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The STANDS4 team

Not to my knowledge. But then again, one of us just started building an engine in the garden (stay tuned for the post about it!), so for all I know there are more hidden hobbies where that one came from!

If chess players started to call the queens “amazons” again, it could be revived. Is anyone connected with Bad Rep a chess player? Or with any influence on a chess player?

“Amazon” is also an early word for the Queen chesspiece, Hodge discovered in A is for Amazon. Which I liked, though it’s now sadly obsolete.

I read a good interpretation of chess as the ultimate patriarchal game – you must destroy your enemy, everything is black or white, everything revolves around the King, the Queen is a threat, and there are nice known rules and straight lines everywhere.

It’s pretty infantile on an emotional level, which is why I eventually got bored of it. Yes, you can create great things within its absolutely uncompromising framework, but I’d rather have something with a bit humanity to it.

Absolutely, Hodge! Just like men, women come in all stripes and colours. And it’s good that women should have the opportunity. Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, playing politics and the pursuit of power call for an extremely unpleasant personality. So the women who wield power are apt to be far from the most genial members of their sex. Indeed, since opportunities are not equal, women probably have to be nastier than men to gain and hold on to power. I think that it was, sadly, inevitable that our first female prime minister would be a woman who could beat the boys at their own nasty little games.

I think that Elizabeth may have been a similar case. She may have gained the throne by right of birth, but keeping it surely entailed deep defilement in Tudor politics.

Victoria was clearly different. Being boring may have (almost) been a requirement. I wonder, had she been more interesting, whether some means would have been found to ease her from the throne. (Although, presumably, unlike Elizabeth, nobody would have wished to behead her.) And patronising (as you put it) “some of the the most dodgy aspects of the nineteenth century” may have been pretty well mandatory for a monarch at that time. (Interesting, though, that you use the word “patronised”, with its etymology in fatherhood.)

I’ve sometimes wondered about Victoria not believing that lesbians existed. However naive she may have been, is that really possible? Was it (perhaps) a convenient way to dismiss a subject on which she preferred not to dwell? (I find it impossible to believe, though, that she was either a lesbian or pro-lesbian.)

I’ve always sort of felt the Victorian age was a great time for culture rather more in spite of Victoria than because of her. She had famously never read a novel, despite the existence of George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy, the Bronte sisters, etc, etc, during her reign and she patronised instead some of the the most dodgy aspects of the nineteenth century. Didn’t believe lesbianism existed, horrible colonialist and extremely personally boring, from all accounts. I suppose it’s important to remember that the presence of a woman in power (cf also Margaret Thatcher) is not a good thing intrinsically, although it’s good women should have the opportunity: just like men, women come in all stripes and colours.

It’s a compilation of gender-role subverting tracks… mostly old recordings of women singing songs intended for men, and vice versa (a notable, jarring, example is Hutch singing “Ten Cents a Dance”). It also includes some songs in themselves gender-subverting. (The best is Ronald Frankau’s “Uncle Bill Has Much Improved”… I think the only one of them I’ve downloaded to my iPod.) The reason I mention the CD in the context of “queen” is Judd Rees’ 1934 song “The King’s a Queen at Heart”. It’s a fairly early example of the usage “Queen as ‘a flamboyant homosexual’”. The song is jaunty and suggests to me that a “queen” in this sense was more a figure of fun than of opprobrium.

Anyway, it was under Elizabeth that England defeated the Spaniards and became a world power for the first time. Virginia was named after the queen, which underlines the justice of your remarks, Hodge… emphasising her virginity in naming the New World. It was also a time English culture flowered — Shakespeare, and all that.

Elizabeth’s reputation led to the coining of the phrase “the new Elizabethan age” during my childhood (the 1950s). The phrase didn’t last, of course, because the promise it implied never materialised. But it’s symptomatic of the regard accorded to Elizabeth I.

And Victoria’s reign marked, of course, the greatest extension of Britain (now with the Scots on board) as a world power. The map of the world was a mass of pink. (Interesting, but presumably a coincidence, that pink is now a colour so closely associated with girls.) When I was doing A Level history, the teacher suggested that 1901 (the year of Victoria’s death) marked the start of the decline of the British Empire.

Culturally, Victoria’s reign saw a flowering of the English novel. Such famous London landmarks as the Houses of Parliament and Tower Bridge date to Victoria’s reign… and so do a startlingly large number of houses (including the one in which I live). The huge number of Victorian houses in London seems to imply that London, as we know it today, was essentially a Victorian creation.

Of course both Elizabeth’s and Victoria’s reigns have their underbellies. When Maggie Thatcher used to bang on about restoring Victorian values, I thought: “including widespread child prostitution?” But Mrs Thatcher’s ill-considered words reflect a widespread rosy view of our queens’ reigns.

As you say: “Now if we could just fix that male primogeniture business…” And, I might add, extend some of the high regard to every bird, bint, bitch, chick, doll, female, girl, hysteric, infant, jade…