Queen Elizabeth II’s stoic legacy

Queen Elizabeth II passed away on Thursday at age 96, and with her went perhaps the most enduring representation of female leadership that the world has ever known.

The heartfelt reaction to her death among the British citizens who gathered at Buckingham Palace and broke into a spontaneous chorus of “God Save the King,” as King Charles III now takes the throne, was a moment of poignance and earnestness on a public stage that no longer permits much of either.

The United Kingdom is likely to have kings on the throne for many years hence, as the new monarch’s eldest son, William, and his eldest grandson, George, are expected to succeed him. Around the world, however, the number of women who assume positions of leadership and responsibility in politics, medicine and business is likely to continue to grow in the post-Elizabethan era, just as they did throughout her reign.

Meanwhile, the late queen’s model of leadership – stoic, steady and strong – is in danger of dying along with her.

That would be tragic, for it is the only model of leadership that can, as Queen Elizabeth did for so many years, modernize old (and thus inevitably compromised, as everything human is compromised) institutions without desecrating and destroying them. Moreover, it is the model that is most effective for many female leaders.

For the 25-year-old Elizabeth being crowned in 1952, there were no tips for managing the insecurity that is now termed “imposter syndrome” and would become a de rigueur way for young women to process the experience of stepping into a demanding academic or professional role some 70 years later.

There would be no trendy cocktail of mental and physical maladies for the young queen to tally in an effort to underscore her worth even as they rendered her ostensibly incapable of performing daily functions. And there would be no assumption, on the part of anyone attending or advising the late queen, that a female leader’s lack of control over her own emotions could possibly betray anything other than exactly what the same lack of control would betray in a male leader: weakness.

It was a less forgiving time to be a woman in power. In an important way, though, it was also a more respectful, less patronizing one. No one assumed that Elizabeth would be any less capable of rising to the task, coping with its demands and maintaining her composure under utmost pressure than her father had been. She met these expectations, not by pretending to be a man (the late queen was quite fashionably feminine, in fact) but by embodying a stoic leadership persona that simply presumed her equality as a woman to be a given. And thus, it was.

In a culture that now fetishizes female victimization and emotionalism and relabels them empowerment (for example, in Disney’s recent “Turning Red” (2020), in which a pubescent girl’s emotions are so intense and uncontrollable that they balloon into a red panda, which she chooses to keep rather than restrain like the older women in her family do, signifying that she’s proud to be out of control), young women are infantilized.

This renders them (and, increasingly, their male counterparts as well) mentally and emotionally coddled, and thereby unprepared for the stresses that accompany increased responsibility.

The queen ascended to the throne long before she was ready, and long before she hoped to. Greatness was, as Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” has it, “thrust upon [her].” She rose to the occasion.

Greatness is also being thrust upon each of us (in more mundane ways, of course) if we care to answer the call. Can we rise to the occasion? Can we resuscitate the presumptive deference to hard work, loyalty and duty – above sentiment, virility and trivia – that Queen Elizabeth embodied, in a society where those virtues have suffered more than a surface wound over the past several years?

I don’t know, but it’s worth a try. God save us all if we don’t.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.