Women & Public Policy Prgm: From ‘Right to Rule’ to ‘Right to Reign’? The Problem of Female Monarchy in Victorian Britain

Date: 

Thursday, October 6, 2016, 11:40am to 1:00pm

Location: 

WAPPP Cason Seminar Room, Taubman 102, Harvard Kennedy School, Eliot Street, Cambridge, MA

Arianne Chernock, Associate Professor Department of History, Boston University

Historians have long suspected that Queen Victoria’s gender played a role in the rise of constitutional (e.g. ceremonial) monarchy in 19th-century Britain. But what was the nature of this role? In this seminar, Arianne Chernock takes on this question through an archival-based approach by exploring Victoria’s centrality to the early women’s rights movement in Britain – especially in inspiring women to demand the right to vote. Chernock argues that recognizing Victoria’s role in the women’s rights movement allows us to see the shift towards a more restricted Crown as an attempt to contain radical thinking about women, agency, and power to create a more democratic and transparent British state.