alt Hacker NewsNo, the gender role stuff is absolutely critical and you can't just handwave it away. Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
In particular, the belief that a married woman had no agency separate from her husband, who would then be de facto king, continued all the way up to Elisabeth II. Much reduced and not ultimately a problem, but it was still discussed at the time of her coronation.
What is more interesting in all this is the reminder of the succession crisis. Monarchy is "supposed to" reduce chaotic power struggles like this by making it unambiguous, but quite often the English succession was disputed or passed down through a second degree relationship.
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> Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
This predates married women losing the right to control their own property https://lawandhistoryreview.org/article/married-womens-prope...
More importantly: a king was expected to embody the traits a queen was hammered for.
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.