Historian Williams examines the role of sexism in a thorough look at 3,000 years of female rulers whose power, she writes, is often \u201cerased, compromised and twisted by words and images.\u201d Royal women are either \u201cfeted beyond measure as warrior queens, saints or fairy princesses or castigated as monsters, sexual obsessives, feminine failures.\u201d Williams considers dozens of reigns, discerning a common, demeaning conclusion drawn about female monarchs across continents and centuries: \u201cThey must be sleeping with any male advisor or supporter. For why else would a man assist or support a woman?\u201d Over time, she argues, queens have often come to be known for the \u201cworst or most lurid thing that one satirist or critic on the enemy side says about them\u201d\u2014whether it\u2019s that Cleopatra was a \u201csex-mad failure\u201d or that Catherine the Great \u201chad sex with a horse.\u201d It\u2019s not just these familiar names that have come under fire from male historians, the author notes. She examines the assorted histories of lesser-known female royals from around the world, including Ranavalonas I of Madagascar, called \u201cthe female Caligula,\u201d and Queen Lili\u2018uokalani of Hawaii, who, denied pen and paper in prison but allowed the more feminine tools of needle and thread, wove her narrative into a quilt now housed in a museum. \u201cIt is not just about sexism,\u201d Williams writes. \u201cQueens are written about more harshly than other women; in the end queens are attacked with words and pictures to try to seize their power.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Historian Williams examines the role of sexism in a thorough look at 3,000 years of female rulers whose power, she writes, is often \u201cerased, compromised and twisted by words and images.\u201d Royal women are either \u201cfeted beyond measure as warrior queens, saints or fairy princesses or castigated as monsters, sexual obsessives, feminine failures.\u201d Williams considers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}