This short chapter is mostly about queens.  Blackstone explains that there are three kinds.  Most of the chapter is about the queen consort —  the wife of the king.  The others are the queen dowager (the king’s widow) and the queen regent, regnant or sovereign, who holds the crown in her own right and “has the same powers, prerogatives, rights, dignities, and duties, as if she had been a king” (p. 212).  Blackstone describes some of the ways queens’ legal status differs from that of ordinary women — and why.  He explains, for instance, that unlike other married women the queen consort is allowed to own property, in order not to burden the king with her affairs (pp. 212-13). But he doesn’t offer a reason why at a time when ordinary married women lost all public and legal identity, the queen regnant actually got to be the most public person of all — that is, the king.

Maybe it’s because in some ways a king is more like a girl than a man.  Both kings and girls live life more from the outside in, more as the object of knowledge, curiosity and reverance than the one who knows, inquires or reveres — more seen than seeing.  To paraphrase Catherine MacKinnon’s famous line, one’s body is, for both girls and kings, that which is at once most one’s self and least one’s own.

I’m speaking, of course, in generalities — skipping over individual differences and, maybe more important, centuries of change.  Still, ruminating on the Queen Regnant, I find myself in a place where I seem to end up again and again — staring in disbelief at how little change there seems to have been, really, about this business of women’s bodies.  Whatever else has changed for girls and women since Blackstone’s time, and whatever we individually choose to make of those changed opportunities, our appearance is invested with meaning.  Like kings, from infancy our bodies are the subject of much more attention than the average man’s– both other people’s and our own.

Eight years ago (can it really be that long now?), when my daughter was a new baby girl, I was struck by the intensity and persistence of our society’s attention to feminine appearance.  Over forty myself, and thus having stepped well out of the spotlight shown on young women’s bodies, I was shocked by the extremity of the responses my curly-headed tot elicited. Strangers would drop to their knees before her stroller on the sidewalk and cry “oh, what a beautiful little girl.”  (I should explain here that while my daughter is a perfectly nice-looking little girl, she is in no sense spectacularly or even unusually beautiful.  And, indeed, I soon noticed that most little girls receive these accolades.)  Every piece of clothing and physical attribute is ritually catalogued and celebrated — “that’s a pretty dress,” “ooh, look at those sparkly shoes,” “what long lashes she has. . .  those cheeks, her smile . . . .” Or the whole package may be lauded together.  To this day a neighbor, himself a strikingly tall, white-haired man reputed to have once been Mayor Lindsay’s bodyguard, hails my daughter from his yard as she walks by on her way to school — “Hello, Miss Lovely”!

He seems like a really nice man.  And I feel churlish for even suggesting there’s anything wrong with the well-intentioned appreciation he and other well meaning people have lavished on my child.  One of the great joys of having a child is the way the quotidian world cracks opens and serves up this amazing outpouring of appreciation and, yes, love.  But isn’t it obvious that being showered with this kind of  attention before you can even speak is going to set you on a course quite different from the one you would be inclined to take if you were not constantly being reminded of how important your appearance is?

Not to everyone, apparently.  At the same time all this was going on I was having conversations at the swing set with other 21st-century liberal moms who were saying things like, “you know, it really is amazing how different they [i.e., boys and girls] are; we’re always trying to give her trucks, but she really is only interested in dolls.”   The idea that girls “have naturally, that is from their birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking” was already subject to critique in Blackstone’s time. Mary Wollstonecraft (quoted in the previous sentence), considered this viewpoint, which she attributed to Rousseau, among others, “so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation.”  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  (Ch. III) (1791).  Noting that she “probably had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy than J.J. Rousseau,” she contended that girls’ fondness for dressing up their dolls basically reflected the interest all the grown ups around them showed in dressing up the girls. Id. Two hundred years later on the playground in Brooklyn I had nothing to add to that argument, and it was just about as effective as it had been in Blackstone’s and Wollstonecraft’s England.

Of course some things are different now, among them the fact that women can be lawyers and law professors and publish writing about law.  (Although, I note that in a recent survey of the top 10 most cited law professors, not one is a woman.) I wonder how our different treatment of little girls and boys physical appearance is implicated in the ongoing professional gender divide.  In particular I wonder if it is part of why we are not producing more women mathematicians, scientists and engineers.  It strikes me that in the quantitative world of lab science, hard drives, and pure math, there is so little narrativity that the presentational self all but disappears, at least until the point at which a few stars emerge to win prizes. In professions women have entered in large numbers — doctor, lawyer, professor — physical presentation of self is definitely part of the game.  To be sure, that presentation is a source of conflict and confusion for professional women. (Must I wear a skirt for that appellate argument or do I chance the pants suit?) But it may be even harder and more confusing to find one’s way in a profession that virtually does away with physical image.    The sheer anonymity may be too hard for women to accept.  It may be impossible for most young women to imagine themselves into these disembodied roles — both because they sense they will fail at the requirement of corporeal invisibility and because they are afraid that if they do succeed, they will be totally erased.

So far, I’ve been writing as if I lived somewhere apart from the feminine attachment to physical appearance that I’ve been describing. Of course it is not so.  Nor is it the case that I always experience that attachment as onerous.  Sometimes it seems like this life on the outside gives women an opportunity that men lack to connect more readily with other people. Actually, it can really cheer you up.

On my way home recently from a meeting in Washington, D.C.  I stepped up to the Amtrak counter, to change my ticket for an earlier train.  The ticket agent looked weary, already yawning at nine in the morning.  He punched up the numbers for my exchange, took my credit card and asked me for the obligatory post 9/11 picture ID, which I produced.  Glancing at it, he remarked, “good looking.”  I was feeling depressed.  “It’s an old picture,” I said.  At this, something in this man woke up.  Looking me in the eye he said, “Well, now that’s something they can’t take away from you.  If you got it, you got it.”  The kindness of his statement was all the more apparent because the statement was so obviously untrue.  After all, physical beauty is quintessentially, paradigmatically transient — the part of one’s self that time most certainly does carry away.  For some reason it makes me think of something I only just found out about physical identity — that it is not in fact only skin deep.  A friend who is having to go through a slew of internal medical examinations tells me that one of her too many doctors explained that people’s insides are as different from one another as their faces.  It turns out that the shape and spatial relationship of a person’s heart, lungs and liver are as much her own as the parts of her that are more routinely visible.  I find this comforting.