Women's inheritance rights in Europe's constitutional monarchies have increased steadily after the ten-year-old Wilhelmina became queen of the Netherlands in 1890. In this part of the former Low Countries, three women have now reigned continuously for more than 120 years, which probably constitutes a world record. A more revealing example is Luxembourg, the only grand duchy in the European Union, which detached itself from personal union with the Netherlands in 1890 by claiming to be subject to Salic law. But when its first autonomous grand duke had six daughters and no sons, Luxembourg amended its succession rules seventeen years later, and two sisters ruled it from 1912 to 1964. The process has accelerated recently. Sweden approved female succession to its crown (for the third time) in 1980. Belgium repealed its version of the Salic law in 1991. Spain's restored monarchy adopted male-preference primogeniture in 1978 but changed to gender-free primogeniture in 2005. In 2009 Denmark, whose current female monarch is its first in more than five centuries, voted 85 percent in favor of genderless royal primogeniture. Nowhere in present-day Europe do royal inheritance laws discriminate against women, although the other three traditional guidelines—legitimate birth, direct descent, and primogeniture—remain in place.
Unlike their divine-right predecessors, Europe's constitutional monarchs do not govern. Its modern governments are parliamentary and elective, and long after their twentieth-century enfranchisement throughout Europe women rarely hold leadership positions within them. Nor do they in the rest of the world. Although the world's first democratically elected female prime minister would govern Sri Lanka more than once after 1960, and a few others have followed, no woman made a serious presidential bid in the United States until 2008 and no woman headed any European government between the death of Catherine II and the election of Britain's Margaret Thatcher. If women increasingly occupy cabinet positions in European governments, old prejudices persist against entrusting them with responsibility for military matters; a sample of 371 women holding ministerial portfolios between 1968 and 1992 in fifteen European parliamentary countries put defense at the very bottom of the list (under 1 percent), below even prime ministers (1.3 percent).6
Can one find any similarities between absolutist female heads of government before 1800 and their democratic female successors after 1960? Although the type of evidence normally used by historians makes it difficult to obtain insights into personal and intellectual styles, an interesting similarity appears if one compares the autobiographical writings of two women who exercised the ordinarily male task of kingship, Christina of Sweden and Catherine II (something none of their male counterparts ever did with comparable candor), with the autobiographical sketch submitted by Europe's first female prime minister to Who's Who. Even though Catherine II's father had been a political nonentity and Christina had repudiated her father's deeply cherished religion, both female autocrats of the old regime retrospectively idealized their fathers, with whom they had had relatively little personal contact. On the other hand, both of their mothers got short shrift and tended to be seen as obstacles to their political development. Centuries later, Thatcher mentioned her father's rather modest political achievements but never even named her mother.
Beyond this example, other possible similarities emerge by juxtaposing some of Catherine II's more candid self-evaluations with Blema Steinberg's elaborately calibrated psychological profiles of three twentieth-century female prime ministers. One is that both the eighteenth-century autocrat and her recent female epigones were formidable workaholics. In composing a brief epitaph for herself at the age of fifty-nine, Catherine II mentioned, as noted, that “work was easy for her,” and there is a paper mountain of corroborative evidence. Steinberg found similarly exceptional capacities for sustained and focused effort among her political subjects. On the other hand, however exceptional their political careers, neither the autocrat of the old regime nor her twentieth-century successors could be described as deep thinkers. In a letter written at the age of sixty-two, Catherine II, who had already dabbled in more different intellectual pursuits than any other ruler, male or female, remarked, “I have never believed that I have the creative spirit” and added, “I have come to know many people in whom I perceived, without envy or jealousy, considerably more intellect than I have.” Steinberg reached the essentially similar conclusion that none of her three women possessed creativity or originality.7
These are not the only possible similarities which might be extrapolated backward from evidence emerging in recent times. For example, the behaviors by which women who exercise supreme authority have cultivated loyalty from their closest male subordinates do not seem to have changed much over the past few centuries. Neither has the rapid decisiveness with which female heads of government react when confronted with dangerous opposition changed much since Mary Tudor learned about Jane Grey's coronation or Catherine II learned about Pugachev's impersonation of her dead husband.
Modern Cultural Perceptions of Female Rulers
Cultural ambivalence about whether a successful female ruler could exhibit appropriate female behavior persisted far into the post-1830 constitutional era. Designing an educational program for his kingdom's ten-year-old heiress Maria da Gloria in 1829, a Portuguese reformer noted that “a princess who must reign by herself is a female in fact but a male in law, so her education must offset nature and diminish as far as possible the woman in order to form the Queen.” Not long afterward, Queen Victoria observed, “We women … are not fitted to reign” and characterized her most famous predecessor, Elizabeth I, as a good queen but a bad woman.8
Successful women rulers from Hatshepsut to Thatcher have been rulers first and women second. However, popular representations of them have always reversed these aspects because romance sells infinitely better than political power in female hands. The cultural reduction of female rulers to women driven more by passion than by political ambition has a long history. Even Zenobia of Palmyra, for whom love interests had to be invented, became the tragic heroine of a French play by 1647 and of a Venetian opera by 1694.9 When seeking historical subjects, Neapolitan composers avoided their native city's colorful fourteenth-century female ruler Joanna I, whose career furnished material for several plots, in favor of safely distant ones with romantic potential. During four years in Russia at the invitation of Catherine II, Domenico Cimarosa composed an opera about Cleopatra and Marc Antony which premiered at St. Petersburg in 1789.
It was a safe choice, as no other early historical woman ruler can begin to rival Cleopatra VII's enduring popularity. Mary Hamer's assertion that through her appropriation by Augustan Rome “the status of Cleopatra [is] a founding myth in Western culture” hits close to the mark. In 1907, in a survey that not only preceded film but also overlooked cycles of tapestries celebrating her, a German scholar recorded that since 1540 Europeans had created no fewer than seventy-seven plays, forty-five operas, and five ballets about her.10 Regardless of the cultural medium, Cleopatra is almost invariably depicted as devoting her entire attention to her romantic relationships with two famous Roman men. Although she had four children, she is rarely shown as a mother, and she is almost never shown performing her basic task of governing Egypt. The power of Roman propaganda has ensured that, after more than two thousand years, there is still only one image showing Cleopatra simultaneously as both mother and monarch. It was almost certainly Cleopatra herself who had it put on the wall of an Egyptian temple.
Medieval Georgia's golden age heroine, Queen Tamar, provides a less familiar but equally instructive example of the modern cultural reduction of a highly successful female ruler to a femme fatale. After Russia had absorbed her old kingdom, Mikhail Lermontov, a major Russian poet fascinated by the “exotic” Caucasus, composed a poem about Tamar in 1841, pasting her onto an old Georgian legend about a destructively seductive princess living in the mountains. Although Lermontov's depiction of the Georgian queen was pure fantasy, it inspired a nineteenth-century Austrian author, J. P. Fallmerayer, to call her the Caucasia
n Semiramis. In 1903 Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian playwright and future Nobel laureate, twisted Lermontov's portrait into a commentary on the new woman of the 1890s. Nine years later the Ballets russes restored Lermontov's temptress in a lavish French production with Tamar and her entourage decked out in Oriental costumes. Outside of her remote native land, no one remembers her as a saint.
A century ago a new art form, cinema, began to provide what has become the most influential source of public images of bygone female rulers. Most films about Europe's female monarchs, often starring famous actresses, were produced long before any woman had reemerged at the head of a European government. Two short early dramatic films about Europe's best-known female monarchs came from France, the pioneer of female monarchical exclusion. The first, in 1909, featured Catherine the Great and the female impostor known as Tarakanova; three years later, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, another film retold Elizabeth I's affair with Essex. In addition to featuring in many later films, since the 1960s female rulers have also been subjects of a closely related genre, television miniseries. As in operas built around legendary or authentic female rulers, the need for dramatic effect has usually prevented a comfortable fit between history and cinema or, subsequently, television. The primary rule governing popular depictions of female rulers in Western culture continues to apply: royal romance is endlessly marketable, but women shown exercising political power can make audiences uncomfortable.
Cleopatra VII continues to inspire more artistic portrayals in various genres than any more modern European female ruler. Films about her began in America in 1912 and have inspired some of the most spectacularly lavish productions. The second, made in 1917, ranks among Hollywood's most expensive early films, reportedly costing half a million dollars and employing two thousand people. The star, the famous vamp Theda Bara, wore several fantastic costumes, but because some of them were considered too obscene to be shown after the mid-1920s only a few fragments now survive. Another large-budget Hollywood version was made by Cecil B. De Mille in 1934. An even more elaborate version, made in 1963 and starring Elizabeth Taylor, remains one of the most expensive films ever made. Cleopatra VII remains culturally polyvalent: a South Indian Tamil film about her was made in 2005, and a Brazilian film followed in 2007.
Ranking just behind Cleopatra in cinematic Orientalism is a female ruler who remains nameless. Four years after Hollywood's first big-budget Cleopatra came The Queen of Sheba, by the same director but with a different leading actress. It reportedly boasted 671 scenes, a cast of thousands, and 500 camels; long before Ben-Hur, it even had a thrilling chariot race—between two women wearing skimpy costumes. No known copies of any reel from this film survive. No major remake occurred until 1959, another lavish production with little cultural depth. Unlike Cleopatra, this anonymous female monarch has been featured in two well-researched television documentaries in 1998 and 2002.
Some films about non-European women rulers were not intended for Western audiences and seem more authentic, not only because their historical subjects were genuine but also because both their producers and leading actresses came from the original countries. Yet authentic must not be confused with historically accurate. Within this subgroup, Wu Ze-tian of China deserves special mention. The first film about her, a black-and-white Chinese version made in 1939, was followed by others made in Taiwan (1960) and Hong Kong (1963). However, her most spectacular filmed reincarnations have appeared serialized on television, which seems better adapted for depicting the most durable early woman ruler (counting her years of regency, Wu Ze-tian ties Elizabeth I at forty-five years) and the only one who began as a low-ranking concubine. For such reasons, a televised series about her made in 2003 runs over twenty hours.11
Both thirteenth-century Muslim women rulers have also been commemorated cinematically because the states they governed developed flourishing film industries in the twentieth century. In India, a black-and-white film from 1924 entitled Razia Begum preceded Razia Sultana in 1961. A more recent Hindi film, Razia Sultan (1983), offers a typical Bollywood plot based on her imaginary love affair with an Ethiopian-born court official. In Egypt, a production from 1935 entitled Chagarrat al-Dorr starred a Lebanese actress.
Because of the need for a romantic focus, some of Europe's more important early female kings, including its first important late medieval royal heiress, Joanna I of Naples, and the best-known and most politically successful among them, Isabel of Castile, have never inspired either feature films or lengthy television documentaries. However, their most significant early modern successor, Elizabeth I, has inspired several of both and undeniably enjoys an optimal fit between history and film. Her biography offers a rare mixture of political authority, exercised with exceptional wit and flair, and romance without marriage, thereby offering an irresistible role for actresses to exhibit their talents in apparent conflicts of interest between love and political duty, interspersed with scenes of straightforward political leadership at dramatic moments—although they nearly always include a face-to-face meeting with her rival, Mary Queen of Scots, something that never happened.
As in her biographies, Elizabeth I has been portrayed in cinema and on television, mainly in her own country. After Sarah Bernhardt, Bette Davis played her twice in Hollywood films (1939 and 1955) before Cate Blanchett did so more recently (1998 and 2007). Elizabeth I has also been commemorated in opera: in 1953 Benjamin Britten updated Rossini's version for the coronation of England's second Elizabeth. England's film industry has been supplemented by high-quality public television, the BBC giving Elizabeth I an early television debut in 1968. The present century has seen another BBC television miniseries about her. Major award-winning productions, most recently starring Helen Mirren (2007), continue to feature her.
Elizabeth's immediate female predecessor, Mary Tudor, remains politically incorrect, putting England's first autonomous female monarch off-limits for British film and television producers, whereas Elizabeth's easily romanticized Scots cousin Mary Stuart, generally considered a political failure, has received considerable media attention. But Mary Queen of Scots consistently follows her English cousin in media treatments. An American playwright, Maxwell Anderson, wrote a play about her in 1933, three years after writing one about Elizabeth; Mary Stuart's featured BBC television debut (1971) similarly came three years after Elizabeth's.
Only one noteworthy film has been made about Europe's other unmarried female king, when Hollywood cast its greatest Swedish actress, Greta Garbo, as Christina in 1933. Significantly, although the historical Christina utterly lacked Garbo's dazzling beauty, Queen Christina was a romantic comedy, a genre avoided whenever English-speaking filmmakers tackle England's Queen Bess. In the film Garbo not only portrayed a highly intelligent woman who devoted considerable time and effort to the task of ruling her kingdom, but even wore male clothing and high boots in many early scenes. The Hollywood plot then reduced Christina's attraction to Catholicism, the principal reason for her early abdication, to an accidental encounter with a handsome Spaniard. Their affair dominates the film's last half, with Garbo changing into female dress. In this way the film stood history on its head, since the probably bisexual Christina habitually wore male clothing only after her abdication.
Europe's most important female monarchs who enjoyed both satisfactory marriages and politically successful reigns have resisted cinematic treatments because patriotic epics cannot expect to draw large audiences if they star women with several children. Only the extraordinary local popularity of Maria Theresa explains why Austria's greatest twentieth-century actress, Paula Wessely, once made a film about her. In 1951, trying to restore a public image badly tarnished by Nazi collaboration, Wessely used her own studio and whatever authentic locales and opera costumes were available in occupied Vienna to produce and star in a film entitled Maria Theresa. As it opens, viewers see a middle-aged matronly empress governing the Habsburg Empire for several minutes before its plot develops around her husband's only known extramarital af
fair.
The worst fit between the film industry and female rulers afflicts Russia's eighteenth-century empresses. Their reigns offer abundant material for many cinematic plots, but they have become stateless because postrevolutionary Russia's deservedly famous film industry ignored them. By default, therefore, only foreign actresses have portrayed them in various cultural distortions of the Westernization of Russia, and the worst situation of all affects the most important Westernizer, Catherine II. The cinematic career of the Semiramis of the North has been as extensive (although not as expensive) as that of the Semiramis of the Nile. Between the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of the twentieth century, Catherine II has played a more or less central role in at least twelve films, none of them made in Russia. This German-born princess has been interpreted by two famous German actresses, Marlene Dietrich (1934) and Hildegard Knef (1963), and by America's Bette Davis. The American comedienne Mae West had the screenplay from 1934 rewritten as a stage play that ran for 191 Broadway performances in 1944–45 but was never filmed. Given Catherine's widespread reputation as a nymphomaniac, it seems inevitable that she also became Europe's only woman ruler to be featured in a pornographic film.12
By far the best filmed interpretation of Catherine II has been provided by British television, with excellent historical commentary from such leading experts as Isabel de Madariaga. Nevertheless, precisely because Catherine II offers such an extraordinary and extreme combination of political and sexual liberation, her potential as a major authority figure for Western women has yet to be adequately tapped by commercial media. This woman achieved supreme rule by overthrowing and imprisoning her husband shortly after giving birth to an illegitimate child—and later wrote the basic account of her coup herself!—and she exited public life thirty-four glorious years later after publicly flaunted sexual affairs with a series of handsome men some thirty years younger than she. The personal history of Catherine II so far exceeds conventional parameters of appropriate behavior for politically ambitious women that even the most adventurous producers, directors, and actresses dare not confront either the beginnings or the end of her reign. At least with respect to women as heads of state, twenty-first century modernity lags behind eighteenth-century reality.
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 27
