Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor, Matriarch

Any woman can be Queen, eventually.

On September 8, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died an exemplary, no-fuss death at her ancestral castle in the Scottish highlands. One day she was cheerfully at her post, greeting the new prime minister in a plaid skirt and matching cardigan. The next day, she made her final public statement and cancelled her afternoon meeting. On the morning of the third day, her family rushed to her bedside, and, around teatime, she passed out of this world and into history.

A global outpouring of sorrow, respect, and affection followed. After days of ceremonial rites, her funeral was televised around the world. The media commentary on these events toggled between a big-picture drama about ‘the future of England’ and a juicier, more relatable drama about the Queen’s living descendants: four middle-aged children, eight adult grandchildren, and 12 young great-grand-children. Despite their inter-family squabbles and various personal failings, they all had genuine love and reverence for Elizabeth, not as a head of state but as Mummy and Gan-Gan.

England aside, she was the family’s matriarch: the embodiment of its memory and standards, a benefactor to its future and a tether to its past. All her descendants craved her guidance and approval. All of them knew she wasn’t perfect, made mistakes, had limitations—the same things everyone knows about their relatives—yet they all wanted to be worthy of her, not let her down. Her death at 96 was felt as a profound loss: They would not look upon her like again.

Where have all the matriarchs gone? A woman need not be crowned at Westminster Abbey to wield formidable “soft power” to shape attitudes, beliefs, and lives. Where are the white-haired women who have seen it all and, in the guise of puttering around the house, shine forth a living example of resilience, kindness, dignity, and common sense? Where are the grandmothers no one wants to let down, the old ladies who don’t mince words but—for your own good—speak hard truths?

In her 2021 essay, “Maiden, Mother, Matriarch,” Helen Roy writes:

Womanhood was once generally understood to wax and wane through three basic phases: maiden, mother, and matriarch. Each archetype points to the next, punctuated by rites of passage. The freshly debuted maiden becomes the bride, who gives birth and then, over the course of time and a thousand little sacrifices, earns her status as the root and regent of an extended ancestral line. The queen is the lifeblood of her family, and she enjoys the status she has earned.

In this more natural progression, duty increases while freedom narrows over time. . . . When the maiden becomes a mother, loss of innocence becomes new life. As a mother becomes a matriarch, the loss of physical beauty is leavened by the acquisition of wisdom. In the wake of a matriarch’s death, there remains a legacy, a guiding example for generations to come.

Speaking as a mother of teenagers, this sounds like a pretty good deal for all concerned. The bittersweet experience of watching my kids grow up is tempered by the hope they will produce little kids one day, and hand them over to me while they go about their busy lives.

Yet, living near grandparents is not something the professional class generally does. It seems more common among rural families with no great ambition, and immigrant families in which three generations share a house. The more years of education a married couple has between them, the more likely they are to settle a plane ride away from Grandma and pay childcare workers for the help she, historically, would have provided. At great effort, the children see her once or twice a year, and after a few days—just as feelings of closeness start to develop—the visit ends. Only low-status rednecks and foreigners have Grandma around to chat, advise, and prepare the same foods their parents loved. For children of the educated class, afternoons and summers with Grandma have been replaced by after-school coding class and Zoo Camp.

It’s all a bit bloodless—human societies have always had matriarchs—and on some level, today’s atomized families sense what they’re missing. On Downton Abbey, septuagenarian Lady Violet was everyone’s favorite character. Ramrod straight and possessed of a dry, acerbic wit, she cast a cool eye on the family’s shenanigans, and the entire clan functioned as her straight man. Yet, she always had their best interests at heart. “Granny” was the family’s standard bearer and hard realist, the person who understood the unspoken rules of their social stratum and human nature in general. When the Dowager Countess quipped that being wrong was an “unfamiliar sensation,” it was because she almost never was.

Occasionally, matriarchs show up in pop culture: In Disney’s Pocahontas, the heroine seeks advice from a wise old tree called Grandmother Willow. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Angelica Huston plays the family matriarch, who remains calm and resolute when her broke ex-husband and three dysfunctional adult children move back home.

These days, however, it’s more common to see grandmothers portrayed as independent free spirits, enjoying lives of luxury without a grubby child in sight. The trendy “coastal grandmother” aesthetic is based on films that celebrate a specific kind of older woman: wealthy, stylish, and unfettered. This type of hands-off grandma loves her pristine white sofas and thinks about getting back in the dating game. The idea is that, after years of “putting herself last,” she’s reached the finish line, where raising kids is someone else’s problem. At sixty-something, she’s re-achieved independence, newly freed up to focus on herself.

Yet, the endgame of being a rich, freewheeling old lady with chic interior design seems weird and fake. It’s ahistorical at best, misleading at worst. The Windsors, foreigners, and rednecks get it right. Matriarchs are real and deeply beneficial to their families, important to the last and lovingly remembered long after death.

It’s easier to be Queen than we think.

(Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)