TV’S Victoria returns Was she the first woman to have it all?
As Victoria returns to our screens, its writer, Daisy Goodwin hails the first English woman to be both mother and Queen
On the face of it, as a woman who shudders at the thought of breastfeeding, beats her children when they disobey her, and who micro-manages every aspect of their lives into middle age, Queen Victoria would not be a poster girl for Mumsnet. Her attitude to motherhood would have her blackballed from the NCT. If she didn’t live in a palace, social workers would be circling.
But while Victoria definitely doesn’t conform to contemporary ideas of a good mother, I think modern women still have something to learn from the first English woman to be mother, wife and queen (Mary I and II couldn’t have children, all Anne’s children were dead when she came to the throne, and of course, Elizabeth was famously the Virgin Queen).
Victoria was the first woman to have it all: a big job, hunky husband, and nine children. But unlike pretty much every working mother alive today, myself included, she was not shrouded in guilt over what being the most powerful woman in the world was doing to her children. At a time when parenting has become a verb and motherhood has become almost an Olympic sport there is something hugely refreshing about a woman who found all infants ugly (“an ugly baby is a very nasty object – and the prettiest is frightful when undressed”) and who told her daughters when they got married: “Don’t spend your whole day in the nursery – it is the ruin of many a refined and intellectual young lady.”
For the young Victoria, her burgeoning nursery was a necessary evil: the inevitable result of an ecstatic sex life with Albert and complete ignorance of the principles of contraception (the Victorians believed that women, like dogs, were most fertile when on heat or menstruating, which we now know is the exact opposite of the truth).
The young queen was not happy when she discovered that she was
She’s the first woman to have it all: big job, hunky husband, nine children and no guilt
pregnant immediately after her marriage, and furious when she found she was pregnant again a month after the birth of her first child. As she wrote to her Uncle Leopold crossly: “I think, dearest Uncle, you cannot really wish me to be the ‘Mamma d’une nombreuse famille’, for I think you will see with me the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardship and inconvenience to myself; men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.”
She found the physical side of childbearing really unpleasant, calling it the schattenseite, the “shadow side” of her marriage. But even a queen could not escape the consequences of her desire for Albert. She had four children in the first five years of marriage, and five more after more respectable gaps, ending with the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857.
There is no doubt that Victoria’s life would have been immeasurably improved if she had known how to avoid pregnancy. Not only was it uncomfortable to be pregnant while wearing a corset, it was considered unseemly for visibly pregnant women to take part in social activities. This was irksome for Victoria, who loved parties, but was probably a relief to Albert, who didn’t.
After a birth, Victoria was “confined” for a month, wheeled everywhere in a bath chair. For a healthy young woman, who was also queen, this must have been torture. Before she could take up her duties again, Victoria had to go through a