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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It's not a handwave - the article doesn't offer anything to handwave away. The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism.

I'm sure being a woman counted against her, bit if the article is going to put up a quote as evidence of sexism then it shouldn't be a passage that can be realistically adapted to any politician ever. If the article had a passage that says "we can't let this woman be king, she can't even own property!" that would be different. But the quote in the article doesn't sound ludicrous when applied to a man. It sounds like something that is routinely said of men in positions of power.

It could even keep the superficial gendering if you wanted it to, there is a lot of argument that men in positions of power should be exhibiting positive masculine bearing (stoicism, accountability, honour, etc, etc) that politicians routinely fail at to great public outcry.

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I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that.

My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence

Er… no it didn’t? It just said the criticism being based on her womanhood was evident because of <reason>, it never promised to prove it, it was just a rhetorical device and they expect the reader to know the information already.

If you want to learn more about early medieval attitudes to women and power in England, it’s on you to learn, not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.

> not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.

Yes but that is my point. They're making the article longer by including evidence that undermines its claims. They should have either made the claim and let it stand without evidence, or they should have aligned what they said to the evidence they felt was worth including.

If they're going to claim gendered criticism then hold up generic criticism as the best example of criticism it confuses the picture. Assuming that there was gendered criticism happening somewhere off to the side out of sight, was that the decisive criticism? Or was it the criticisms that the article writer felt were important enough to include in the article?

Because the impression the article is giving is that people weren't complaining about her gender, but the fact she was behaving arbitrarily and arrogantly. That is good reason not to put a man in charge too - if you see a man acting arbitrarily and arrogantly it is also a mistake to put him in charge of anything and he would be criticised for it. I do that all the time, there are a lot of unprincipled men in politics who should be called out for their hubris. And they are.

Now it may be that what she was doing wouldn't be considered arrogance and hubris in a man (we don't know exactly because the article is short) but "double standards" and "sound ludicrous if aimed at a man" are simply not true. We hold men to the same standard and make the same criticisms of them.

The substance of your objection is “these criticisms are regularly levelled at men today,” and you skip the part that 900 years have passed since they were levelled at Matilda. You then demand the article provide evidence to overcome this comparison you have been 12th century norms and 21st century norms? Really?

Let me repeat: this is not intended as a thesis. It’s a small historical tale to explain the background of a period of time in early mediaeval England. It assumes you know how women were viewed during that time period and the example provides flavour. If you want to contradict its claims, just post the articles that shows differently.

Evidence such as this quote?

> an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex

That is, the 'Gesta Stephani' is claiming that she should not be arrogant because it is not proper, because she is a woman.

That evidence?

That's not sexist though, it is just equivalent to noting she's a woman (like calling her "her" and "she") because we can reasonably offer the same criticism about a man. A man can have an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the controlled gait and bearing proper to the stronger sex. And adjusting for language drift people do make that sort of complaint of men, I remember one criticism of Biden being that he walked in a frail way and fell over a lot - literally complaints about his gait and bearing giving a bad impression. Not a very strong criticism but he was male and it was made.

We might reasonably infer that she got called arrogant for doing something that wouldn't be considered arrogance in a man, the article has unhelpfully elided that detail (maybe the original author did as well). But we've also got to admit she might have actually been unusually arrogant, that does happen from time to time. If I were in charge of a military I'd be standing around even more arrogant than I already am.

pjc50 offered a good example of something that was actually gendered - women not being able to own property in their own right for whatever unfair reason. The quote isn't that sort of out-and-obvious sexism. Said quote could almost be modern political whinging.

PS I'll add in an acknowledgement that words did mean different things back then so possibly at the time the only reasonable reading was with an "[as with all women]" on the end, but the fact is that as written this quote is making specific accusations of arrogance and arbitraryness that are not contained to either gender and are bad in all leaders, female or otherwise. He didn't write "women are all arrogant" or "women are all arbitrary". If anything the thrust of the quote is most women weren't either of those things. It doesn't support the idea of double standards or ludicrous criticism that would never be made of a man.

Ok, I suppose I understand but I really do not agree. Modern criticism of the US president is so far removed from medieval criticism of a female monarch as to be nearly irrelevant.

To address your question, though, yes I absolutely read "proper to the gentler sex" to be a statement about how Queen Mathilda _ought_ to have behaved. Also I have strong doubts that men (especially male rulers) at the time would have had the same standard set for arrogance. Of course a King could be in fact arrogant and then critics might point that out, but I do not see why they would bring his sex into it.

One thing we might agree on is that all political criticism can be false, and whether or not she was _actually_ arrogant is difficult to say. In the context of a bitter civil war, any record of events will have the strong bias of the author. The modern world did not invent fake news.

Arguing that a criticism focusing on her behaviour allegedly not being "proper to her sex" isn't gendered whilst handwaving away all the well established historical context about how women were treated to invent new context where she deserved everything she got is bold, I'll give you that...

Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.

Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.

I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.

So there were some texts later discussing the problems of Elizabeth I being Queen Regnant when all laws and customs referred to a “King.” We also see a lot of her father’s behaviour (Henry VIII) being driven by his need for a male heir. It’s why he tries to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

Further, there were specific reasons why Elizabeth I was treated differently to her father. For example, Henry VIII used to meet with counsellors when he woke up in the morning, still in bed. For obvious reasons, this was not done when his daughter reigned.

Not to mention the Privy Council, so named because they were trusted to speak to the King while he was on the toilet!

I don’t think the modern day Privy Council ever met with Elizabeth II in such a way!

I don't think that's why it's called a "Privy Council". Just because the only meaning for privy that you know, today, is a toilet, does not mean that the word in another context means toilet, any more than the fact you know the verb "do" in English can be slang for sexual intercourse means that when Marlo says "Do it or don't" in The Wire he means for his soldiers to have sex. He's indicating that he doesn't care whether they murder Bubbles.

"Privy" more generally means private or personal, which explains its use for a group which advises specifically the monarch alone.

I just checked and you’re right! I’m mixing it up with Groom of the Stool, which was a separate but also honourable position.

> According to the Oxford dictionary the definition of the word "privy" in Privy Council is an obsolete one meaning "Of or pertaining exclusively to a particular person or persons; one's own",[3] insofar as the council is personal to the sovereign.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_Council_of_England#Name

Yep, you’re right. I was mixing it up with Groom of the Stool.

Jadwiga of Poland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadwiga_of_Poland crowned as king

Anna Jagiellon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Jagiellon

I do think it’s fair to point out that both of these postage Matilda by a few hundred years. I’m actually struggling to think of many Christian European kingdoms that would have at this point.

France only had kings at that point (in fact, Matilda’s son Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Acquitaine comes about because she didn’t give the king of France a son!)

Germany (HRE) selected their emperor so didn’t have succession problems in that sense.

Italy was a collection of city states, Naples was yet to form a kingdom.

Maybe Poland had an earlier queen? But then I don’t know if English nobles paid much attention to Poland, to be honest!

No idea, but from this handy page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_monarchs

it seems like the rest of the world (India, China, Thailand, Egypt, ...) had female monarchs of various sorts ('queen regnant' seems like a relevant terminology here, I'm not sure).

The closest ones to Europe (discounting ancient Egypt?) might be:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85sa_Haraldsdottir_of_Agde... (semi-legendary)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinar_of_Hereti (11th C. Georgian)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica (of course, also other less-well known Britons)

Actually, there are a fair few Greek and Spanish examples. One other possible might be:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronilla_of_Aragon (12th C.)

> The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism.

Perhaps what you consider generic criticism was considered gendered criticism at the time?

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