STRAIGHTWRY COLUMN

Empress Excelled at Heavy Lifting

At the risk of being repetitious, women should be doing all the heavy lifting and should also be running this world, leaving us men free to go hunting, fishing and get drunk occasionally.

My advice to get women as chief executives in business and industry and to elect them as prime ministers, has drawn distressingly little support from the world at large. The Arabs actively oppose the idea although it is interesting that that most traditional and conservative nation of Yemen pays homage to one of the world’s great women every day of the year. There, as in a few other nations of the world, the big. heavy Maria Theresa thaler is still coin of the realm

So, in the hope that it may convert a few other people to the idea of female dominance this column is devoted to this woman, one of the movers and shakers of history, ranking with with Churchill, Bismarck, Mao Tse Tung and the Caesars.

The British historian Edward Crankshaw, whom many will remember for his syndicated column of a few years ago called Inside the Soviet Empire, is the author of one of the best Maria Theresa biographies. Feminists should read it. So should people who do not bleed once a month.

Maria Theresa came to the throne of Austria in 1740 at age 22, an unusually pretty woman with an empty head. Her father, the emperor, had kept her head that way. Up to the day the smallpox carried him off the Emperor longed for a son to succeed him. Any old son would do. Anything that was male would be better than this dumb blonde. All who love dumb blonde jokes should read what happened next.

Maria Theresa inherited a ramshackle, bankrupt empire in the centre of Europe. It was run by bureaucratic burnouts who hadn’t an idea left in them. Within 15 years she turned it into the powerhouse of central Europe.

In Mr. Crankshaw’s words: “She was a woman of immense vitality and profound common sense--with a woman’s practical eye into the bargain.”

The greatness of Maria Theresa is not that she adopted men’s ways in a man’s world. She didn’t. She did not start tucking snooze into her lower lip, wearing jeans and cussing to prove that she was one of the boys. She had no interest in being one of the boys. . She never stopped being a woman. She had every strength and every frailty associated with her sex and she used them all, even the frailties. Elizabeth 1 of England and Maggie Thatcher would have known her instantly.

Quite early in her marriage, Maria Theresa recognized that her husband, Francis, was more decorative than useful. He was a bad general, a lousy diplomat and an unfaithful skirt lifter. Truth was, and she saw it, he was just a conceited boob. But she loved him. So, between bearing his 16 children and pretending not to notice his adulteries, she arranged the empire’s affairs so that the man she adored never got to twiddle with any of the levers of power, where he might blow the household switches and start a fire. But this was done in such a way that when Francis died, he still believed that he had been the seagull who steered the ship.

This is feminine deviousness raised to magnificence. Ordinary men can only stand in awe of such a woman and pray that Almighty God, with his infinite compassion and mercy, might find such a one for us.

Mr. Crankshaw studies in great detail how she accomplished so much, starting with so little. He finds many answers.

One is that she was an autocrat who knew the danger common to all autocrats, listening to Yes Men. It is a lesson no American president of recent memory learned. Maria Theresa chose No Men. They were advisers of high intelligence and great integrity. They tried to argue her out of most of her policies and would finally give in rather than be subject to one of her tantrums, which she threw whenever it seemed advantageous to do so. About nine times out of ten, Maria Theresa’s judgments were proven right. That is about average for females surrounded by males.

Mr.Crankshaw’s long book goes a long way toward explaining why, in so many parts of the world, her face on a coin still inspires confidence two hundred and fifty years later.

-30-