Arianne Chernock. The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women’s Movement.

Abstract

Queen Victoria was not an obvious feminist role model. England’s fifth and—until 2015—longest-reigning regnant queen presided over a large empire during a time of significant economic growth, but she is never presented as a trailblazer for women’s rights. Instead she epitomized a domestic femininity, popularizing the image of monarch as dutiful wife, doting mother, and grieving widow. Add to this her comment that “women were not made to govern” and her concerns over the “mad, wicked folly” of women’s rights, and it is unsurprising that her legacy for feminist historians is complicated (1). Arianne Chernock’s study, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women’s Movement, uncovers a less familiar fact that these statements made by Victoria were not widely known during her lifetime. The second was not public until after her death, while the earlier one emerged in 1876, twenty-four years after she wrote it. Thus, she was a less oppositional figure for her contemporaries in Britain’s first wave feminist organizations than for their later counterparts.