HISTORY 70B- Midterm Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 90 pages long!)
Document Summary
A lot of what we have in primary sources about queens not true. Usually queens were largely absent from history until rather recently. Valued as their ability to be a mother. If she couldn"t do this, she had to be pretty savvy to maintain her position. This is part of why they weren"t really studied: they"re just mothers. We can"t understand kings w/o understanding queens though. But a lot of what they do is in private and what they said. Society during these times were really uncomfortable with the idea of women exercising power but they were even more uncomfortable with the idea that a family might fall out of power. People accept that both king and queen have power but they just give the male counterpart a lot more authority. When things go wrong, people tended to blame the queens. As much as their lives are defined by child rearing and marital relations, their lives are really extraordinary.
