Was the Queen a Feminist?
Two years after her passing, the jury's still out.
Queen Elizabeth II was famous for longer than anyone who has ever lived, a new biography of the U.K.’s late monarch points out—and it’s true. The Queen, who died two years ago, reigned for 70 years, and from the moment she was crowned until her death, she was probably the most famous—and most photographed—person on earth.
Seven decades is a long time to be in the public eye. But actually, we (the ordinary, the riff-raff, the unchosen) knew very little about her. That was by design: The Queen took her role as apolitical head of state very seriously. Her public persona—including her sensible fashion and small talk (“Have you come far?”)—was carefully curated to give away almost nothing about her personality or political preferences. That is where her genius lay: Her face may have graced banknotes, stamps and global media—but she was so distant a figure, about whom so little was known, the public could project onto her almost anything it wanted. Sweet? Charming? Funny? A terror? A tyrant?
What about a feminist?
It’s a question experts have wrangled with for years.
Olivia Colman, the actress who played the Queen in the Netflix show The Crown, called her “the ultimate feminist.” “She’s the breadwinner. She’s the one on our coins and banknotes. Prince Philip has to walk behind her. She fixed cars in the Second World War. She’s no shrinking violet,” Colman said.
Unpacking the Queen
Queen Elizabeth was born in 1926, two years before women over the age of 21 were given the vote in the U.K. She lived through several waves of feminism, but you wouldn’t find her joining a march or burning her bras—obviously.
The Queen's role demanded that she refrain from being outspoken. Because of this, she almost never said anything about the women’s movement. Perhaps the sole exception was at the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Institute, an organization of which she was a member for 80 years.
“In the modern world," she said, "the opportunities for women to give something of value to society are greater than ever, because, through their own efforts, they now play a much greater part in all areas of public life.” It's not so much a statement of view as a statement of fact.
Closed-lipped though she was, she stood out as a female figurehead in a staunchly male world; a rare pop of color in an ocean of heads of state.
Her femininity was useful, too: In moments of political tension, she could charm those who might otherwise provide a spot of bother to the British government, including the likes of Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Nicolae Ceausescu and even, in 2003, Vladimir Putin. (She was said to have thought Donald Trump “very rude,” and imagined, according to a recent biographer, that Trump and his wife, Melania, must have had some kind of arrangement.) She also inspired loyalty among her subjects: Upon her death, even the most notably anti-royalty among them acknowledged that for a monarch, she hadn’t been that bad, really.
Which still doesn't answer the question of what she really thought.
“Never complain, never explain” is said to be the British royal family’s mantra. As the Beatles phrased it: “Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl / But she doesn't have a lot to say.”
The bestselling author and historian Philippa Gregory, whose book "Normal Women" charts women’s role in British society from 1066 until the 1990s—and who has been awarded a CBE by the royal family (although it was awarded by Princess Anne)—tells me Queen Elizabeth was “brought up in a world where [feminism] wasn't yet a conversation.”
“All of the markers of patriarchy which we're familiar with, she was congruent with.”
“She came to the throne as a young woman, and she had a completely conventional marriage with a quite conventional man, in which she promised to obey,” she says. “All of the markers of patriarchy which we're familiar with, she was congruent with.”
A 'Sort-Of' Feminist?
Still, there were moments when she seemed to act like a feminist.
In 1945, less than a decade before her coronation, then Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army (along with all unmarried women under 30, who could choose between joining the ATS or working the land or in industry), and later trained as a mechanic.
Does that count as feminist?
“Fixing cars in the Second World War is neither feminist nor un-feminist,” argued the journalist Zoe Williams in 2019, shortly after the Colman quote was published. “It would have been feminist to continue to fix cars once the war had ended.” But perhaps Williams's statement misses the point: Once the war ended and the husbands returned home, over two million women who had worked through the war lost their jobs so that men could take back the roles they had previously held. Whether Princess Elizabeth intended it or not, taking that step back into the home, along with so many other women, could be seen as a moment of female solidarity. Or not.
“With the Royal Family generally, you see them embodying the popular conventions of the time,” the author, Gregory explained to me. “That's part of their job: providing stability and endorsement of what people want at the time to be normality.”
Another oft-cited snapshot of apparent Royal feminism: In 1998, when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited Balmoral, the Royals’ Scottish estate, the Queen supposedly offered her guest a tour of the grounds in a royal Land Rover, climbing into the driving seat herself. (As the Washington Post so succinctly put it: “Anyone might be surprised to see a head of state driving herself around, and a 72-year-old one at that. But in Saudi Arabia at the time, all women, royal or not, were banned from driving.”)
She went on to treat him to a display of her driving skills, chatting merrily throughout. “Through his interpreter, the Crown Prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead,” Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, wrote in his memoir.
And then there's this: Britain’s constitution forbade the Queen from making legislative decisions; that was up to her governments. But can we really discount the fact that, over the course of her reign, the percentage of women employed in the U.K. rose by over one-third, or that the gender pay gap closed from roughly 40% in the postwar period to about 8.3% by the time she died. Or that employers discriminating against married women became illegal, as did husbands raping their wives. By the end of her reign, women had access to contraception and abortion free of charge. All of these made women’s lives better.
And even if she was not directly responsible for these changes, perhaps just the knowledge that the most important person in the U.K. was a woman, forced people to view women differently. Shall we therefore call her a feminist by default?
An Imperfect Record
There's also the problem that her personal record was riddled with blemishes. She was exempted from equality laws for more than 40 years, meaning women (or anyone) who felt discriminated against while working for her could not bring lawsuits against her. Indeed, documents published in 2022 showed just 31% of those holding the most senior roles in the Royal household were women.
And her relationship with Margaret Thatcher, the U.K.’s first female prime minister, was said to be—and allow me a pointed clearing of the throat here—“pragmatic.” Perhaps the Queen was aggrieved at sentiments like one expressed by the Observer’s political editor, who wrote in 1988 that “we have become a nation with two monarchs, and… in her housewife/superstar progress around the world, Thatcher has steadily become more like the Queen of England than the real thing.” (Of course Thatcher, while it's true she broke a major glass ceiling, wasn’t exactly known for her feminist leanings either.)
But when Thatcher suggested ways to ensure the two avoided wearing the same clothes at the same function, the response was that “Her Majesty does not notice what other people are wearing,” which is levels of snark so high it’s practically Dowager Countess of Grantham level.
Perhaps, suggests Gregory, the Queen never really saw the need for feminism. “It’s not to say that she was against equality for women,” she says. “It's just she was brought up in a world where it wasn't yet a conversation.
“If you're highly privileged, you're not really going to have an instinctual grasp of the obstacles to other women.”
“If you're highly privileged—I mean, the most privileged woman in the country, possibly in the world—you're not really going to have an instinctual grasp of the obstacles to other women.”
And yet….
In her later years, the Queen gave us one last insight into her views. In 2013, a decade before her death, she gave royal assent to the Succession to the Crown Act, a piece of legislation which had to be enacted in seven realms but affects precisely one family, decreeing that the first-born royal will ascend to the throne, regardless of their gender.
The new rules had reportedly been championed by the Queen. In that one act, says Gregory, she may have finally revealed to us a small piece of her personality. “As a queen, she would have every belief in women's ability to lead,” she told me.
So perhaps the point isn’t whether the Queen was or wasn’t a feminist—that argument can go either way. Maybe what it comes down to is that she believed in the abilities of women. She knew women to be just as good as men. Perhaps, dare we say it, superior.
Francesca Donner
Francesca Donner
Josie Cox
