United Kingdom: No more sexism in the monarchy

“Girl power has finally reached the royal court,” said The Mirror in an editorial. At a summit of the 16 nations of the British Commonwealth in Australia last week, heads of government abolished the principle of male primogeniture. From now on, a woman can succeed to the throne even if she has a younger brother. That means, in practice, that the eldest child of Wills and Kate will one day rule, no matter its gender. This “constitutional earthquake” is, of course, long overdue. And the queen supports it, said James Lyons, also in The Mirror. At the summit, she spoke of female potential as something “that is yet to be fully unlocked,” and encouraged her subjects to “find ways to allow all girls and women to play their full part.” The nations also struck a blow for religious tolerance, repealing the law that bans the monarch from marrying a Catholic.

Just imagine how different history would be if this change had come earlier, said Giles Hattersley in The Times. The 1701 Act of Settlement forbade a first-born girl to claim the throne if she had a younger brother, and prevented any Catholic from becoming monarch. Had that act never been passed, the royal line would have eventually “traveled through the Italian houses of Savoy and Este as well as the German house of Wittelsbach.” Our current monarch would be Franz, Duke of Bavaria, a 78-year-old German bachelor, while his distant cousin, our own Elizabeth II, would be living out her days as a German princess at her “modest pile near Hanover.” If male primogeniture had been abolished a bit later and Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter had claimed the British throne, her son Kaiser Wilhelm II would have become king of England, creating an Anglo-German empire that would have “prevented the first world war” and “perhaps even the second.”

Far be it from us to argue against female succession, said The Telegraph, but why now? The current queen has been an unqualified success as monarch, and she approves of the change. “Yet tinkering with the constitution is never as predictable or easy as one thinks.” Recall the flap over trying to reform the House of Lords a few years ago, which generated countless hours of debate but no consensus. It’s not as if the country has been clamoring for new laws of succession. In fact, “the cynical may argue” that the timing of the change is politically convenient for Prime Minister David Cameron. He is “known to be worried by what focus groups have told him about his appeal to women voters.”

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Even so, “it’s a decision no one is likely to oppose,” said Matthew Denison in the Express. If you stack up our four queens—Elizabeth, Anne, Victoria, and Elizabeth II—against the dozens of kings, the women come out ahead. The reign of Elizabeth I was a golden age of Shakespearean drama and saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Anne beat the French and united England with Scotland and Wales. Victoria reigned over the British Empire at its highest point. “Royal history gives a resounding thumbs-up to the idea of a queen as reigning monarch.”