Adrianne Chernock's stimulating study, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women, turns on a simple yet significant finding: Queen Victoria's notorious opposition to feminism was unknown in her lifetime. Only after her death was a letter of 1870 published in which she referred to women's rights as a “mad wicked folly” (1). With no one any the wiser about her own views, there was considerable scope across her reign for the queen to inspire rather than deflate arguments about women's enfranchisement. Drawing on an impressive range of evidence, Chernock recovers these conversations amongst women's suffrage supporters and their opponents about the lessons to be learned from female monarchy. Chernock superbly combines intellectual history and the history of popular culture with a nuanced grasp throughout of the ebb and flow of first wave feminism. At the center of her analysis are two anomalies. First, the peculiarity of the English (matters were slightly different in Scotland), who diverted from the Salic law of much of Western Europe whereby women could not inherit the crown. In England, queens reigned, and long before Victoria acceded to the throne in 1837, there had been several already, notably in the second half of the sixteenth century, and again in the early eighteenth century. Another queen seemed likely one hundred years later, as George III's only legitimate grandchild was a girl, Princess Charlotte. She died in childbirth in 1817, but eighteen months later, Victoria was born, and another female monarch became more of a certainty. A second anomaly followed, one that became a recurring motif for debates about empowering women. Why was it that although there was a woman on the throne, women in general were denied the franchise?

Actually, as Chernock reveals in her first chapter on the eighteenth-century background, the high tide of radical appropriation of female monarchy for democratic ends came long before the 1830s. Although Mary Wollstonecraft avoided the analogy, others pointed up the moral of female regents past and present—for example Matilda, Anne Boleyn, and Queen Caroline (the estranged wife of George IV)—as making as good a case for women's rights as any. So in the first half of her reign, Victoria was worked into “this developing feminist narrative” (41). Queen Victoria's status was invoked by Unitarians such as W. J. Fox, marriage law reformers (notably Caroline Norton), and the petitioners fronted by John Stuart Mill, who sought to replace the word “man” with “person” in the reform bill of 1867, the effect of which would have been to enfranchise around half-a-million women householders. Then, in some of the most original and innovative sections of the book, Chernock describes the pushback that followed: how political misogynists led the attack on “petticoat government,” arguing that while Victoria reigned, she did not in fact rule. Past queens such as Elizabeth I were shown to have been dependent on their male counselors, just as Victoria deferred to hers, initially to Lord Melbourne and then to Prince Albert, whose projection not only as the man behind the throne but also family patriarch owed much to contemporary attempts to redress the subversive implications of female rule. As Chernock argues convincingly, Walter Bagehot's famous depiction in The English Constitution (1867) of female monarchy as the “dignified” and “theatrical” part of the polity, while the cabinet was the locus of real or “efficient” power, was a subtle intervention on the side of the argument against women's suffrage.

The story does not end there, however. In the longest chapter of the book, Chernock charts the resurgence of suffragists claims on Queen Victoria during her jubilee years of 1887 and 1897. Millicent Fawcett led the way, pointing up the ways in which Victoria had proved both a wife and mother and the leader of the nation, emphasizing that domesticity did not automatically exclude political participation. Cashing in on the queen's popularity in this way, meant also signing up to imperial patriotism. Chernock shows that the expanded role enjoyed by the queen in a global setting—as empress of India and remote figurehead of the settlement colonies—was accepted as enhancing her exemplary status for campaigners for the vote. As she points out, there was another women's suffrage bill in the summer of 1897, at the height of the Diamond Jubilee fervor, and suffragists identified themselves as “women of the British empire” (176) in celebrating the royal birthday. More space might have been found here for including the contributions to the jubilees of female colonial subjects. Impressive memorials were sent to the queen from the women of Burma and Jamaica for example. To what extent were these embraced or even noticed by British women campaigners?

In its final chapter, The Right to Rule comes full circle, returning to the moment after Queen Victoria's death, when Theodore Martin, one of her confidants, revealed her criticism back in 1870 of Lady Kate Amberley's support for women's rights, a “mad wicked folly” (Queen Victoria was always toughest on aristocratic ladies who should know better). Once that cat was out of the bag, the stage was set for a battle over the queen's posthumous legacy as a female ruler. Anti-suffragists now had the proof they needed, whilst suffragettes celebrated the queen's deeds and not her words, remarkably finding room for her at the center of a “Woman Militant” banner of 1908.

This perceptive book places early British feminism in an unfamiliar context and unpacks some of the ways in which monarchy could be seen as both progressive and conservative. There is, of course, one further anomaly worth mentioning. Had Mill's amendment of 1867 been successful, then Queen Victoria, a widowed householder, would have been one of its beneficiaries. By convention, British queens do not take part in parliamentary elections, but in this instance this one might not only have reigned and ruled, but voted as well.