What are we to make of the women who have figured so prominently on the Right of British politics over the past several years? Do they shock us – me, at any rate – because they seem so unwomanly?
Women are supposed to be the ‘softer’ sex, kinder than men, and put on earth to compensate for the latters’ grossness. ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman.’ That’s King Lear, holding in his arms the body of Cordelia, his dead daughter, whom he had banished from his kingdom in Act 1 because she had refused to flatter him. I have to say that this has long been my own ideal of womankind, undoubtedly sexist though it is, and sometimes contradicted by my own experience.
And it’s also contradicted in the play by Lear’s experiences in Acts 2-4, when his two other daughters – Goneril and Regan – turn out to be the very opposite of ‘soft, gentle, and low’. (Also of course Lady Macbeth in the Scottish play; and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.) Shakespeare knew about evil women, and seems to have thought there was something ‘unnatural’ about them. Which is how I – with my old-fashioned gender conditioning – feel about Margaret Thatcher, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. Vile women all of them; and all the more vile because of their sex.
Obviously there are monsters among Tory men, too; and leading female Labour, Lib-Dem and Green politicians who aren’t or weren’t monsters at all. My great hero Barbara Castle was one of them; Rachel Reeves may turn out to be another. (Also, over the Pond, Kemala Harris.) So it’s obviously not their gender per se that makes Braverman et al monstrous.
Unless it’s their position as women in a male-dominated society. It was always said of Thatcher that she felt she had to adopt a hyper-masculinist persona – deepening her voice, for example – in order to be taken seriously; or, as one of her ministers put it at the time, as ‘the only member of her [all-male] cabinet with balls’. All these villains will have been subjected to condescension or worse early in their careers; two of them – Braverman and Patel – also on grounds of their ‘race’ (they’re both the daughters of immigrants); and Thatcher because of her original ‘class’. This could have toughened them for the unfair wars they would need to wage against the white, privileged, upper-class men who comprised the Conservative Party they were trying to gain a foothold in, and sharpened their political philosophies.
That I think is normal. It affects lower-class men too. (Look at 30p-Lee Anderson.) The most reactionary Fellow of my Cambridge college years ago was a man who was several classes beneath the majority of them (except me); using his Right-wingery, I felt, in order to establish his right to hob-nob with the toffs. Maybe that’s happening with our present-day Gonerils.
On the other hand it might not have anything at all to do, even indirectly, with their gender or origins; but be merely the result, in all these cases, of rational independent thought. The fact that they shock me more than men holding the same views probably says more about my own conditioning and prejudices. Why shouldn’t the fairer sex – as I used to regard them – have its share of proto-Fascists too? After all, the first ever leader of an overtly British Fascist party in the 1920s was a woman. (Look her up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotha_Lintorn-Orman. Is it my prejudice that makes me think she looked a bit butch?)
Porter’s Pensées 
As you know, there is a substantial literature on imperial feminism. I think it caused a mild stir when it first came out as it challenged the view that women were essentially more pacific than men. Oddly this ‘essentially pacific’ view was held, not only by some feminists in the 1970s, but also by some imperialist anti-suffrage men like Cromer and Curzon in the 1900s. Many imperial feminists were not on the political right, let alone the radical right, since imperialism could be found across the political spectrum.
Women have actually suffered in the past from the view that they were naturally inclined to political conservativism; in the eyes of some Edwardian Liberals in the UK, I believe, and certainly in Spain. At the birth of the Second Republic even some left-of-centre feminists like Victoria Kent believed that the vote should be withheld from women as they were supposedly too prone to domination by the clergy. Thankfully Clara Campoamor disagreed in a brilliant speech and secured women the vote.
Fascism historically was pro-natalist and tried to relegate women to the private sphere. This is a key dilemma for the far right today. JD Vance’s excavated comments from a few years ago suggest a hint of the Handmaid’s Tale, but outside very conservative Christian circles such views look like a vote loser. Few European countries are that conservative: Giorgia Meloni is divorced, and far right parties in both France and Germany are led by women. While “great replacement theory” nutters might be pro-natalist, I think the radical right prefers to style itself more moderately as pro-family and indeed highlights female emancipation as one element of its anti-Islamic discourse.
Cas Mudde distinguishes between the extreme right and the radical right, the former being anti-parliamentary democracy and overtly authoritarian, the latter being highly illiberal democrats. I guess presently Reform UK would be classed as “radical right”. Of course, it’s a slippery slope.
Given the allocation of female roles in Shakespeare’s day, perhaps it’s not so surprising that Cordelia had a low voice…
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