The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  So Boadicea, aided both by late Victorian perceptions concerning women and empire, and by the image of Queen Victoria herself, passed into the pantheon of idealized patriotic women. It is a place she has not lost in the century since the erection of her statue and is not likely to lose, so long as national crises arise, demanding reference to comforting historic symbols of courage and endurance.

  Patriotic fervour helped to make up one part of the modern Boadicean plinth. At the same time, as women stirred in their struggle for general recognition as a sex (rather than as privileged individuals) Boadicea’s protean legend began to be employed in quite a different connection. Pageants had become increasingly popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times; in this manner the British aristocracy was able to show off both its adequate historical knowledge and its more than adequate historical fancy dress, in a pleasurable real-life example of zeugma. But The Pageant of Great Women, first performed on 10 November 1909 at the Scala Theatre, London, was a pageant with a difference, since it was performed in the suffragette cause.7 This was two months after the Prime Minister, Asquith, had instructed the prison doctors to feed suffragette hunger-strikers forcibly. Originally produced by the play department of the Actresses’ Franchise League, written by Cicely Hamilton, designed and directed by Edith Craig, the pageant subsequently toured the country.

  Boadicea, ‘a Briton in arms’, was one of the most prominent characters. When she appeared, spectators were adjured to ‘look on her who stood … and spat defiance at the hosts of Rome!’ A photograph of the event in the Daily Mirror shows what they saw: a stalwart Boadicea, towering over her companions and got up more or less according to Dio Cassius’ instructions, with flowing tresses over a barbaric robe, a torc and other jewels, and an enormous spear in her hand (another possible comparison, to Ellen Terry’s famous portrait as Lady Macbeth, reminds one that Edith Craig was Ellen Terry’s daughter).

  The character of Prejudice was played by a man. Otherwise the familiar stage army – in this case literally so – of great women was paraded in categories which included ‘Learned Women’, ‘Artists’ and ‘Saintly Women’ as well as ‘Rulers’ and ‘Warriors’. Here Queen Zenobia ‘of the hero’s heart’ was placed among the Rulers; but the Rani of Jhansi – ‘though but a child in years’ – found her place among the Warriors together with Boadicea, Joan of Arc and the fourteenth-century Scot Agnes Dunbar. It was intended by this appeal to the rich past to draw public attention to the ‘physical, intellectual, creative and ethical’ strengths of women, in contrast to Prejudice’s contemptuous declaration that Woman’s innate stupidity made her incapable of thought. Fifty-two actresses took part.

  In order to facilitate touring, it was Edith Craig’s plan that such a pageant should contain only three speaking parts, all allegorical; these were performed by professionals. Otherwise members of suffragette societies on the spot would supply the colourful heroines, Edith Craig arriving to dress them. This ingenious arrangement was not without its little local difficulties: the extreme popularity of the role of Joan of Arc constituted one of them. Another of a rather different nature was encountered when the members of a suffrage society in a university town thought they knew enough for no one to be anxious to play Catherine the Great: who, ‘whatever may have been her merits as a ruler, was renowned for the scandals of her private life’. Finally a girl was found who presumably shared Edith Craig’s view that a good part was a good part for all that.

  The pageant ended with Prejudice taking his stand on force as ‘the last and ultimate judge’, and claiming that force for man alone ‘who takes the sword – The sword that must decide!’ Woman on the other hand, declared Prejudice, ‘Fears the white glint of it and cowers away’. It was at this point that the Warriors, led by Boadicea, were paraded in rebuttal. The stage directions read: ‘Then Prejudice slinks away.’

  But Prejudice, if he left the stage of the Scala Theatre, did not slink far, let alone slink away altogether, even with the winning of the vote for women at various dates in various countries across the world. Seventy years after the Pageant of Great Women an extraordinary exhibition was shown in San Francisco for the first time before embarking upon a worldwide tour to packed attendance.f2

  The Dinner Party was conceived by the American artist and craftswoman Judy Chicago and executed by her over five years with ‘a working community of women and men’.8 The exhibition consisted of thirty-nine ‘place settings’ upon a large open triangular banqueting table, which in turn rested upon a porcelain ‘Heritage Floor’, bearing the names of 999 women, grouped into categories. Its aim – an avowedly feminist one – was not only to ‘symbolize the long history of female achievement’ but also to remind its audience that ‘the history of Western civilization, as we have understood it, has failed to represent the experience of half the human race’.

  The Dinner Party’s categories include ‘Primordial Goddess’ and ‘Fertile Goddess’ but also ‘Kali’, a category described as a ‘traditionally positive view of female power misrepresented as a destructive force’ (such as Celtic Britain’s Rhiannon). ‘Boadicea d. 62 AD’ (sic) is, like ‘Kali’, the name which heads a category standing for ‘the tradition of warrior queens extending back to legendary times’. Other Boadiceas include Cartimandua, Artemisia, Cleopatra, defined as a ‘Ruler–Deity’, Medb of Connacht, Tomyris and Zenobia, given the full panoply of description as ‘Queen, warrior, military strategist and scholar’.

  Give or take changes in the language of female protest between 1909 and 1979, there is an obvious and significant similarity between the suffragette pageant and the feminist exhibition in method of execution. It is not just that certain devaluations of the nature of women – her innate stupidity and cowardice for example as denounced by the pageant’s male figure of Prejudice – are clearly still perceived to need rebuttal in the late twentieth century, as they have been rebutted by bold spirits throughout history. Further than that, the appeal in both cases to ‘Triumphant Women’ of the past bears witness once again to the enduring importance of heroines such as Boadicea, mythical or actual, to women combating their own inferior status; and this despite the passionate desire of many women to help forward all their sex, not merely the potential leaders.

  With the coming of the Women’s Movement, such heroines naturally take on new guises. In The Dinner Party, for example, ‘Elizabeth R’, like ‘Boadicea d. 62 AD’, constitutes a category: the first Elizabeth is described as ‘One of the greatest female rulers who ever lived, distinguished stateswoman and scholar.’ While not dissenting from the verdict, one cannot help wondering what Elizabetha Triumphans herself would have made of the all-female company, she who was accustomed to pikes being couched and ensigns lowered in devotion as she passed, ‘to she alone and none but only she’; to say nothing of her calculated boast of having the heart and stomach of a man. Boadicea, on the other hand, has come to symbolize a kind of female freedom and even sexual liberation.

  The discovery by the feminist poet Judy Grahn – to her own satisfaction – that the name Boadicea (in its original Boudica form) was the origin of the word ‘bulldike’, may stand as an extreme example of this.9 Grahn, in an article of 1980 entitled ‘The Queens of Bulldikery’, described how in years past the mystery of the word ‘bulldike’ had ‘burbled and thickened’ in her mind; deciding that it stemmed from Old English, she therefore searched for a historical people who once worshipped and valued bulls. From here to Boadicea (‘Bo’ means ‘cow’ in Irish while English friends assured her that ‘bull’ was pronounced ‘Boa’) and thence happily to Boudica, was a short leap of Grahn’s creative imagination.

  ‘Boudica was a barbarian and a Celt,’ wrote Grahn, ‘and her pudenda would have been active, unashamed, and radiating with female power all her life … Considering Celtic customs it would have been unnatural of Queen Boudica not to be a lesbian. She was, after all, a queen and a military leader of her people.’ With an even greater leap of the imagination, Grahn also drew attention to
the large number of puns surrounding Boadicea’s name, such as the soldiers’ dikes which they made in AD 61, and her statue called ‘Boadicea on the Embankment’, embankment being a synonym for dike.

  Grahn however derided Dio Cassius’ description of the atrocities committed under Boadicea’s command – the laceration of the women’s breasts in particular – as being ‘too much like the typical patriarchal response to women warriors in general to be believed’. (This point of view, incidentally, provides Grahn with an ally in the shape of Milton, however unlikely the combination; he too dismissed such invented details by which historians hoped to ‘embellish’ their work.)10 The next leap is to transfer the word ‘bulldike’ to the United States: Grahn’s explanation lies in the slang of Newgate Prison, from which many indentured criminals proceeded westwards, a high percentage of them, according to Grahn, Celts, who remembered their ancestors as homosexual ‘as a matter of course’.

  It is too easy to dismiss all this as ludicrously unhistorical (which of course it is). For one might observe with truth that Grahn’s imaginative reconstruction is really no more ludicrous than some of the other theories which have been proposed about Boadicea in the past, including, famously, her ‘rich burial’ at Stonehenge, actually erected nearly two millennia before, but believed as an article of faith in the early seventeenth century. Nor is Grahn’s bold lesbian Celt, ‘radiating with female power all her life’, necessarily further away from the original than Purcell’s meekly apologetic late-seventeenth-century princess (‘My Fortune wound my Female Soul too high And lifted me above myself’).11

  Be that as it may, Grahn’s alluring but fantastical theory has its own importance: for it draws attention to the Warrior Queen, here epitomized by Boadicea, as a symbol of sexual freedom as well as female independence. At the same time, such an image looks back to the remote past. Grahn’s poem, written in 1972, ‘She Who’, acts as the epigraph of her article:

  I am the wall at the lip of the water

  I am the rock that refused to be battered

  I am the dyke in the matter, the other …

  and I have been many a wicked grandmother

  and I shall be many a wicked daughter …

  This is once again the language, proud, mystical and ferocious, of the Ptolemaic creed of Isis, invoked to adorn the image of Cleopatra: ‘I am she that rises in the Dog star, she who is called Goddess by women … I am the queen of war, I am the queen of the thunderbolt …’12

  Liberated sexuality in general – not merely homosexuality – contributes to the modern image of the Warrior Queen. Boadicea: A Tragedy of War by Robert Reynolds, issued by the Poets Press in New York in 1941, has a heroine who is seldom mentioned without a reference to her heavy breasts ‘like pillows …’ and her frank sexual desires characteristic of Celtic women: ‘Yet she attracted the younger tribesmen. She was the eternal, fecund woman of their songs and stories, and their myths.’ Henry Treece’s heroine, in an English novel of 1958, Red Queen, White Queen, has not only Boadicea but her daughters (Gwynedd and Siara), all three of them plump and buxom and blonde, sleeping with whoever pleases them ‘in the old fashion’. In 1986 a British television programme on ‘Imaginary Women’ conducted by Marina Warner, showed Toyah Wilcox, twenty-five-year-old rock singer turned actress and film star, driving a chariot; her hair – an appropriate modern version of Dio’s ‘tawny’ – was a violent punk red.13 Toyah Wilcox, who had accepted the role of Boadicea – ‘a character I greatly admire’ – in a film the year before, now described her heroine as a ‘free liberated sexual woman’.

  Such a picture of a free-wheeling female rebel against patriarchal attitudes may seem in quaint contrast to the statuesque image inherited from late Victorian times, gravely maternal, deeply imperialist. Yet once again, as in the case of Grahn, the idea of the rebel, give or take her sexuality (the true nature of Boadicea’s sexuality is one of the many things about her which are likely to remain forever obscure), is, of the two, the more in keeping with the few known facts of Boadicea’s career.

  There is still a further element in the mythology of Boadicea which has ensured the survival of interest in her image into modern times. That is the emergence of the political female leader. At first sight an elected woman Prime Minister may seem to have little in common with a Warrior Queen of ancient or even more recent times. Yet there is still an equivocal relationship perceived to exist between women and force which can rise to a head whenever a woman is voted into power, or even (significantly in modern democracies) might be voted into power. This equivocal relationship brings the notion of Boadicea, or some other legendary Warrior Queen, into play once more.

  In the suffragette pageant of 1909, Prejudice had claimed force for Man alone, on the grounds that Woman traditionally cowered away from ‘the white glint’ of the sword; he also claimed force as ‘the last and ultimate judge’, effectively debarring timorous Woman from the exercise of power. Or in General de Gaulle’s nobler version of the same sentiment, quoted in Chapter One, force was described as watching over civilization and ruling empires, ‘the fighting spirit’ being an integral part of man’s inheritance. On the stage in 1909 Prejudice had been easily roused by the appearance of the defiant Boadicea, epitomizing Woman’s ability to handle any martial matter. But the reality was very different and remains so. The question of what Kleist in Penthesilea called ‘Fate’s iron tongue, the sword’ will not go away.14

  Can women, if voted into power, handle the great issues of war (and death) and peace? Are they not too tender, if not actually too timid? Female leaders of the second half of the twentieth century have conspicuously found themselves having to prove their credentials in this respect by one means or another, not only after election but during the process leading up to it. Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in the United States presidential election of 1984: the first woman to figure in such an outstanding position (and at the time of writing – 1988 – the year of the next round of presidential elections, the only one). Her account of her experiences campaigning, as related in My Story, published in 1986, makes illuminating reading. For it shows clearly that deep, primitive fears of women’s potential timidity or weakness lurked in certain quarters of her country. Nothing in the political development of women elsewhere or even in America’s own vigorous Women’s Movement had affected this.15

  Such fears were not exactly nursed in secret. In her confrontation on nationwide television with her opposite number, the sitting Republican Vice-President George Bush, on 11 October 1984, Geraldine Ferraro described herself facing ‘the final and inevitable question’. Thus Vice-President Bush: ‘Congresswoman Ferraro, you have had little or no experience in military matters and yet you might some day find yourself Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. How can you convince the American people and the potential enemy that you would know what to do to protect this nation’s security, and do you think in any way that the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?’ (This question was posed incidentally five years after Mrs Thatcher had become Prime Minister of Great Britain, hardly a good example of a woman of whom the Soviets had successfully taken advantage!)

  ‘I didn’t hesitate,’ wrote Geraldine Ferraro. ‘“Are you saying that I would have to have fought in a war in order to love peace?” I shot back …’ And she did of course assure the questioner of her confidence in her own ability to handle such a situation. But she admitted that it was a terribly important question ‘and I had thought a great deal about how to answer it’. George Bush for his part emphasized his own combat experience in the Second World War – for which Geraldine Ferraro, born in 1934, would of course have been too young, quite apart from her gender: ‘Yes, I did serve in combat, I was shot down when I was a young kid, scared to death. And all that … heightened my convictions about peace.’

  Marvin Kalb on Meet the Press put the question to Geraldine Ferraro in an even simpler form: ‘Are you strong enough to pu
sh the button?’ (Another legitimate question – to candidates of both sexes – might be: Are you strong enough not to push the button? But this was not posed.) Although Ferraro gave the obvious reply that she could do whatever was necessary for the protection of her country, privately she found it endlessly annoying to be presumed weak and indecisive just because she was a woman. There was a bigger underlying issue: if her candidacy was really being judged on the same level as a man’s, she would hardly be asked to answer questions like that. Nor indeed was this question asked of any other candidates, other than members of Congress who were religious ministers.

  But of course Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy – in the event unsuccessful since the election was won by the Republicans in a landslide – was not being judged on the same level as a man’s. And those elected female leaders who have emerged triumphant have needed to pull the mantle of the Warrior Queen about them, where appropriate, and use it to lend further mythic authority to the role of mere Prime Minister: sex has had to be made a subtle advantage, instead of a crude disadvantage.

  Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India on 24 January 1966 at the age of forty-eight. She was not in fact the first woman in the world to occupy the position: that honour had already gone to Mrs Gandhi’s contemporary, Sirimavo Bandaraneike of Sri Lanka, who was elected in July 1960. Interestingly enough, at their inception, the careers of both Mrs Gandhi and Mrs Bandaraneike indicate that the Appendage Syndrome common to so many Warrior Queens continued to operate under elective conditions as it had done under the hereditary system in the past. That is to say, although the London Evening News wrote concerning Mrs Bandaraneike of the need for a new word – ‘Presumably we shall have to call her a Stateswoman’ – the comment of the News Chronicle was considerably more apt: ‘Gentle widow heads for job as premier’.16