The Crown and the quiet erasure of feminist history

The Crown arrives on Australian screens as a prestige drama that insists the Windsors deserve our empathy and our long Sunday afternoons. For viewers in Melbourne queueing up the latest season with their flat whites, or Sydneysiders debating it in group chats after dinner, the show functions as a kind of nostalgic sedative. Yet behind the powdered wigs and the immaculate staging sits a quieter project: a deliberate softening of feminist struggle, a rewriting of twentieth-century women into ornaments of statecraft. The series asks us to feel for a family whose power depended on the containment of women's lives, and it does so with the confidence of a production whose audience has never read a history book.

What gets erased is not merely biographical detail but a generational argument. The Crown treats the monarchy as a stage on which women occasionally appear, rather than as an institution that actively shaped, and was shaped by, the feminist movements of its era. Australian audiences familiar with our own messy, irreverent history of women demanding the vote, entering pubs, fighting for equal pay, and pushing back against censorship may notice how rarely those struggles find their way into the show's grand narrative. The series is sophisticated about silences, and its silences are political.

A palace that learns nothing from the streets

The first three seasons of The Crown frame the royal family as a self-contained organism, weathering scandal the way a cathedral weathers rain. When feminist movements appear at all, they do so as ambient noise: a placard glimpsed through a carriage window, a chant carried on the wind outside a hospital where a princess gives birth. The women inside the palace remain untouched by the rising tide outside, as if the demands of equal pay, reproductive autonomy, and bodily sovereignty simply bounced off the gates of Buckingham.

This is a structural choice, not an accident. By keeping its central women insulated from political struggle, the show absolves the monarchy of complicity in systems feminism sought to dismantle. The Crown invites us to read Princess Margaret's disappointments as tragic rather than structural, and to see Elizabeth's restraint as noble rather than as the performance required of a woman whose institution had everything to lose from genuine equality.

Margaret, Diana, and the trap of beautiful suffering

Princess Margaret is the show's early gift to viewers who want feminist feeling without feminist politics. Her longing, her doomed romance with Peter Townsend, her cigarette holder and sharp tongue, all rendered with such aching beauty that the underlying message goes unnoticed: a woman's desires, however intense, were never going to be accommodated by this family. The Crown makes her suffering gorgeous. It does not make her political.

Diana arrives later as a different kind of trap. The series asks us to weep for her eating disorders, her isolation, her betrayal by a cold husband and a colder institution. Yet it stops short of crediting Diana with the feminist agency she later exercised, her visible rejection of royal scripts, her AIDS advocacy, her ambassadorship for the marginalised. The Crown wants a saint. It does not want a strategist.

Thatcher, the inconvenient feminist the show cannot quite forgive

Margaret Thatcher is where the series' relationship with feminism becomes most tangled. Played as a shopkeeper's daughter turned iron lady, she is given credit for breaking glass ceilings and blamed, in nearly equal measure, for embodying a strain of conservatism that harmed working-class women. The Crown cannot decide whether Thatcher is a feminist triumph or a feminist betrayal, so it splits her in two.

For Australian viewers this is a familiar discomfort. We have our own contested legacies, from Germaine Greer and her constant argument for liberation, to the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 and the long fight for paid parental leave that culminated in 2011. Thatcher complicates the story The Crown wants to tell because she succeeded on terms the monarchy could never accept: through politics rather than birth, through ideology rather than deference.

Australian feminism, royal mythology, and the history we kept

Australian feminism did not wait for royal permission. South Australia granted women the right to vote in 1894, the first in the British world, and the Commonwealth followed in 1902, well before the United Kingdom extended the franchise on equal terms. Helen Reddy sang "I Am Woman" in Melbourne in 1971, and women chained themselves to a bar at the Brisbane Corsaid protest of 1971 in an echo of American action but with our own sunburnt attitude.

Key moments the palace missed:

• South Australia granting women the vote in 1894, the first in the British world
• The 1965 protest at the Toorak Hotel in Melbourne, where Merle Thornton chained herself to a bar stool
• The 1971 Brisbane protest at the Corsaid Hotel where women refused to leave the men's only bar
• The 1984 Sex Discrimination Act, which followed years of feminist legal activism

These were not footnotes. They were the kind of scrappy, funny, sometimes furious grassroots organising that The Crown's polished aesthetic refuses to engage. Australian audiences know feminist history was made in pubs, in union halls, in suburban kitchens, and on picket lines outside Parliament House in Canberra. The monarchy was never central.

Class, race, and whose stories get the costumes

The Crown's most consistent omission is class, not gender. The women we spend time with own land, employ staff, and move through the world with the casual authority of generational wealth. Working-class women appear as servants, as nurses, as secretaries, given sympathetic faces but rarely given names that last.

Race is handled with similar caution. The series gestures at the Windrush generation, at decolonisation, at the Commonwealth, but it does so in a way that keeps the throne at the centre of the frame. Feminist movements of the Global South, of Black women in the US and UK, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in Australia remain peripheral. They are the context, never the subject.

What feminist storytelling could demand

If The Crown wants to be more than beautiful furniture, it would have to do several uncomfortable things at once.

What the show owes its viewers:

• Place working-class and racialised women at the centre of its narrative, not at its margins
• Acknowledge the monarchy's role in slowing feminist reform, including its treatment of Margaret and Diana as assets rather than agents
• Let feminism appear as a political movement, with strategy, disagreement, and mess, rather than as a mood
• Sit with Australian, Caribbean, and African feminist histories as seriously as it sits with Westminster

For Australian viewers, used to our irreverent political storytelling from Water Rats to The Slap, the choice is sharper. We know feminist history because we have argued over it, marched for it in Sydney's CBD, and taught it in universities from Perth to Hobart. The Crown could do the same. It chooses not to.

For those who want a feminist history that resists royal varnish, the Australian Women's Register, the archives at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and oral history projects from the Australian Women's History Network are places to begin. Stream them alongside the show if you must, but read them before you believe the costumes.