Tag: patriarchy

Remembering Dale Spender

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Sometimes on this blog I write about feminists who had interesting ideas about language before the 21st century: women like Suzette Haden Elgin, the linguist and science fiction writer who created a women’s language, Láadan, and Marie Shear, the editor and language commentator who defined feminism as “the radical notion that women are people”. I write about these women knowing that many readers won’t have heard of them; their stories illustrate how easily the work of women can fade into obscurity and be forgotten.     

This post is about someone who understood that problem well: the Australian feminist Dale Spender, whose death at the age of 80 was announced last month. Spender devoted a great deal of time and energy to recovering the forgotten contributions of once well-known female thinkers and writers. She saw this as a political act: as she said in her book Women of Ideas And What Men Have Done To Them, “unless we can reconstruct our past, draw on it and transmit it to the next generation, our oppression persists”. For me Women of Ideas was the most successful of Spender’s books (not that I can claim to have read them all–she wrote or edited more than 30). But many feminists will remember her best as the author of Man Made Language. First published in 1980 and now regarded as a feminist classic, it was the book that established Spender’s reputation. It also played a significant, though complicated, part in my own development as a feminist linguist.

When Man Made Language came out I was both a student of linguistics and a politically active feminist. But those two parts of my life were completely separate. I didn’t know that anyone was doing feminist research in the subject I was studying: in the three years I’d already spent studying it none of this work had ever been mentioned. Then, one evening in 1981, someone in a local women’s group I belonged to turned up to one of our regular weekly meetings brandishing a copy of Man Made Language. “This is amazing”, she said: “we should read it and talk about it”. And it was by reading Spender’s book, not for an academic seminar but for a discussion in a women’s group, that I discovered the work of the first generation of feminist linguists, anthropologists and communication researchers.

One reason I hadn’t read it earlier was that I knew academic linguists didn’t think much of it. If they paid it any attention at all, they dismissed it as naive, ill-informed and trivial, the work of a writer who (a) was not a linguist, and (b) had an obvious political axe to grind. Though these critics spoke in the measured tones of what I’d now call “gentlemanly sexism”, it was clear to me that they were grinding axes of their own: they resented Spender both for trespassing on “their” turf and for her radical (or as they saw it, “manhating”) feminist views. Nevertheless, I deferred to their expert opinion, and felt no compulsion to read Man Made Language for myself.

When I did eventually read it, I found I agreed with some of the linguists’ criticisms. Not all of them, however. Though I wasn’t convinced by Spender’s answers, unlike the gentlemanly sexists I didn’t find her questions trivial. In fact, her book made me want to explore those questions further, and that led me to start writing what became my own first book. That book helped me to get my first academic job, and set me on a path that I would follow for the next 40 years. So, although (or indeed because) I was critical of Man Made Language, the book both inspired me and ultimately changed my life.  

At the time, being young and arrogant, I didn’t give Spender the credit she deserved. I don’t mean she deserves credit for kick-starting my career (I’m not quite that self-absorbed), I mean she deserves credit for the impact Man Made Language had on a whole generation of English-speaking feminists. Since her death a number of my women friends have recalled reading it as “a lightbulb moment”: it put questions about language on the feminist agenda in a way no single book had done before and arguably none has done since. Not everyone who read it agreed with Spender’s arguments, but it challenged those who didn’t, like me, to come up with their own alternatives. A less radical, less provocative book would not have had this galvanizing effect.

So, what was Spender’s radical argument? It’s summed up in her book’s three-word title: she argues that the languages we all use were created by the dominant sex, men, and that they represent human experience from a perspective that is both male-centred (reflects men’s ways of seeing and interpreting the world) and masculist or patriarchal (assumes the superiority of men to women). In the Introduction she puts it like this:

One of our fundamental rules for making sense of our male-dominated world is – predictably – that the male represents the positive while the female, necessarily then, represents the negative. …Each day we construct the world we live in according to these man-made rules. …And one of the crucial factors in our construction of this reality is language. Language is our means of classifying and ordering the world: our means of manipulating reality. …Yet the rules for meaning, which are part of language, are not natural; they were not present in the world and merely awaiting discovery by human beings. On the contrary, they had to be invented before anything could be discovered, for without them there is no frame of reference, no order, no possibility for systematic interpretation and understanding.

I don’t dispute the point that many (if not most) languages exhibit male bias, but I’ve always had trouble with the idea that this is because men invented the “rules for meaning”. Are there, in fact, “rules for meaning”, and if there are, does it make sense to think of them as “invented”? Presumably Spender can’t have thought that the rules for meaning were decided at some all-male committee meeting thousands of years ago, but when and how are they supposed to have come into being? And how were men able to impose their rules on the entire speech community, preventing anyone who experienced the world differently (and in particular, the women who made up half the population) from using words to express their own reality?    

My own view was, and still is, that no one invented the rules of meaning, and no one can control the use of language in the way Spender suggests. It’s true there are some kinds of language (most obviously, formal published writing) which can be regulated quite strictly by people with institutional authority; it’s also true that until recently that authority belonged overwhelmingly to men (or more exactly, to a privileged subset of men). Historically it was those men who wrote the dictionaries and grammar books which define “correct” usage, who created the technical vocabulary of specialized domains like science, and who controlled, as printers, publishers and editors, the most influential or prestigious channels through which writing circulated publicly. Those facts explain why male perspectives dominated public discourse for centuries. But it doesn’t follow that men control “language” or “meaning” in general: we don’t need to believe in some mysterious male power to dictate what all words will mean for every language-user in every context. 

In fact, there are good reasons to reject that belief. Most of what we know about our native language(s) and the rules or conventions for using them is learned through everyday (mainly spoken) interaction which is not subject to institutional control. A lot of that learning takes place in childhood, and typically it is women and older girls who are primarily responsible for the linguistic socialization of children. And why would women or girls who spent more time talking among themselves than to men or boys (a pattern which was probably the norm in most cultures for most of history) have been unable to use language in ways that reflected their shared experience?

Another thing we don’t need to believe in is the kind of “strong” linguistic determinism Spender espoused in Man Made Language—the view that language sets limits not only on what can be said, but also on what can be thought. As she explained in the Introduction,

While at one level we may support or refute the myth of male superiority – it being a matter of political choice – at another level we are unaware of the way in which it structures our behaviour and forms some of the limits of our world. 

A language which incorporates man-made semantic rules like “male is positive, female is negative” makes it impossible to conceptualize femaleness positively.

But what this line of argument always leaves unexplained is how the person making it can think outside the linguistic box they claim the rest of us are trapped in. How do we reconcile Spender’s own ability to conceptualize femaleness positively, and to assert that man-made language distorts reality, with the argument that language structures our thinking and determines what we perceive as real?   

In fact Spender doesn’t argue that consistently. After making the observation I’ve just quoted about the way our everyday use of language reproduces a male view of reality, she goes on:

Some of us, however, have decided to stop. We no longer wish to give substance to the patriarchal order and its integral component, the superiority of the male. We have started to formulate different rules for classifying the world, rules that are not based on the assumption that the proper human being is a male one and that female is a negative category. We have begun to codify the meaning that woman is an autonomous category and we are beginning to make this version of the world come true.

This implies that man-made language does not, in fact, prevent women from noticing and rejecting its male bias. They can decide to stop following men’s rules and substitute their own. Far from being controlled by language, Spender is saying that women can choose to take control of it.

Is it really that simple, though? The paragraph I’ve just quoted reminds me of the famous exchange in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass where Humpty Dumpty insists (in the face of Alice’s polite scepticism) that words mean whatever he chooses them to mean. The problem with this isn’t that Humpty Dumpty can’t choose to use words in novel and unconventional ways (he can and he does): it’s that his ability to communicate through language depends on other people’s understanding of the words he uses. If he wants his interlocutors to grasp what he means, there are limits on how far he can stray from the norms of his linguistic community. He can’t just ignore what everyone else thinks a word means and unilaterally impose his own, completely different definition.

But it’s also a mistake to think that definitions are set in stone, or that conscious efforts to change them are automatically doomed to fail. The history of such efforts suggests that they’re most likely to succeed when they are linked to wider shifts in social attitudes and practices. The word marriage is an obvious recent example: where the law has changed to permit same-sex marriage that has also changed the way the word is used, making it very unlikely that its traditional meaning (“the union of a man and a woman”) will be its primary meaning for future generations–however vocally religious conservatives insist it should be. By contrast, when the organizers of the first “slutwalk” proposed to redefine a “slut” as “a woman who is in control of her own sexuality”, they were accused of being out of touch with reality: the punitive attitudes expressed by the word slut had not changed enough to make “reclaiming” it feasible or desirable.

One of the things I found frustrating about Man Made Language was its tendency to swing between the extremes of strong determinism (man-made language imposes a male view of reality on everyone) and voluntarism (we can simply “decide to stop” deferring to man-made rules). Apart from being, on the face of things, incompatible, both these views (IMO) oversimplify the way language works.

But my biggest disagreement with Spender was more basic. I don’t believe that “man (or men) made language”, and I don’t think there’s anything liberating about what that belief implies–that language does not belong to women in the same way it belongs to men, and that women will therefore find it harder than men to put their thoughts, feelings and experiences into words. Though Spender’s version of this argument is framed in a different (i.e., feminist) way, to me it still feels uncomfortably close to the popular “deficit model” which holds that women’s ways of using language are inferior to men’s.

Women are constantly told, by all kinds of self-appointed experts, that there are problems with the way they express themselves verbally. Their speech is said to be “weak” and “lacking in authority”; according to Naomi Wolf they don’t get firsts at Oxford because their written sentences aren’t bold enough. In the past male critics dismissed women’s literary writing on the grounds that its subject-matter was “trivial” and its prose style “flowery”, while linguists and lexicographers had their own version of the “man made language” story, in which men were, as Otto Jespersen put it in 1922, “the chief renovators of language”,: their use of language was creative and innovative whereas women’s was conservative and conventional. There was, Jespersen commented, “a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions”.

These claims are based on prejudice, not evidence: they are examples of the “male positive, female negative” thinking Spender criticizes. And I’m not suggesting she herself believed women’ were inferior communicators. But unfortunately, many people–including many women–do believe that. I thought the thesis that language was made by and for men might end up just reinforcing women’s feelings of inadequacy, while distracting attention from the most significant communication problem they face–which is not the way they speak, but the way they are heard (or not heard) and judged.

But my reservations about Man Made Language put me at odds with most of the feminists I hung out with in the early 1980s. Whereas I found its arguments too sweeping, for them it was the book’s bold and uncompromising stance that made it so inspiring. Unlike previous popular treatments of language and sexism, which addressed a mainstream audience from a liberal, equal rights feminist perspective, Man Made Language spoke to grassroots activists who were more aligned with radical feminism. In those circles it was very influential: it undoubtedly started some important conversations, and for that we should be grateful to Dale Spender.

I met Spender only once, at a conference in the early noughties where we were both invited speakers. She was about to leave when we ran into each other, and was wheeling a large purple suitcase which matched her trademark purple outfit. I hadn’t actually sought her out because I thought it might be a bit awkward, but if she knew I had criticized Man Made Language she gave absolutely no sign of it: I found her open, friendly, likeable and funny.  

Pondering this encounter later, I remembered a TV “debate” on Man Made Language which had pitted Spender against the linguist Randolph Quirk. He was enormously condescending, but Spender refused to be provoked or cowed; instead of trying to argue with him, she just kept repeating what she’d said in the book. Since in a debate you’re supposed to try to refute your opponent’s points, not ignore them, the result was a bit of a car crash, and at the time I found it excruciating to watch. But after meeting Spender I saw it more as a case of someone practising what she preached. She wasn’t interested in playing what she saw as a male game, or in bolstering Quirk’s sense of his own superiority by engaging seriously with his criticisms.

If I’d been in her position I’d have been impelled by my own vanity to try to win the argument. But I don’t get the impression that Dale Spender was vain. In person she didn’t expect you to defer to her status as an Uber-Famous Feminist (and I’ve met plenty of famous feminists who did). She was a tireless promoter of other women’s ideas, not only in her own writing but also as an editor of encyclopedias, book series and the journal Women’s Studies International Quarterly.

Though I disagreed with Dale Spender about some things, I admired her for her conviction, her energy, her optimism, and her commitment to preserving the words and achievements of women for the benefit of future generations. What she did for other women of ideas, I hope we, and those who follow us, will do for her.  

Is this what a feminist looks like?

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It’s been an odd couple of days since Queen Elizabeth II died, and one of the oddest things about it has been the appearance of a rash of statements, news articles and opinion pieces on the question of whether the Queen was a feminist.

This hare may have been unwittingly started by the actor Olivia Colman in a statement she made back in 2019 to publicize a new season of Netflix’s royal family drama The Crown, in which she was about to play the role of Elizabeth II. She called the Queen “the ultimate feminist”, adding that “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”. 

I’m sure Colman didn’t anticipate that these remarks would become a talking point in the aftermath of the monarch’s death three years later. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. First the Washington Post ran with “Was Queen Elizabeth II a feminist?”, then suddenly the pieces were everywhere: The Independent, The Guardian, Metro, Woman’s Hour, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the business publication Forbes (which brought a “lean in” vibe to the proceedings by suggesting that “the queen’s commitment and dedication to her own job paved the way for other women to dedicate themselves fully to their careers”). The majority of them took the view that the Queen had indeed been a feminist, though dissenting voices included the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams and Amanda Taub in the New York Times.

I also have a view on the question itself, as will become clear, but the question I found myself asking as I scrolled through all this commentary was about words: what do these people think the word “feminist” means? Actually, my brain formulated it rather more prescriptively: “does anyone know what feminism is anymore?” This spontaneous reaction was slightly embarrassing, because I am, among other things, the author of a short introduction to feminism which is quite insistent on not being too prescriptive about the meaning of the word. For as long as feminism has existed there have been different/competing definitions of it, and massive disagreements among those who claimed to represent it. As a political movement it has always and everywhere been decentralized, a loose and shifting coalition of autonomous groups which themselves varied wildly in their mode of organization; there’s no politburo-style committee with the power to decide on or enforce a party line for everyone who uses the label “feminist”. In my book I dealt with this by proposing a very minimal working definition of a feminist as someone who believes two things: (1) that women are oppressed as women, and (2) that this can and should be changed through political action. Everything else—how you analyse the nature and the root causes of women’s oppression, what kind of change you want to see, what kind of action you think will bring it about—is up for grabs.

In theory, then, I’ve got very little interest in attempts to police the way the f-word is used—and as a linguist I have a lot of interest in observing how it actually is used, and how that varies and changes over time, as it inevitably will. But the “was the Queen a feminist” debate did make me wonder if we’re in the process of evacuating the word of both its political meaning and its history. 

As the feminist theorist Sylvia Walby has observed, feminism is now understood by many people more as a kind of personal identity than as a political project: we ask “is so-and-so a feminist?” rather than “does so-and-so do feminism?” Since we’re currently in a phase when feminism is cool rather than despised (this goes in cycles), one result is that almost any woman who isn’t actively anti-feminist is fairly likely to identify herself as a feminist. For large numbers of women who don’t “do” feminism—or any other kind of politics—that’s just a shorthand way of indicating that they subscribe to what is now a conventional, mainstream view in most parts of the world: women should be equal and free to choose their path in life, whether it be full-time parenting or running for president. (This is the kind of feminism The Onion had in mind when it marked International Women’s Day with a piece headlined “Women now empowered by anything a woman does”.)  

Despite–or rather because of—her privileged position, the Queen was not, in the mainstream feminist sense, “empowered”: she spent her life in the proverbial gilded cage, with no freedom to choose her own path, or to express political views of any kind. Commentators wanting to claim her as a feminist were therefore obliged to look for evidence of her doing or saying things which might be read as signs that she was privately sympathetic to feminist ideas. In many cases what they came up with strained credulity. For instance, many pieces cited the fact that when she married she kept the name Windsor rather than taking her husband’s name, Mountbatten, prompting him to complain that he was the only man in the country who couldn’t give his name to his children. I doubt this had anything to do with feminism: it’s far more likely to have been motivated by dynastic considerations. It also overlooks the evidence that in private she did defer to her husband. After Philip died, we were endlessly told that although he walked behind her on ceremonial occasions, when it came to family matters, he was the “undisputed master”; in public she wore the crown but at home he wore the trousers.

Another striking thing about the commentary, which is also in line with the broadening and political bleaching of the f-word’s meaning in contemporary discourse, was its tendency to uncritically equate “being a feminist” with “being a woman who occupies a position of power”, or in this case perhaps I should say “being a female figurehead”, since as a modern constitutional monarch the Queen, though influential if she chose to use her influence, had no serious political power. Having your picture on stamps and banknotes doesn’t make you powerful, it makes you a symbol; nor is it very convincing to suggest that merely having a woman in that symbolic role somehow elevates the status of women in reality (see also fertility goddesses, Marianne, the Virgin Mary, etc.)

A lot of this power and leadership stuff felt weirdly anachronistic, talking about a woman who personified an ancient and highly traditional institution in the sort of language we might associate with profiles of Silicon Valley “girlbosses”. Writers kept referring to the Queen as a “role model” for women leaders, which was particularly jarring given that the role of a hereditary monarch is only open to a tiny, pre-determined set of people, who do not have to have any ambition to fill it, nor any particular aptitude for it.   

But perhaps this is a bit more complicated than I’m suggesting. From Amanda Taub’s thoughtful piece in the New York Times I learned that in 1952 an aspiring woman politician wrote an article for the Sunday Graphic which contained these words:

If as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.

Once again this glosses over the fact that hereditary monarchs do not “aspire to the highest places”, they are simply put in their predestined place when the time comes. But could it be true that a society which has accepted a queen as its figurehead (because with monarchy you get who you get) becomes more receptive to the idea of a woman leader who did have to aspire to power, and compete for it with men? This writer apparently hoped that was true, though she was not, in any other respect, a feminist. Her name, in case you haven’t already guessed, was Margaret Thatcher.

Amanda Taub also talked to a historian, Arianne Chernock, who had studied the phenomenon of the “queen crazy woman” in 1950s America. In 1953 a report on this phenomenon in the LA Times quoted a psychologist who explained that for some American women the Queen had become “a heroine who makes them feel superior to men”. Though my own feminist education has given me a strong tendency to suspect any pronouncement about women made by a psychologist in the 1950s of being sexist bullshit, I don’t find the idea that identification with a female figurehead might prompt women to imagine having power either implausible or uninteresting; all liberatory politics has to begin in the imagination.    

My own objection to the idea that the Queen was a feminist is not really about her personal views (of which we know almost nothing) or the way she conducted herself (as Amanda Taub notes, “she stuck quite rigidly to traditional gender roles in terms of her behavior, clothes and public presentation of herself as a wife and mother”). It’s more about the extraordinarily patriarchal nature—and I mean “patriarchal” in the strictest and most literal sense—of the institution she was born into and dutifully served throughout her life.  

Many commentators pointed out that she presided over the 2011 reform of the law of succession which dispensed with male primogeniture: in future Britain may have a Queen regnant who has younger brothers (though we already know it won’t happen before the death of George, son of William, son of Charles). But one thing nobody mentioned (so forgive me if I do) was that one of the primary responsibilities of any queen, regnant or consort, is to produce legitimate heirs. This is another aspect of the “gilded cage”: royal women may live in luxury, be deferred to and publicly venerated, but they are also regarded as breeding stock. Elizabeth I managed to choose to remain unmarried and childless, but it wasn’t easy for her to hold that line, and I can’t imagine a modern, figurehead-type queen being able to hold it. Feminists may not agree on much, but one thing they mostly have tended to believe is that compulsory heterosexuality, marriage and reproduction—along with the whole concept of “legitimacy”—are among the cornerstones of the patriarchal order. Royal women are living symbols of what that order means for women, and even though what they experience is the luxury version, I find it impossible not to see it, and their consent to it, as a sort of degradation. (I think some royal women, especially those who married into it, have also come to see it that way, and their response has been to look for an exit.)

When I say that the Queen was not a feminist, that’s not a criticism of her or the way she did the job: a royal woman born in 1926 was never very likely to be a feminist. Her views and her behaviour, like everyone else’s, were bound to reflect her social milieu and life-experience (which in some ways was unusually varied, but in others extraordinarily limited). In that respect I found some of the arguments against her being a feminist as off-point as the arguments in favour. For instance, some people maintained she wasn’t a feminist because she was an upper-class white lady who was comfortable with hierarchy and inequality and, at a minimum, unapologetic about British colonialism. Well, OK, she was all of that; but in that case Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (aka the suffragettes) wasn’t a feminist either. (In her youth Pankhurst was a radical, but she became an avid nationalist, an outspoken defender of the Empire and, eventually, a Tory—while at no point renouncing her commitment to women’s rights.) This is another case of projecting a contemporary, broadened definition of feminism (as a movement to end all forms of social injustice rather than specifically a movement to advance women’s rights) onto a figure from an earlier period of history.

I’m still committed to the view that feminism is a house of many mansions: there are and always have been competing/conflicting definitions, and that hasn’t stopped feminists from getting on with whatever they saw as their work. But I’m equally committed to the view that however variously we define its goals, principles or methods, feminism is a political project: simply existing as a famous or powerful woman does not, in and of itself, make someone a feminist. We should be able to admire the achievements of non-feminist women without needing to co-opt them into a movement they never wanted to join, and we should be able to criticize the ideas or actions of feminist women, past and present, without needing to deny that they were ever feminists.      

Death of a patriarch

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Not long ago I quoted Robin Lakoff’s observation that looking closely at the details of language-use can reveal, or bring into sharper focus, beliefs and attitudes that usually go unnoticed. I’ve been reminded of that again this week, following the announcement of the death of the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip.

Since he was approaching his 100th birthday, this event was not unexpected; the government and the media had made a detailed plan (code-named ‘Operation Forth Bridge’) which they could put into action whenever it happened. So, what we are now reading and hearing—all the news reports and tributes and retrospective features about his life—is not the result of some hasty bodge-job. Much of this material was compiled well in advance, by people who had plenty of time to consider what they were going to say. I was expecting the coverage to be a lot of things I haven’t personally got much time for: royalist (obviously), obsequious (naturally), nationalistic (inevitably). But I’ll admit I was not expecting it to be quite so… patriarchal.

When I say ‘patriarchal’, I mean that in a very basic and literal sense. I’m not just talking about the presentation of the Prince as a model of aristocratic masculinity, a man who had served in World War II, who spoke with the bluntness of a former naval officer, who sent his son to a school that prescribed cold showers and stiff upper lips, etc., etc. I’m talking about the fact that commentary on his life has been organised, to a remarkable extent, around the proposition—not directly stated, but apparently still taken for granted—that it is natural and desirable for men to rule over women and children, in any social unit from the family to the nation-state. That proposition has shaped the outlines of the story we have been told—the story of a man who was outranked by his wife,  and who (understandably) found that demeaning; and also of the wife herself, a Good Woman who understood the problem and made every effort to mitigate it.  

In case you think I’m just making this up, let’s have a look at some textual evidence.

The first thing that’s striking about the coverage is that many news reports announcing Philip’s death chose headlines that specifically drew attention to his subordinate position. In Italy the Corriere della Sera had ‘Goodbye to Philip, always one step behind the Queen’. This wasn’t the only occurrence of the ‘step behind’ formula: he was also compared, by Andrew Marr, to ‘an Indian bride’ walking two steps behind (not surprisingly this comment was criticised for ignorance/casual racism, but I’m mentioning it in the context of this discussion because it’s such a clear pointer to the underlying idea that Philip was feminised, or emasculated, by his role). Another phrase used by several newspapers was ‘in the shadow of’, as in the Spanish daily El Pais’s headline ‘Muere el Principe que vivió 70 años a la sombra de Isabel II’ (‘the prince dies who lived for 70 years in the shadow of Elizabeth II’). Some reports combined these formulas: the Bangladeshi Daily Star, for instance, informed readers that Philip ‘lived in the shadow of the woman he married at Westminster Abbey in 1947 and always walked a step behind the queen’.

To assess the significance of these choices, we need to ask if the same phrases would be equally likely to appear in reports on the death of a queen consort, the wife of a surviving male monarch. That’s hard to test empirically because it’s rare, at least in recent British history, for a male monarch to be widowed (the last four kings all died before their wives). But it would be odd to describe a queen consort as living in her husband’s shadow, because that’s exactly where important men’s wives are expected to live. Being outranked and overshadowed by one’s spouse is the unmarked case for women; for men it is marked, and that’s what makes it headline material.

For Prince Philip, unlike the female consorts who preceded him and those who will follow, being relegated to the shadows was a problem; indeed, it was the problem that defined him. In the words of the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, ‘Philip’s life was…lived in perpetual limbo, his every move, every remark, every glance reflecting on his wife. He enjoyed none of the scope extended to various predecessors [like William of Orange and Prince Albert]’. ‘The frustration’ adds Jenkins, ‘must have been intense’. This frustration is clearly a function of Philip’s maleness: if a woman in his position were to complain (as he once did) that she was ‘nothing but a bloody amoeba’, she would be met with a mixture of incomprehension and accusations of being a jumped-up, power-crazed harpy. Royal wives are expected to content themselves with smiling, looking pretty, accepting bouquets and providing heirs: those who do threaten to overshadow their husbands do not, on the whole, remain royal wives.  

The second notable thing is the emphasis commentators have given to the idea that while the Queen may have outranked her husband in public, behind the scenes their roles were reversed—or to put it another way, their marriage was based on the ‘normal’ patriarchal arrangement whereby wives defer to husbands, not vice-versa. Perhaps the bluntest statement to that effect appeared in Italy’s La Repubblica, which described Philip as ‘l’unico che poteva permettersi di dire alla sovrana: “Stai zitta”’ (‘the only one who was allowed to tell the sovereign to shut up’). For this the paper did get some pushback on social media. But it wasn’t unique: the Guardian said that Philip ‘allowed’ the Queen to take the lead in public, while the LA Times assured us that he was ‘the undisputed master of the royal household’. Sky News noted that ‘the Queen wore the Crown—but when it came to family, Prince Philip wore the trousers’. Ah yes, the Crown and Trousers, that beloved 1950s pub where women couldn’t get served at the bar or set foot in the saloon…I remember it well, and apparently so does a royal correspondent who’s probably about half my age.

If the Prince ruled the roost at home, perhaps he was really the power behind the throne, and his place in the shadows, always a step behind, was just a carefully nurtured illusion. A number of papers reminded us that for decades the Queen began every address to the nation with ‘My husband and I’, as if to underline his indispensable status as ‘her closest advisor and confidant’. And the idea that he was indispensable, if not actually in charge, might explain an otherwise puzzling piece of fluff put out by Reuters under the headline ‘Despite loss of husband, little sign Queen Elizabeth will abdicate’. That ‘despite’ clause is a classic, encouraging the inference that we would naturally expect her to consider abdicating at this juncture—that the death of her husband would be an appropriate moment for her to ‘relinquish the throne in favour of her son and heir Prince Charles’. (Time, perhaps, to draw a line under the anomaly represented by a female monarch, who is only ever there because her predecessor had no sons.)

In reality, as the piece goes on to acknowledge, there is no reason to think the Queen has any intention of abdicating, ‘despite the huge hole in her life that Philip’s death leaves’. It isn’t explained why she, or indeed anyone, would decide to deal with a ‘huge hole in her life’ by making another huge hole in it. But apart from the thought that a woman in her 90s should not be clinging on to power when a man is waiting for his turn (once again, although I can’t test it, I doubt this would ever be the response to a reigning King’s loss of his wife), the idea that it’s time for her to go may be related to another theme which has been quite noticeable in the coverage of Prince Philip’s death, the portrayal of him as ‘the love of her life’ (vice-versa has been rarer, presumably on the old romantic/Romantic principle that only women are ruled by their hearts). ‘He was her King’, said Bild, metaphorically bestowing on him the title he was not permitted in reality, because kings have higher status than queens. Perhaps the commentators think that, like Queen Victoria after Prince Albert died, she will be (or should be) too grief-stricken to carry on.

Does any of this really matter, though? Would we not expect media coverage of such an anachronistic institution to be, itself, anachronistic? Yes, and in many respects it has been: in its solemnity, its deference, its assumption that mourning dead royals is the same kind of shared national preoccupation it was in 1903, and its total disregard for the realities of the digital age (the BBC shut down one of its television channels entirely for a day while showing the same royal-themed programming simultaneously on the other two; meanwhile on the other gazillion channels, life went on as usual). All this seemed, to many people, weirdly old-fashioned, as if we’d suddenly gone back 50 or 100 years in time (the BBC even set up a webpage specifically for complaints about the excessiveness of its coverage).

But I don’t think the patriarchal presuppositions I’ve been discussing are in the same category. Nobody needed to have it spelled out why Prince Philip’s position was so difficult and ‘frustrating’ (something that will never be said about the future Queen Camilla); journalists my own age or younger reached unselfconsciously for formulas like ‘wore the trousers’ and ‘in her shadow’. The Times was able to report that Prince Charles had ‘step[ped] up to fill his father’s shoes as male head of family’ (because of course every family must have a man at its head). The assumptions behind all this did not strike most people as weird. And that, depressingly, is because they aren’t.