QUEEN MARY

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6867, 23 March 1929, Page 18 (Supplement)

QUEEN MARY

i Her Remarkable Role

The position of the Queen *s one of the Counsellors of State who are functioning for the King during his illness ia remarkable. But not the least remarkable point about it is that the King’s subjects take it for granted, writes Dr. J. M. Bulloch in a London magazine. Yet such an arrangement would be quite impossible in the United States, or, for that matter, in any republic. Nowhere is the President’s wife a Presidontess as an Emperor’s is an Empress or a King’s a Queen. But the position is all the more remarkable in America, for in the States woman seems to occupy a larger place in the public eye. She does not, however, count at White House or in the high affairs of State. Some American women are keenly conscious of the fact, and one of them, Mrs. Kate Trimble Woolsey, five-and-twenty years ago, wrote a very resentful book about it under the title of “Republics versus Woman,” contrasting the treatment accorded to women in aristocracies with that out to her in democracies.. The contrast seems a sheer contradiction. And yet Mrs. Woolsey was able to put up a very good case for her contention, which holds good even if American women —though not French have received the vote. She laid it down that Republicanism is “in its entire nature and construction a masculine monopoly and must necessarily confer all its pinnacles, authorities, powers, honours, glories, favours, exclusively upon men. It is woman’s implacable foe.” A striking illustration eomes home to myself, for I happened to be in New York in 1899 when the town went mad over a triumphal procession, very beautifully arranged, in honour of Admiral gallant admiral afterwards laid the house which his grateful country had presented to him, at the feet of the lady he had just married. It was a courtly gesture, but America resent-

. ed it, and from that day Dewey became a cipher. Then I remember that when Queen Maud of Norway, on returning home from France in May, 1907, sent a wire thanking President Falliercs and his wife for their hospitality, every French newspaper commenting on the inclusion of the name of the lady, for never before had a ’smf® been mentioned in any kind of what may be called a State document. It is true that M. Poincare altered this, for, when President, ho appeared at functions accompanied by his wife—he once brought her to Buckingham palace—whereas till that time the President’s consort had been entirely a private individual. King Edward used to aay that England had never been 1 greater than under Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, and Mrs. Woolsey, blazing with anger at the position of her sex, ransacked history for proofs of her contention, citing Deborah, Semiramis, Zenobia—-she-forgot Cleopatra —Isabella of Castile, Queen Bess, Catherine tho Great, Maria Theresa and Victoria. She also declared—perhaps it is still true—that “the personal or individual face of no American woman has even been upon the bills or upon the coins of the Republic, but only those of men, men, men.” If she had been better acquainted with our customs she could have found other corroborations, one of the most striking of which is usually forgotten by ourselves —namely, that tho precedence of a British peer ’3 daughters eomes immediately after that of their first-born brother and in front of their younger brothers. This is brought out in the case of the families of earls where the daughters are called 'Lady,’ while the younger sons are only ‘Hon.' Thus it is quite in the order of our mode of life that Queen Mary should hold so high a place 05 one of tho King’s deputies. Perhaps that is why Americans, and especially American women, are so interested in everything touching King George’s illness.