For any one born during or a little after the 1950s, that the monarch Of the United Kingdom is a woman is both commonplace and nothing strange, yet it was not always meant to be so. Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s longest reigning female monarch and its longest reigning one flat out – was at birth not meant to be the heir to the throne; her father, the Duke of York was the second born son, a spare and unlikely to inherit the throne. It was the fateful decision of her uncle, King Edward VII to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced woman which turned the Princess Elizabeth from favoured relative into Britain’s citizen number one, and made him perhaps one of history’s greatest accidental feminists. even though their match resulted in his exile and loss of the crown for himself and his heirs, the consequence of his actions had one incredibly powerful effect. It elevated the daughter of his brother, the then Princess Elizabeth to first in line to the throne – and gave Britain a female monarch, and until the birth of Queen Elizabeth’s children, a female heir presumptive, Princess Margaret– with an effect that was more evident in later years, when Britain entered its post-war era with the glamour of a young, female symbolic leader, who in the aftermath of the war, represented a promise of a new Elizabethan age in which culture and steady government would flourish; aside from the queen’s own position, it also brought to prominence the role of women in maintaining the monarchy to the fore, notably through the role of her mother Queen Elizabeth, whose later title of Queen Mother, with its echoes of other regions, notably Benin, gave a clear indication of her role in the set up – and though it can be overplayed, in the aftermath of the war it was probably much easier to portray Britain as the great imperial mother country with a female in the lead, rather than a man; in the past half-century or so since his death, the Edward Windsor has been remembered mostly for giving up his crown for love, yet, he could also be remembered as an accidentally prescient, proto-feminist dynast who gave Britain its first modern honorary chairperson.
The Jist: Short and sweet content 
