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When Women Ruled the World summary

Name: When Women Ruled the World
Rating: 4.1 (187 reviews)
Author: Kara Cooney

Kara Cooney

Six Queens of Egypt

4.1 (187 ratings)

24 mins

What is When Women Ruled the World about?

Ancient Egypt is a historical anomaly: the Egyptians called upon women to lead their country more frequently than any other culture. Tracing their rise to power within the authoritarian system of divine kingship, When Women Ruled the World (2018) tells the stories of Egypt’s six most important female leaders – Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret and Cleopatra – and explores what lessons they hold about female leadership for us today.

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When Women Ruled the World
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What’s in it for me? Learn the history of Egypt’s female leaders.

Shrill, bossy, selfish – these are terms you may have heard used to describe women in power. In fact, many sociological studies show a bias against women as leaders that prevails even in our ostensibly progressive society. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign was, for many women, a particularly painful reminder of the opposition to female leadership that still exists in the modern world.

So it may come as a surprise that in ancient Egypt, a culture preceding ours by thousands of years, women were consistently called upon to lead the country. Royal women repeatedly stepped forward to claim the throne, from the first ruling dynasty of the Egyptian nation-state to the very last. How could women gain and hold so much power in a deeply patriarchal, ancient society?

Using the latest archeological evidence, Egyptologist Kara Cooney traces the stories of six of these women – Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret and Cleopatra – through the rise and fall of the Egyptian empire. Take a deep dive into ancient history and discover how these female trailblazers kept their country prosperous and safe – and find out what lessons the lives of these powerful women hold for us today.

In these blinks, you will learn about

the lives, losses and successes of Egypt’s six most important female leaders;
the mechanisms of power in ancient Egypt; and
the value of female leadership in times of crisis.

In times of crisis, ancient Egypt repeatedly called upon women to lead the country.

Thousands of years ago, in ancient Egypt, women ruled supreme. How was this possible? To answer this question, we need to take a look at Egypt’s unique system of power: divine kingship.

In 3000 BC, when northern Egypt defeated the south after centuries of conflict, the Egyptian nation-state was established. Protected by deserts and seas, rich in minerals and nourished by the Nile, Egypt became one of the most prosperous nations in the ancient world. This wealth may be the reason for Egypt’s relative political stability throughout the millennia.

At the same time that the nation was established, Egypt’s tradition of divine kingship was founded with Dynasty 1, the first of 20 royal dynasties. For the Egyptians, their king was a divine representative with incontestable authority – even when “he” was a woman.

Make no mistake: ancient Egypt’s regency system was undeniably patriarchal and authoritarian. Power was meant to transfer from father to son indefinitely, and female rule was an exception. This belief was rooted in the myth of the god Osiris, the primeval king of Egypt, who had passed his title on to his son Horus.

However, Egyptian mythology also has a representative of the divine feminine in the form of Osiris’s wife and sister, Isis. In texts inscribed on pyramid walls, the goddess Isis is portrayed as queen, mother, lover, daughter and nurturer. The titles of royal women, such as Great Royal Wife or King’s Mother, were modeled after these female archetypes. Their job was to protect the kingship, making sure the royal lineage could continue uninterrupted.

Trying to produce male offspring was considered a royal duty and, to maximize the king’s chances of reproduction, he had multiple wives. But despite this practice of polygamy, ancient Egypt faced no shortage of succession crises. Each time a royal family line ended, a new dynasty would arise.

It was often during the uncertain times at the ending of a dynasty that a woman stepped up to take power. Women often pulled strings from behind the scenes, making it even harder to trace their achievements. When a king was crowned too young, his mother would act as regent – as done by Egypt’s first female leader, Queen Merneith.

Though these female rulers often had short reigns as strategic peacekeepers, some of them accomplished as much as any male counterpart. But all too often, their names have been erased and forgotten.

Queen Merneith ruled in her son’s stead, cementing power in ritual sacrifice.

What do you do when your country’s new king is only two years old? You let his mother call the shots. That’s how Queen Merneith of Dynasty 1 came to rule Egypt. We know about her story from inscriptions in royal burial complexes, temples and monuments. The Palermo Stone, a famous fragment of a royal monument, lists her as King’s Mother – right alongside the male kings of Dynasty 1 through 5.

Young Merneith was no stranger to power. As the daughter of the revered King Djer, she grew up in the royal palace in Memphis and observed the king’s duties up close. When her father died, Merneith’s brother Djet took the throne and asked her to be his wife. You read that right: Merneith was now both the King’s sister and his wife.

Neferusobek became the first female king of Egypt – stalling a succession crisis caused by inbreeding.

As we’ve seen, incest wasn’t taboo for the ancient Egyptians. In fact, not only was incest a regular occurrence in the royal palace, but Egyptian royalty considered it the ideal strategy for reproduction – just as it did for patrilineal succession. After all, the myth of Isis and Osiris served as inspiration – a union that produced Osiris’s heir Horus.

And incest was a great way to “keep it in the family” when it came to royal power. Instead of marrying in another elite group who would suddenly want a bigger piece of the pie, wealth and power stayed within a close-knit family circuit.

Ruling Egypt for over two decades, Hatshepsut was the most influential female king of all.

A few centuries after Neferusobek’s dynasty was brought to its knees by the effects of inbreeding, Dynasty 18, led by warrior King Thutmose I, expanded Egypt’s borders into the Levant, crushing the mineral-rich provinces of Nubia and Kush.

Luckily, Thutmose I’s eldest daughter Hatshepsut, whom he appointed to the prominent office of High Priestess when she was just a girl, inherited her father’s determination and leadership skills. When Thutmose I died, Hatshepsut became the Great Royal Wife of her sickly brother Thutmose II. The new king Thutmose II accomplished little and died after only a few years of rule. A toddler born of his harem was then selected to be the next king. But Thutmose III’s biological mother was incapacitated, so Hatshepsut was chosen to rule in the boy’s stead.

Reinventing herself as a man, Nefertiti rose to power during a religious crisis caused by her husband.

Every year, half a million visitors flock to see the bust of Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. The mysterious queen is revered for her beauty – but recent evidence suggests Nefertiti was more than just a pretty face.

King Amenhotep IV of Dynasty 18 took Nefertiti as his Great Royal Wife when she was perhaps only ten years old. He had inherited a peaceful and prosperous Egypt, whose people bowed eagerly to the will of their divine king. Little did they know that Amenhotep’s maniacal religious agenda would throw the country into disarray.

Tawosret took the throne by force, becoming the first woman to rule Egypt unaccompanied.

Hatshepsut’s enrichment of the elites and Akhenaten’s religious fanaticism led to permanent shifts in Egypt’s balance of power. In Dynasties 19 and 20, politics became more decentralized and the kingship opened up, allowing other families to marry into royalty. This meant less royal inbreeding and more competition among elite families. At the same time, Egyptians tried to curtail female authority, removing previous women leaders from the king’s lists and making sure that no woman held multiple royal titles.

This systematic suppression was the reason why Queen Tawosret had to use unorthodox measures to gain power. Tawosret was born in an internationalized Egypt, where mass migration and foreign influence led to an explosion of complexity in social and political relations. At around 2000 BC, she became the wife of King Seti II, who had just ascended to the throne. There was only one problem: in Lower Egypt, a Theben man named Amunmesses claimed to be king as well. Thanks to superior military resources, Seti II proved victorious in the civil war that ensued.

Cleopatra was a master tactician and used her relationships with Roman politicians to build Egypt’s power.

Egypt’s last queen is undoubtedly its most famous, although she wasn’t actually Egyptian. Cleopatra was a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, a Greek-Macedonian family that inherited Egypt after it was freed from Persian rule in 332 BC. The Ptolemies embraced Egypt’s system of divine kingship, combining it with the hypercompetitive political system of the Greeks. As a result, conspiracy and murder were rife.

At 14, Cleopatra was named co-ruler of Egypt by her father Ptolemy XII. When he died, he named his son Ptolemy XIII as successor. But Ptolemy XIII didn’t want to share the throne with his sister, driving Cleopatra into exile in Syria shortly after his accession.

Just as the Egyptians did millennia before us, we should learn to embrace female leadership.

Like many successful women, Cleopatra was relentlessly mocked by the men whose very power she threatened. The Romans ridiculed her for her excessive displays of wealth and emotional outbursts. Octavian accused her of being selfish, sexually manipulating Marc Antony for her own political benefit. She was the perfect scapegoat to convince the Roman Senate to wage war against one of their own. And yet Cleopatra is remembered because she nearly had it all.

Selfishness and emotional sensitivity are still common labels attached to women in power. The author argues that Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 presidential election is a telling example of how women are still held back in progressive Western society for displaying ambition too openly, while men are rewarded for it. Moreover, strong leadership and the emotional sensitivity ascribed to women are often depicted as incompatible. But the ancient Egyptians understood that a woman’s emotionality, even her supposed indecisiveness, could be a political advantage in troublesome times.

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About the Author

Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptology at UCLA. Her studies focus on afterlife beliefs, preparations for death and gender dynamics in ancient Egypt. Her previous book, The Woman Who Would Be King, is about the life and death of Egypt’s female king Hatshepsut.

Who should read When Women Ruled the World?

Folks who are interested in the history of female leadership
Women who want to be inspired by female trailblazers of the past
History buffs who want to learn more about life and death in ancient Egypt

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