A curious thought about feminism, women, and police states:
One of my fundamental beliefs about human nature and the genders is that women, in the right circumstances, can be just as brutal and vicious in power as men can be.
The way politics has been structured, they have merely been denied the opportunity. Women have, as a rule, been completely excluded from meaningful power, and this has only changed slowly and gradually. However there have been instances of women exercising an autocratic power and showing that they are, in actual fact, just as capable of running the institutions of state thus as men.
The most famous examples are of course Maria Theresa and the Russian Tsarinas Elizabeth and Catherine the Great. These three women, in fact, could be argued to have prolonged the Ancien Regime and even consolidated it relative to its then-challenges. Yet these three women are almost never mentioned as models for feminists in any sense, or even as examples of women who successfully bucked and took over the system, even when their actual real-world careers would make damn good films if anyone ever bothered to actually make them. These women were master-autocrats, and they rivaled anything done by the Sun King, to the point that they actually in the case of Maria Theresa provided one of the only instances where a particular dynasty won any wars at all and under Catherine the golden age of a society that rather lacked them. And of course in the repression sweepstakes Catherine I invented the Potemkin Village later updated by the Soviets for gullible Westerners, while Catherine repressed the Pugachev Rebellion with cruelty that rivaled anything done by any of the Tsars or the Soviet dictators, for that matter.
If I were to be uncharitable, I would in fact state that a lot of the later institutions of the police state in Russia can be seen most clearly in the reign of Catherine. Starting with the tendency to a sequence of aggressive wars of annexation, wholesale slaughter as a means of repression, and cronyism in high office. Add in military parade fever, reliance on agencies of repression to strengthen rule at home, and cynical embrace of fads in so-called "civilized" society to sucker the gullible and you've pretty much got it in embryo before it's even, theoretically, supposed to exist. Add in finally the whole "power gained by coup d'etat" and she's one of the first classical rulers of a police state ala Francia, Solano Lopez, Porofirio Diaz, Jiang Jieshi, and so on.
In more modern times there is of course Indira Gandhi, whose role as dictator was one of her more famous legacies. Gandhi's brutality is what rather strongly contributed to her assassination, while Benazir Bhutto had more than hint of the dictator about herself as well. Ghandi and Bhutto to me illustrate the point that as women gain more of a role in politics, including in regions like the Middle East where democracy is on.....tenuous....at best grounds to spread that women might well start having the opportunity to do things like how men have tended to be the ones to do them. So, the first point is that if women's political involvement and feminism succeeds there will be more Indira Ghandis in the future.
The second is the curious to me exception in feminism where in talking about powerful women one sees a conspicuous absence of those figures of the Ancien Regime. It would seem to me in particular that Catherine the Great would deserve an entry, if for nothing else Magnificent Bastardy and being a Liberated Woman in an un-liberated time. So why is it that feminism at least as far as I've read about it, tends to neglect those women in general, given how few powerful women actually get any mention at all? It would seem to me those women would offer an interesting look, if in nothing else, at how women's roles in politics have shifted from the age of Theresa and Catherine to the age of Thatcher and Asma Al-Assad.
The way politics has been structured, they have merely been denied the opportunity. Women have, as a rule, been completely excluded from meaningful power, and this has only changed slowly and gradually. However there have been instances of women exercising an autocratic power and showing that they are, in actual fact, just as capable of running the institutions of state thus as men.
The most famous examples are of course Maria Theresa and the Russian Tsarinas Elizabeth and Catherine the Great. These three women, in fact, could be argued to have prolonged the Ancien Regime and even consolidated it relative to its then-challenges. Yet these three women are almost never mentioned as models for feminists in any sense, or even as examples of women who successfully bucked and took over the system, even when their actual real-world careers would make damn good films if anyone ever bothered to actually make them. These women were master-autocrats, and they rivaled anything done by the Sun King, to the point that they actually in the case of Maria Theresa provided one of the only instances where a particular dynasty won any wars at all and under Catherine the golden age of a society that rather lacked them. And of course in the repression sweepstakes Catherine I invented the Potemkin Village later updated by the Soviets for gullible Westerners, while Catherine repressed the Pugachev Rebellion with cruelty that rivaled anything done by any of the Tsars or the Soviet dictators, for that matter.
If I were to be uncharitable, I would in fact state that a lot of the later institutions of the police state in Russia can be seen most clearly in the reign of Catherine. Starting with the tendency to a sequence of aggressive wars of annexation, wholesale slaughter as a means of repression, and cronyism in high office. Add in military parade fever, reliance on agencies of repression to strengthen rule at home, and cynical embrace of fads in so-called "civilized" society to sucker the gullible and you've pretty much got it in embryo before it's even, theoretically, supposed to exist. Add in finally the whole "power gained by coup d'etat" and she's one of the first classical rulers of a police state ala Francia, Solano Lopez, Porofirio Diaz, Jiang Jieshi, and so on.
In more modern times there is of course Indira Gandhi, whose role as dictator was one of her more famous legacies. Gandhi's brutality is what rather strongly contributed to her assassination, while Benazir Bhutto had more than hint of the dictator about herself as well. Ghandi and Bhutto to me illustrate the point that as women gain more of a role in politics, including in regions like the Middle East where democracy is on.....tenuous....at best grounds to spread that women might well start having the opportunity to do things like how men have tended to be the ones to do them. So, the first point is that if women's political involvement and feminism succeeds there will be more Indira Ghandis in the future.
The second is the curious to me exception in feminism where in talking about powerful women one sees a conspicuous absence of those figures of the Ancien Regime. It would seem to me in particular that Catherine the Great would deserve an entry, if for nothing else Magnificent Bastardy and being a Liberated Woman in an un-liberated time. So why is it that feminism at least as far as I've read about it, tends to neglect those women in general, given how few powerful women actually get any mention at all? It would seem to me those women would offer an interesting look, if in nothing else, at how women's roles in politics have shifted from the age of Theresa and Catherine to the age of Thatcher and Asma Al-Assad.