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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement by Arianne Chernock Barbara Caine (bio) The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement, by Arianne Chernock; pp. xi + 249. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. Historians' interest in Queen Victoria shows no sign of diminishing. If anything, it has increased, but with a changed focus. No longer does the life of the queen attract attention, nor even her role within the government and the state. What is significant now is rather how Queen Victoria was seen by different groups and in different contexts. This question of how the image of Queen Victoria was "leveraged" by both supporters and opponents of women's rights to further their causes is the focus of Arianne Chernock's engaging new study, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement (9). Neither those who drew on Queen Victoria to support their claims for women's rights, nor those who used her image to make the opposing case, sought the queen's active involvement in their causes or had any clear idea of her views on the subject. Well into the 1870s, Chernock argues, "the queen remained a screen onto which subjects subscribing to wildly different propositions on sex and gender could project their beliefs" (63). Her lack of support for women's rights is now well known, but, as Chernock points out, the British public remained largely unaware until the 1870s when Theodore Martin, in his Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (1875), cited a private letter by the queen stating her belief that "we women are not made for governing" (qtd. in Chernock 153). Her displeasure at "this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's rights'" was also expressed in a private letter to Martin and published by him—to support the anti-suffrage position in 1902 (qtd. in Chernock 194). The use of female monarchs by radicals seeking democratic reforms, and especially rights for women, was widespread in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such that those supporting women's rights "were primed to see the young Victoria in a hopeful light" (41). Radical Unitarians and Chartists, alongside the women involved in Langham Place and the early supporters of women's suffrage, frequently drew on Victoria's image in pamphlets, speeches, and articles to support their views. Drawing on the writings of many individuals, including Barbara Bodichon, Helen Taylor, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Chernock explores the different ways in which Queen Victoria provided an example of how it was possible for women to combine private and public duties and responsibilities, as devoted wife and mother as well as queen. She was also used as an illustration of the fact that the demand for political rights for women was in accordance with the principles of the British Constitution. [End Page 314] Still, supporters of women's rights did not have it all their own way. On the contrary, their opponents made more effective use of Queen Victoria by casting her example into a framework for questioning the power and capacity of female monarchs more broadly and for redefining the monarchy itself when held by a woman. While advocates of women's rights turned to the example of Queen Elizabeth as an earlier illustration of female capacity for rule, their opponents insisted rather on the importance of her counselors, especially Lord Burghley, in Elizabethan governance. Queen Elizabeth, in the opinion of conservative historians like James Anthony Froude and Goldwin Smith, was merely a figurehead: when a queen was on the throne, it was the men around her who exercised real power. The same argument was only too easily made with regard to Queen Victoria due to the presence of Prince Albert, who was "King to all intents and purposes" in the eyes of some (qtd. in Chernock 103). In the book's most interesting chapter, Chernock shows how discussion around the powers and prerogatives of the monarch increasingly were gendered within many political and legal circles in the...