politics (hence women not being MPs or being allowed to vote until the 1910s), but that doesn't make sense if the head of state is a woman (especially if this was in an era like the 16th century when monarchs weren't just ceremonial figureheads and still held significant power). And there have been a number of monarchies that have explicitly ruled out women from the line of succession (Japan and Morocco spring to mind), so why didn't the English?
I've actually written a number of answers on this subject:
Did ruling Queens in historical Europe face gender discrimination?
Were women monarchs as respected as their male counterparts?
It's often hard to really get a grasp on the patriarchy, because it's so big and so encompassing. I make a point in a few of those linked answers that historical fiction typically gives us a very black-and-white perspective where people either believe women can do anything men can, or else they're condescending jerks who think women are incapable of rational thought and real strength. The grey zone of people who, for instance, believe women are naturally suited to motherhood and social reform causes because they're genuinely morally superior to men don't turn up in fiction unless they're shown to be hypocrites, and so we don't really have to deal with the fact that sexism can go hand-in-hand with beliefs in female competence. (Note my answer here on women against female suffrage, which also deals with this issue.) And we don't see men who are generally supportive of their daughters, sisters, and/or female friends in their unconventional pursuits, but also expect their wives to be conventional in order to reflect well upon themselves as heads of the household, or any other hypocritical and complex contradictions. This makes it harder to understand how people could believe that women had no place in political campaigning and wrangling but also support a queen like Victoria, who portrayed herself as a loving and subordinate wife and above politics.
There have been several threads devoted to relationship between women's emancipation and female monarchs. More can always be said, but the short form is that what might seem to contemporary viewers a paradox didn't seem that way at the time.
For Queen Victoria herself, there was no paradox to resolve; she was Queen, she had no brief for suffragettes. Ernst Kantorowicz wrote of "The King's Two Bodies" -- the monarch is only collaterally a physical person; there is a second political body which is unconnected to the sex of its bearer.
See
-- where u/Sunagainstgold has a very thorough treatment