‘Effeminate Dayes’
Banks, Carol & Holderness, Graham
Early Modern Culture, No. 1 (2000)
Abstract
Whilst acknowledging that these accounts, or primary historical sources, are observations and possible generalisations from a male perspective, and that many Elizabethan women may have provided an alternative appraisal, it cannot be denied that in the 1590s a woman had successfully governed England for more than forty years, a lifetime by contemporary standards; most English men and women at this time would therefore have known none other than female rule. This situation did not occur again until the second half of the nineteenth century when, significantly, the first official step towards female suffrage was made by the philosopher and politician — John Stuart Mill — who proposed the motion for women’s right to vote in 1867, thirty years after Queen Victoria had ascended to the English throne. Of course the situation is similarly repeated in our own time, not least between 1979 and 1990, a decade in which feminism reached its peak, when, in addition to a female monarch — Elizabeth II — England also had a female Prime Minister — Margaret Thatcher.
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