| > The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king... I don't know about that, the quoted criticisms sound a lot like those that would be levelled at a king too. The issue is more that nobody expects a man to care, even a little bit, if someone accuses him of being crude and arbitrary in his search for power. Obviously it is gendered, but the actual complaints are generic. Anyone with serious power has to bat through things like that. I can give an example by swapping in Trump. The criticism holds up with a gender swap, adjusted for the fact that by default we expect a man to be in the office so it isn't explicitly gendered. This sounds like stock criticism of him that might turn up in any political conversation. [Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will. |
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| ▲ | tobyjsullivan a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s a weird article, for sure. I find it likely that gender would have played a role, but the way the article is written, it seems to almost undermine that argument. > Matilda was not at his bedside and did not even know of [her father’s death] for at least a couple of weeks, by which time her cousin Stephen (a younger son of Henry’s sister Adela, dowager countess of Blois) had rushed to England, seized the royal treasury and had himself crowned… after a couple of years she was able to marshal her resources [and sail for England]. The author makes the claim that a son would have never lost the crown under these circumstances and it was gender alone. But that seems very difficult to believe when all the other person had to do was show up. Of course someone would take the crown under those circumstances, and they’d be able to find backers to support them in doing so. | |
| ▲ | pjc50 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, the gender role stuff is absolutely critical and you can't just handwave it away. Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870. In particular, the belief that a married woman had no agency separate from her husband, who would then be de facto king, continued all the way up to Elisabeth II. Much reduced and not ultimately a problem, but it was still discussed at the time of her coronation. What is more interesting in all this is the reminder of the succession crisis. Monarchy is "supposed to" reduce chaotic power struggles like this by making it unambiguous, but quite often the English succession was disputed or passed down through a second degree relationship. | | |
| ▲ | roenxi an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not a handwave - the article doesn't offer anything to handwave away. The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism. I'm sure being a woman counted against her, bit if the article is going to put up a quote as evidence of sexism then it shouldn't be a passage that can be realistically adapted to any politician ever. If the article had a passage that says "we can't let this woman be king, she can't even own property!" that would be different. But the quote in the article doesn't sound ludicrous when applied to a man. It sounds like something that is routinely said of men in positions of power. It could even keep the superficial gendering if you wanted it to, there is a lot of argument that men in positions of power should be exhibiting positive masculine bearing (stoicism, accountability, honour, etc, etc) that politicians routinely fail at to great public outcry. | | |
| ▲ | scott_w 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that. | | |
| ▲ | ViktorRay a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch a few decades earlier. Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this. I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument. | |
| ▲ | roenxi 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence |
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| ▲ | scott_w 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | More importantly: a king was expected to embody the traits a queen was hammered for. |
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