Reasons Why I'm in Love with England: #23 Linda Colley

She's just fabulous. No explanation needed.

But I guess I'll explain anyway. Here are a few quotes from her book Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837:

“By assisting the war effort, women demonstrated—in a highly acceptable fashion—that their concerns were by no means confined to the domestic sphere. Under cover of a patriotism that was often genuine and profound, they carved out for themselves a real if precarious place in the public sphere.”

“Men could be Britons, or Scotsmen, or Irishmen, or Englishmen. But women, according to this view of things, were not to be described in terms of such public allegiances. They were ladies, who were to be characterized only according to their private relationships with men. And they were vulnerable.”

“Women who had been worn out by repeated childbirths, who knew the peculiar burden of coping with a large and discordant family could see in Queen Charlotte’s life their own idealized. Young girls who had quarreled with their parents or striven to marry the man of their choice could and did identify with Princess Charlotte. Her death in childbirth horrified, fascinated, but may have also comforted young wives who feared, quite legitimately, the same fate.”

“The remarkable prominence of the female component of the British Royal Family from the end of the eighteenth century right down to the present day, a prominence that has coincided with a gradual decline in church attendance, can be seen in part as a kind of substitute religion, a strictly Protestant version of the cult of the Virgin.”

“Princess Charlotte, like Queen Charlotte, like Queen Caroline, and like the future Queen Victoria, supplied British women with a focus for their patriotism that was peculiarly their own. But, in addition, monarchy as soap opera made (and arguably still makes) the wrongs and rites of passage of ordinary women’s lives seem important and valuable in a way that no other aspect of British political life could or can do, run exclusively by men as it was then, and as it still largely is today.”

“There seems no doubt that, insofar as the position of women changed in Britain in the half-century after the American war, the effect was to increase—rather than diminish—their opportunities for participating in public life. The wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France tempted much greater numbers of female Britons out of the home and into pro-war activism (and into pacifist agitation, too) than any previous conflict.”

“If British women were being urged to remain at home more stridently in this period than ever before, it was largely because so many of them were finding an increasing amount to do outside the home. The literature of separate spheres was more didactic than descriptive.”

“The significant point, however, is that for both sexes, the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century saw a sharper rate of change at home, massive and demanding wars abroad and the challenge of new forms of patriotism. This was the period in which women first had to come to terms with the demands and meanings of Britishness.”

Plus: look at her! She's adorable!