"We can encourage young girls to be modern Boudiccas" writes Frankie Goodway

Isn’t the Queen a feminist icon? someone asked me the other day. Instinctively, I laughed. Dear Elizabeth might be the last bastion of hats as daywear, or the great British summer holiday (she summers in Scotland. Admittedly in a large castle, but still) but she’s not the sort you expect to see fighting for women’s rights.

Nor do the fighters picture her in their ranks. The Women on Banknotes campaign received one constant, belligerent criticism – there’s a woman on all banknotes, and her name is Liz. This was countered with a simple point: every man on a banknote is there by merit. The Queen is there by a fluke of birth.

In the past perhaps that would have been enough to give her icon status. Think of Boudicca, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I. While none of these women were feminists, they are all recast as proto-feminists, who were believing in their own rights as women centuries before suffragism took hold. Boudicca’s massacre of London becomes vengeance for the rape of her daughters.

Mary, a woman suspected of assassinating her own husband, becomes a martyr for independent Scotland. And Lizzie the First is Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, who defeated the armada and ruled alone for decades. The propaganda machine that is history has served them all well, eliminating their darker moments. But even in their glories, they weren’t feminists – think of Elizabeth I’s most famous proclamation: “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Cheers for the pep talk (and for the wonderful sight of Cate Blanchett in armour) but last time I checked, my heart and stomach were totally war-compliant.

The fact is Western history is so often the story of rich white men, that women have reached for any predecessor with power or strength for inspiration. They are true icons, gilded over with gold, so that the real woman who lived and died slips away under a veneer of sainthood. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can encourage young girls to be modern Boudiccas, as long as we stress that they can be as strong as her without attaching blades to the wheels of their bikes. And we must fight the tendency to polish our icons even more – acknowledging their flaws is crucial in identifying our own bias.

All three women mentioned above are white queens who inherited power and wealth. History has largely hidden the lives of poor women, of women of colour, of disabled women. Our older icons show the prejudices we still hold today.

So back to the original question: in the feminist shrine, is there room for another Queen Elizabeth? Not for me. There’s little I can take away from a lady whose biggest contribution to public life is a video Christmas card.

She helped organise a de facto arranged marriage for her son that destroyed another woman’s life long before she died.

But hey, the hats are nice.