Queen Elizabeth II died at the age of 96, having been ill but not disabled, having lived to see her great-grandchildren, having been Queen for as long as people used to believe they were supposed to be alive.
Do all blogs have to mention these facts? Is it even appropriate that they do? I'm not even one-quarter English; Mother's English ancestor came to the Carolina coast in the early seventeenth century, and during the intervening years his descendants married Irish, French, and German Americans. I never lived in England. I never saw the Queen. My husband, who was born a British subject and had spent a little time in England, and his brother, who lived there for several years, were anti-monarchists. Blogging about Britain's loss of their Queen feels a bit like trespassing at a funeral.
Then, of course, somebody had to repost the recording of the British crowd waving little American flags as "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played at Buckingham Palace. Right. That crowd ought to understand.
In a remote way it did mean something to me, probably to all the women who were little girls in the 1960s and 1970s, that Britain had a Queen Regnant and Prince Consort. There were people, back then, whose mission was to discourage little girls in order to give little boys better chances at jobs and scholarships. Those people wanted little girls to imagine that there was just something proper, something feminine, about backing down and slacking off and being frivolous and making sure always to come in second so that someone male could come in first. Men were supposed to make the decisions and women were supposed to cheer for the men...Er. Um. Except that the United Kingdom had a Queen, a wise mother figure who knew when each of the Empire's daughter nations had grown up and waved and smiled and conceded independence to those nations. Long ago in the bad old days when England had Kings, our ancestors had to fight a war to get ourselves recognized as a separate country, but now the United Kingdom had a Queen who was letting the other former colonies be as free as they wanted to be.
Of course the decision to do that had not been made by the Queen entirely and alone. When I look back on the mania for all things British in the American pop culture of my childhood, what stands out is that Britain had lost a lot of money in the war. Buying everything they shipped out was a way to show support, so we bought all those books and songs about people who were actually poor, but in such a, well, classy way. Heating bedrooms only with a hot-water bottle or a hot brick, making meals of tea with jam and bread, not putting ice in drinks, walking or bicycling instead of driving, not being "on the phone" or having "all the mod. con.," sounded like good things when the British did them. Americans who made that sort of frugal choices tended, in the 1960s, to awfulize them and suggest that "having to" do without every fad anybody was selling was the sort of trauma that forced people to turn to lives of crime. Despite the old stereotype of Britain having been divided into a class of decadent insensitive rich people and a class of miserable malnourished poor people, in my youth Britain was giving the world a powerfully inspiring message of liberation for the less wealthy. My parents weren't rich so, although Dad had no English ancestry at all, they encouraged us to revel in aristocratic English-style frugality and look down on extravagance.
Part of this aristocratic frugality was, of course, having a Queen, who had been pretty as a fairy-tale princess, who had Crown Jewels and royal robes for a few ceremonial occasions, but who was setting a fashion for sensible, practical clothes. Her skirts weren't impractically long or short, her clothes weren't fussy or frilly, her look didn't change much from year to year. She'd been a Girl Guide. She'd been a tough, practical, thoroughly modern princess, a role model for all little girls. She usually wore things that were suitable for work because, as a princess, she did work.
The other countries that had been colonies were, of course, getting their independence so easily because Britain couldn't afford any more wars. Still, if the British Empire had still been governed by greedy, arrogant people, heavier taxes and more blatant exploitation of the colonies might have seemed like a more prudent option than just celebrating their independence. The wormier sort of people asked publicly why they should even be polite about the passing of "a symbol of colonialism." That might have been a reasonable question to ask at King George's funeral, but how the Queen, so often seen giving her blessings on newly independent nations, got to be a symbol of colonialism is unclear to me. In fact, as the Queen reached middle age, the world was hearing a good deal about "Mother England" and "her daughter" countries, and the Queen didn't make a bad symbol of the prudent mother who sends her teenaged children out into the world with real, unselfish concern for their well-being.
By the 1980s the British economy was, if not as robust as people wanted, at least on its own feet, and other ethnic groups demanded their turn to dominate pop culture in the U.S. In the U.K. the Queen paved the way for other women to be elected to positions of official power, showing the world even more abundantly that the nation's best years of peace and prosperity have come during the long reigns of its Queens.
The world became accustomed to Britain's having a Queen. Our expectations of what it means to grow up as a man or a woman changed during, and partly as a result of, her reign. Without denying that nearly all people are born with one kind of anatomy or the other and are likely to be happiest when they follow their anatomical destiny, we let our idea of women's anatomical destiny mature; we accepted that being "feminine" eventually ceases to mean being a pretty girl and comes to mean being a wise, responsible, authoritative grandmother. The top military leaders of the world will probably always be men, even if humankind learns to wage its wars through trade or at least technology. The best way to lead a nation or an organization may not be through war, or even based on the methods people learn in war. The best leaders in times of peace may be women--mature, gracious women who know when and how to back away and let other people do things for themselves.
Britain has laid down "the White Man's Burden" of appropriating his neighbors' wealth and accepted, instead, the "burden" of leading the world in actual achievements. In theory a man, or men, could have presided over this historic change. We are about to see how well a man who's been trained for the role for seventy years can perform it. Meanwhile, women around the world may give thanks that we've seen how well world leadership can be done by a woman.
So it's appropriate that the rest of the world join the British in honoring the passing of Qieen Elizabeth II, and in praying that King Charles III and his son will be worthy heirs.
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