Princess Mary proves Meghan Markle wrong
Meghan Markle has been proved wrong by Princess Mary without her even needing to say one word.
COMMENT
In late February 2018, Meghan Markle, royal fiance and former Toronto renter, sat on a stage in London and set out her stall. Feminism, only 110 short years since British women had achieved universal suffrage and the right to wear a nice pair of wool slacks, had arrived at the Buckingham Palace gates.
“Women don’t need to find a voice,” she told the audience. “They have a voice. They need to feel empowered to use it, and people need to be encouraged to listen.”
Fast forward to January 2020, when Meghan, now the Duchess of Sussex, and her husband Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex exited the royal stage in a fug of thwarted ambitions and twitchy resentment. One of the many supposed takeaways: That feminism was incompatible with monarchy. That the duchess’ platform of empowerment speak and banana-annotating was too brave, too modern and too forward-thinking for an institution that still has a Warden of the Swans on the books.
It’s an argument that holds water- only until you glance across the North Sea and spy
Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, Australia’s proudest Scandi export and soon-to-be Queen.
See, Our Mary, for years now, has been busy fundamentally proving that particular Meghan thesis wrong.
This week, with her mother-in-law Queen Margrethe shocking the sensible pants off Danes by announcing she is set to abdicate later this month to make way for Crown Prince Frederik, there has been feverish and renewed attention directed at the couple, much of it focused on Fred’s recent eyebrow-raising Madrid getaway.
And sure, we all know the main plot points of the Mary mythic storyline, from Cupid’s arrow improbably hitting the heir to one of the world’s oldest monarchies in a Sydney watering hole to a soundtrack of Aqua, to the teary crescendo emotional inside the Copenhagen cathedral. It’s all a situation that legally requires writers to use ‘fairytale’ as an adjective at least once per story.
Except most people don’t know what Mary has really been up to these two decades.
It’s eye-opening and pretty wild stuff.
Stuff like that a whole lot of money was donated to the couple in lieu of wedding gifts, cash that the new crown princess used to start the Mary Foundation with domestic violence as one of the outfit’s core focuses. (“People don’t think of [domestic violence] in Denmark. We are trying to remind people and to help,” she said in an interview in 2009.)
Or stuff like being appointed the patron of the World Health Organisation, becoming the patron of the United Nations Population Fund to promote maternal health and safer motherhood in developing nations, and earning such a reputation that she was a keynote speaker at the OECD Global Forum in 2022.
In the two years alone before the pandemic alone she undertook 20 working trips, including to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia and in 2021 went to Burkina Faso on an awareness-raising mission to help those affected by genital mutilation and forced marriage, among other issues.
In 2019 she became the patron of WorldPride, making her the first ever royal- in any country- to serve as patron of a major LGBTI+ organisation.
I could go on here but you get my gist. When it comes to Mary’s royal work, we are not talking about a woman who spends her days fannying about the place with nice charities that deal with the more photogenic childhood illnesses or the travails of abandoned labradors.
Rather, what the crown princess has actually been doing since 2004, aside from keeping her early aughties thong collection in mint condition, has been radically remaking the notion of what a 21st century princess can do.
Long before Kate, the Princess of Wales discovered that Alexander McQueen also make blazers and that an Excel spreadsheet is useful for purposes other than cataloguing hats, it was Mary who truly pioneered the Pantsuit Princess ™ model, perennially giving off ‘Fortune 500 CEO fresh off the jet’ vibes as she built up a wildly impressive global CV.
Who’s a fragrant bit of dynastic arm candy now?
It’s here we have to circle back to Meghan and her doomed, all-too-short royal career.
While plenty of stories have banged on about the similarities between Mary and Kate, for my money, the duchess is a better match. Both are women who met their princes serendipitously (a blind date with beers; a Sydney pick-up joint); both were women with moderately successful careers (Eastern suburbs real estate; cable dramedy acting); both moved countries, changed religions and learned new languages (Danish; Stiff Upper Lip); and both arrived and were seen as too “direct”.
Crucially, both were and committed to putting gender equality and issues affecting women and girls at the heart of their royal 9-5. But this is where these two women’s stories diverge, pretty spectacularly.
Post-Megxit, it seemed like one of the lessons was that a hereditary monarchy was never going to welcome the project of contemporary feminism; that the values and goals of the fight for equality would never find a warm welcome inside an institution based on hereditary privilege.
Royalty would always smother or stifle feminism.
Our Mary has entirely proved that wrong. (And reductive and simplistic.)
For two decades in dull meetings and conference rooms and refugee camps and women's’ organisations’ tea rooms, the crown princess has proven that crusading and unabashedly feminist work is entirely possible for royal women.
While Meghan deserves points or gold stars or at the least recognition for her keenness to uncompromisingly identify herself as a feminist, a meaningful act in and of itself (and her SmartWorks capsule collection) Mary’s career shows is what the duchess could have achieved.
To understand how Mary did this all, only have to know one thing- it took years. One thing that she seems to have understood is that royalty doesn’t function like Hollywood where you’re only as good as your last outing or glowing Sun front page.
The vast majority of what the crown princess has been up to for the last 20 years is not glamorous stuff that triggered non-stop adulation. ‘Woman convenes meeting on maternal mortality outcomes’ is not, in any language, the stuff that gets you, even if you’re a princess, breathless coverage.
What Mary understood though was that princessing is not about immediate PR gratification but the cumulative effect, not a banana in sight.
There is another person that Meghan could have asked about this – Queen Camilla. In 2013, the same year that Meghan appeared in Men’s Health, her stepmother-in-law began working with victims of rape and sexual abuse and in 2021, the same year that the Sussexes were busy sharing with Oprah, the now-Queen became the patron of Nigeria’s first rape crisis centre.
Turns out Meghan of 2018 is right – “people need to be encouraged to listen.” Especially to what Queens and future Queens are up to.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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