Far from championing women’s rights, Queen Victoria was passionately opposed to the emerging women’s emancipation movement. Eminent historian Lytton Strachey quoted a fascinating letter from Her Majesty on the subject, following an 1870 meeting in favour of Women’s Suffrage:
“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 —– 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.”
I wondered which “Lady” might have been the one to be whipped. A quick search reveals that the most prominent such was Lady Amberley, whose diary for 1870 does indeed record one of the first meetings of the Women’s Suffrage Society. Aged 28 at the time, she was described as “vigorous, lively, witty, serious, original, and fearless”. Just the characteristics to make her eminently whippable, in my book!
::smile::
This reminds me of a favorite family story. My mother’s mother’s parents disagreed about women voting.
My great-grandfather, a very proper product of Eton and Oxford was opposed to giving women the vote. My great-grandmother favored women’s sufferage.
According to my grandmother, they didn’t discuss it very often and my great-grandmother didn’t disagree too loudly. But she did take a revenge.
When women’s sufferage succeeded, for the first 5 years she marked her ballot exactly the opposite of his. Her logic was that this would give him a sense of what it was like to not have the vote.
Despite, or perhaps because, of her doing this by the end of his life he admitted that women’s sufferage was one of the issues he had found himself on the wrong side of.
While I’ve always loved hearing stories about them, I’ve never had any doubt who had the upper hand in their o so traditional marriage. 😉
Mija: I have a suspicion that for nearly every man who thinks he has “the upper hand”, there is a woman happy for him to go on thinking that, whilst she quietly manipulates him to get her own way. But y’all knew that, right? I’m not letting the cat out of the bag? LOL
My husband often says that women should not be allowed to vote, and he’s only half joking. And do you realize that I’ve never voted in my life, except for the students’ government in college? It’s because in Mumbayumbastan it makes no difference and in US I won’t be able to vote for another few years.