Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  With the coming of the Women’s Movement, such heroines naturally take on new guises. In The Dinner Party, for example, ‘Elizabeth R’, like ‘Boadaceia d. 62 AD’, constitutes a category: the first Elizabeth is described as ‘One of the greatest female rulers who ever lived, distinguished stateswoman and scholar.’ While not dissenting from the verdict, one cannot help wondering what Elizabetha Triumphans herself would have made of the all-female company, she who was accustomed to pikes being couched and ensigns lowered in devotion as she passed, ‘to she alone and none but only she’; to say nothing of her calculated boast of having the heart and stomach of a man. Boadicea, on the other hand, has come to symbolize a kind of female freedom and even sexual liberation.

  The discovery by the feminist poet Judy Grahn – to her own satisfaction – that the name Boadicea (in its original Boudica form) was the origin of the word ‘bulldike’, may stand as an extreme example of this.9 Grahn, in an article of 1980 entitled ‘The Queens of Bulldikery’, described how in years past the mystery of the word ‘bulldike’ had ‘burbled and thickened’ in her mind; deciding that it stemmed from Old English, she therefore searched for a historical people who once worshipped and valued bulls. From here to Boadicea (‘Bo’ means ‘cow’ in Irish while English friends assured her that ‘bull’ was pronounced ‘Boa’) and thence happily to Boudica, was a short leap of Grahn’s creative imagination.

  ‘Boudica was a barbarian and a Celt,’ wrote Grahn, ‘and her pudenda would have been active, unashamed, and radiating with female power all her life … Considering Celtic customs it would have been unnatural of Queen Boudica not to be a lesbian. She was, after all, a queen and a military leader of her people.’ With an even greater leap of the imagination, Grahn also drew attention to the large number of puns surrounding Boadicea’s name, such as the soldiers’ dikes which they made in AD 61, and her statue called ‘Boadicea on the Embankment’, embankment being a synonym for dike.

  Grahn however derided Dio Cassius’ description of the atrocities committed under Boadicea’s command – the laceration of the women’s breasts in particular – as being ‘too much like the typical patriarchal response to women warriors in general to be believed’. (This point of view, incidentally, provides Grahn with an ally in the shape of Milton, however unlikely the combination; he too dismissed such invented details by which historians hoped to ‘embellish’ their work.)10 The next leap is to transfer the word ‘bulldike’ to the United States: Grahn’s explanation lies in the slang of Newgate Prison, from which many indentured criminals proceeded westwards, a high percentage of them, according to Grahn, Celts, who remembered their ancestors as homosexual ‘as a matter of course’.

  It is too easy to dismiss all this as ludicrously unhistorical (which of course it is). For one might observe with truth that Grahn’s imaginative reconstruction is really no more ludicrous than some of the other theories which have been proposed about Boadicea in the past, including, famously, her ‘rich burial’ at Stonehenge, actually erected nearly two millennia before, but believed as an article of faith in the early seventeenth century. Nor is Grahn’s bold lesbian Celt, ‘radiating with female power all her life’, necessarily further away from the original than Purcell’s meekly apologetic late-seventeenth-century princess (‘My Fortune wound my Female Soul too high And lifted me above myself’).11

  Be that as it may, Grahn’s alluring but fantastical theory has its own importance: for it draws attention to the Warrior Queen, here epitomized by Boadicea, as a symbol of sexual freedom as well as female independence. At the same time, such an image looks back to the remote past. Grahn’s poem, written in 1972, ‘She Who’, acts as the epigraph of her article:

  I am the wall at the lip of the water

  I am the rock that refused to be battered

  I am the dyke in the matter, the other …

  and I have been many a wicked grandmother

  and I shall be many a wicked daughter …

  This is once again the language, proud, mystical and ferocious, of the Ptolemaic creed of Isis, invoked to adorn the image of Cleopatra: ‘I am she that rises in the Dog star, she who is called Goddess by women … I am the queen of war, I am the queen of the thunderbolt …’.12

  Liberated sexuality in general – not merely homosexuality – contributes to the modern image of the Warrior Queen. Boadicea: A Tragedy of War by Robert Reynolds, issued by the Poets Press in New York in 1941, has a heroine who is seldom mentioned without a reference to her heavy breasts ‘like pillows …’ and her frank sexual desires characteristic of Celtic women: ‘Yet she attracted the younger tribesmen. She was the eternal, fecund woman of their songs and stories, and their myths.’ Henry Treece’s heroine, in an English novel of 1958, Red Queen, White Queen, has not only Boadicea but her daughters (Gwynedd and Siara), all three of them plump and buxom and blonde, sleeping with whoever pleases them ‘in the old fashion’. In 1986 a British television programme on ‘Imaginary Women’ conducted by Marina Warner, showed Toyah Wilcox, twenty-five-year-old rock singer turned actress and film star, driving a chariot; her hair – an appropriate modern version of Dio’s ‘tawny’ – was a violent punk red.13 Toyah Wilcox, who had accepted the role of Boadicea – ‘a character I greatly admire’ – in a film the year before, now described her heroine as a ‘free liberated sexual woman’.

  Such a picture of a free-wheeling female rebel against patriarchal attitudes may seem in quaint contrast to the statuesque image inherited from late Victorian times, gravely maternal, deeply imperialist. Yet once again, as in the case of Grahn, the idea of the rebel, give or take her sexuality (the true nature of Boadicea’s sexuality is one of the many things about her which are likely to remain forever obscure), is, of the two, the more in keeping with the few known facts of Boadicea’s career.

  There is still a further element in the mythology of Boadicea which has ensured the survival of interest in her image into modern times. That is the emergence of the political female leader. At first sight an elected woman Prime Minister may seem to have little in common with a Warrior Queen of ancient or even more recent times. Yet there is still an equivocal relationship perceived to exist between women and force which can rise to a head whenever a woman is voted into power, or even (significantly in modern democracies) might be voted into power. This equivocal relationship brings the notion of Boadicea, or some other legendary Warrior Queen, into play once more.

  In the suffragette pageant of 1909, Prejudice had claimed force for Man alone, on the grounds that Woman traditionally cowered away from ‘the white glint’ of the sword; he also claimed force as ‘the last and ultimate judge’, effectively debarring timorous Woman from the exercise of power. Or in General de Gaulle’s nobler version of the same sentiment, quoted in Chapter One, force was described as watching over civilization and ruling empires, ‘the fighting spirit’ being an integral part of man’s inheritance. On the stage in 1909 Prejudice had been easily routed by the appearance of the defiant Boadicea, epitomizing Woman’s ability to handle any martial matter. But the reality was very different and remains so. The question of what Kleist in Penthesilea called ‘Fate’s iron tongue, the sword’ will not go away.14

  Can women, if voted into power, handle the great issues of war (and death) and peace? Are they not too tender, if not actually too timid? Female leaders of the second half of the twentieth century have conspicuously found themselves having to prove their credentials in this respect by one means or another, not only after election but during the process leading up to it. Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in the United States presidential election of 1984: the first woman to figure in such an outstanding position (and at the time of writing – 1988 – the year of the next round of presidential elections, the only one). Her account of her experiences campaigning, as related in My Story, published in 1986, makes illuminating reading. For it shows clearly that deep, primitive fears of women’s potential timidity or weakness lurked in certain quarters of h
er country. Nothing in the political development of women elsewhere or even in America’s own vigorous Women’s Movement had affected this.15

  Such fears were not exactly nursed in secret. In her confrontation on nationwide television with her opposite number, the sitting Republican Vice-President George Bush, on 11 October 1984, Geraldine Ferraro described herself facing ‘the final and inevitable question’. Thus Vice-President Bush: ‘Congresswoman Ferraro, you have had little or no experience in military matters and yet you might some day find yourself Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. How can you convince the American people and the potential enemy that you would know what to do to protect this nation’s security, and do you think in any way that the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?’ (This question was posed incidentally five years after Mrs Thatcher had become Prime Minister of Great Britain, hardly a good example of a woman of whom the Soviets had successfully taken advantage!)

  ‘I didn’t hesitate’, wrote Geraldine Ferraro. ‘ “Are you saying that I would have to have fought in a war in order to love peace?” I shot back …’. And she did of course assure the questioner of her confidence in her own ability to handle such a situation. But she admitted that it was a terribly important question ‘and I had thought a great deal about how to answer it’. George Bush for his part emphasized his own combat experience in the Second World War – for which Geraldine Ferraro, born in 1934, would of course have been too young, quite apart from her gender: ‘Yes, I did serve in combat, I was shot down when I was a young kid, scared to death. And all that … heightened my convictions about peace.’

  Marvin Kalb on Meet the Press put the question to Geraldine Ferraro in an even simpler form: ‘Are you strong enough to push the button?’ (Another legitimate question – to candidates of both sexes – might be: Are you strong enough not to push the button? But this was not posed.) Although Ferraro gave the obvious reply that she could do whatever was necessary for the protection of her country, privately she found it endlessly annoying to be presumed weak and indecisive just because she was a woman. There was a bigger underlying issue: if her candidacy was really being judged on the same level as a man’s, she would hardly be asked to answer questions like that. Nor indeed was this question asked of any other candidates, other than members of Congress who were religious ministers.

  But of course Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy – in the event unsuccessful since the election was won by the Republicans in a landslide – was not being judged on the same level as a man’s. And those elected female leaders who have emerged triumphant have needed to pull the mantle of the Warrior Queen about them, where appropriate, and use it to lend further mythic authority to the role of mere Prime Minister: sex has had to be made a subtle advantage, instead of a crude disadvantage.

  Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India on 24 January 1966 at the age of forty-eight. She was not in fact the first woman in the world to occupy the position: that honour had already gone to Mrs Gandhi’s contemporary, Sirimavo Bandaraneike of Sri Lanka, who was elected in July 1960. Interestingly enough, at their inception, the careers of both Mrs Gandhi and Mrs Bandaraneike indicate that the Appendage Syndrome common to so many Warrior Queens continued to operate under elective conditions as it had done under the hereditary system in the past. That is to say, although the London Evening News wrote concerning Mrs Bandaraneike of the need for a new word – ‘Presumably we shall have to call her a Stateswoman’ – the comment of the News Chronicle was considerably more apt: ‘Gentle widow heads for job as premier’.16

  For Mrs Bandaraneike, Rani-like, was the widow of the veteran Sri Lankan statesman Solomon W. R. D. Bandaraneike, eighteen years her senior, who had acted as premier for three and a half years before he was assassinated in 1959 by a Buddhist monk. An inconclusive political election the following March was followed by an invitation to Mrs Bandaraneike to head the government: ‘she was the symbol, the figurehead that was necessary; the spark to ignite the flame’, in the words of her biographer.17 (There is an obvious modern comparison to be made with Mrs Corazon Aquino, grieving widow of an assassinated opposition Filipino leader, whose symbolic presence heading a political party, at a time when her remarkable personal qualities were largely unknown, provided the spark to sweep away President Marcos in 1986.)

  As for Indira Gandhi, coming from a Kashmiri brahmin family, the only child of Pandit Nehru, she could in a sense be said to have been born to rule: a princess who inherited from her parent, as Matilda of Tuscany inherited from her father Boniface II, or Tamara of Georgia from Giorgi III. Prior to her election, Indira Gandhi, the shy child of a brilliant father, absent much of her childhood in prison, and of an uneducated mother of lower social standing, had indeed held only one political position: she had been President of the Congress Party in 1959, but resigned after less than a year in favour of her maternal duties. Indira Gandhi actually became Prime Minister when Lal Bahadour Shastri died suddenly in office of a heart attack. In this uneasy situation, it was a symbol of that same continuity which Queen Elizabeth I constantly sought to establish with references to her sire ‘Great Harry’, that the crowds in 1966 shouted not only ‘Indira ki jai!’ (Long live Indira!) but also ‘Jawaharlal ki jai!’ (Long live Nehru!).18

  Mrs Gandhi, the beneficiary of the Appendage Syndrome, quickly became part of another familiar syndrome – that of the Better-Man: in her first year of office, for example, she was described as ‘the only man in the cabinet of old women’. She also received much of the same ‘heroic’ treatment concerning her youth from her admiring biographers, as well as herself stressing such early heroic self-identifications in what was surely a calculated manner. An early girlhood identification with Joan of Arc for example is frequently mentioned even by her family, and confirmed by Mrs Gandhi herself in a letter to her lifelong friend Dorothy Norman: she was ‘a great heroine of mine … one of the first people I read about with enthusiasm’.19

  In other interviews, as with the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Mrs Gandhi underlined a tomboy past: she revealed that her very doll play had been militarily oriented: ‘I had many dolls. And I played with them, not necessarily seeing them as babies to feed. In fact I used them as men and women to perform insurrections, battles and so on.’ She told a would-be biographer that sometimes her dolls were arranged to perform a struggle between the Satyagrahis and the police, with the bridegroom doll playing the Satyagrahi leader, while the little Indira shouted slogans such as ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ Mrs Gandhi’s ‘male’ aggressive role was by her own account encouraged by her mother, who had resented the constrictions on her own life, as well as by her father: ‘I was brought up as a boy when I was small. I climbed trees, I ran and I never had any feeling of inferiority or weakness.’20

  It was politically adroit of Mrs Gandhi, faced with the problem of being a woman premier in a country which was 83 per cent Hindu, to hint at the honorary male in such statements about herself. Officially however she took a slightly different stance: ‘As Prime Minister, I am not a woman. I am a human being.’ (Although her confidence to Dorothy Norman – ‘I am in no sense a feminist but I believe in women being able to do everything’ – may have come nearer to representing her real feelings on this complicated subject.) Again she stated: ‘I do not regard myself as a woman but as a person with a job to do.’ Golda Meir’s version of this, incidentally, when asked how it felt to be a female Foreign Minister, was to crack back, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been a male Foreign Minister.’ A short biography of Mrs Gandhi ‘for young boys and girls’ by R. Sundara Raju, published in New Delhi in 1980, begins with the prophecy of a dying old man, Sarojini Naidu, at her birth that she would be the ‘Nightingale (the new soul) of India’. Later Indira Gandhi declared that ‘Being a woman has neither helped nor hindered me. During the struggle for independence, nobody was concerned about being beaten up or shot at or anything. Nobody said: “This is a woman and we won’t shoot.” It woul
d be unfair if, later on, this question were to crop up.’21

  Yet since inevitably it did crop up and would always do so, Mrs Gandhi also employed that other expedient of the Warrior Queen by which she made a virtue of necessity with wonderful dexterity. That is to say, she assumed the role, even the title, of ‘The Mother’, so deeply embedded in the Hindu consciousness, with the aura of those goddesses bright and dark, Durga and Kali, rulers of fertility and destruction, hovering about her. History, or folk memories of history as described in Chapter Sixteen with regard to the Rani of Jhansi, could be said to be on her side, to make of her in the minds of the less educated the last in a long line of queens and empresses, rather than the first woman Prime Minister. Moreover in 1966 Mrs Gandhi possessed to the simple mind the hopeful imperial quality of being the mother of sons – Rajiv Gandhi, later Prime Minister of India in his turn after his mother’s assassination in 1986, was twenty-two at the time. One remembers Isabella of Spain, bolstered up in authority by the birth of an heir during the civil war.

  It was however war – the successful Indian war against Pakistan of 1971 – which gave Mrs Gandhi her ultimate prestige and also her ultimate kind of deification, as Durga on the one hand, an imposing leader of her country on the other. Afterwards, as Dom Moraes wrote, ‘She had achieved the status of a myth. She was Joan [of Arc] without the inconvenience of prison, fire and cross.’22 It was not a war of Mrs Gandhi’s seeking (in fact it can be argued that the female premiers of the twentieth century, like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century queens regnant, have not been of their nature belligerent – merely determined to do their belligerent best in war when it comes – that is to say, to be as good as men if not better). Yet following the first Pakistani air raids against India in December 1971, no one could ever again ask, in India at least: how will this woman react in a crisis? Will she be too timid, or if not too timid, too tender?