British Queens - Better Rulers?

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Stuttgart (Institut für Anglistik), course: Spotlights on British History, 12 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: A few months ago, there has been an innovation in German history: A female Federal Chancellor had been elected. Angela Merkel is the first woman since the existence of the Federal German Republic supposed to rule the country. From the very beginning, when her election campaign started, this meant hard work for her. First, when she still was chairwoman of the CDU, she had a rather masculine and unkempt appearance as well as image, for which many people made fun of her. But for her election campaign, she suddenly started changing this image. On the election posters, you could see a neat and smiling Angela Merkel. Considering this, one is tempted to assume that this changing of image helped her to achieve her election victory and that a feminine image is generally helpful for succeeding at political level. But does this mean that female rulers are better rulers? Are supposedly typical female properties like empathy, intuition and benignity better premises for ruling a country than strictness and the ability to assert oneself? Or are women who rule only poor copies of male rulers? I will especially examine this in the history of Britain, where for centuries there has been a long tradition of male as well as female rulers.

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