How you feel about Princess Diana says a lot about you

Yes, Princess Diana is now a feminist icon.

No, you haven’t misread, though your disbelief is understandable. After all, during her lifetime, the idea was unimaginable.

Harry himself drew a connection between his wife and his mother. “So much of what Meghan is and how she is, is so similar to my mum,” Harry says in episode one of Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan. “She has the same compassion. She has the same empathy. She has the same confidence. She has this warmth about her.”

And like Meghan, Diana became a branded woman. Too confessional. Too manipulative. And most of all, too damn dumb.

“The Princess, I fear, suffers from the ‘Open Gob Before Brain Engages’ syndrome – a condition which afflicts the trivial and the brain-dead,” read a typical article from the 1990s, this one from the Sunday Mirror. At that particular moment, Diana was being skewered for criticising the Tories for being “hopeless” in not supporting her campaign to highlight the victims of landmines.

It’s not far from how the princess saw herself. “She told me she was as thick as two planks,” historian Paul Johnson, a friend of the princess, once said. “‘What I wanted to be before I got married was an air hostess. But I wasn’t educated or intelligent enough’.”

So, how can it be that Diana is now an inspirational role model for a new generation of women? And why has the princess – who’s been dead for 25 years – become something of a touchstone that is dividing generations? Because how you now view Diana has become a political issue that speaks volumes about what sort of person you are.

Loading

“Certainly, my parents’ generation have a bit of an attitude [towards Diana] – ‘you kind of brought this upon yourself’,” says Melbourne University Associate Professor Lauren Rosewarne, 42, about Diana’s ill-treatment by both the press and the royal family she’d married into. “I remember an aunty or uncle saying, very scathingly, ‘she’d always tip off the press to her whereabouts to get photos’.”

This view of Diana was a one-way ticket to gaining respect in the 1980s and ’90s, particularly for women, says media and gender expert Professor Catharine Lumby, from the University of Sydney.

“There was a lot of commentary in the late ’90s, generally by white men in elite media outlets … saying, ‘oh she’s a joke, she’s just some overly emotional woman, she’s an arch-manipulator of men’,” says Lumby, referring to the way in which Diana broke taboos by speaking to the press about her personal problems, among them her loveless marriage, postpartum depression and eating disorders.

This went against – still goes against – the male-dominated, Western cultural view that the “rational” is king and anything pertaining to the emotional and the bodily are suspicious, says Lumby.

“If you’re an educated woman, in a way you’re buying into a man’s world to some extent,” she says. “So, to get along in that world, it’s very tempting to buy into that [view of Diana]… There was a strong incentive for a lot of women to go with the sneering at Princess Diana and the sobbing masses [who mourned her when she died] … ‘Oh, how embarrassing all these sobbing masses, they’re just idiots because she was [just] a pretty woman’.”

Even one-time New Yorker magazine editor Tina Brown, who wrote a relatively sympathetic biography of Diana in 1997, The Diana Chronicles, portrayed her as a numbskull.

“Tina Brown is also weirdly mean about Diana’s intellect,” said Michael Hobbes in one episode of the wildly popular podcast, You’re Wrong About, which dedicated five episodes to Diana in 2020. “She keeps talking about how she failed a bunch of O-levels and how she got low grades on all these standardised tests the British children have to pass.”

His co-host, Sarah Marshall, opined: “Whatever. I bet Tina Brown did a great job with all of her tests.”

Marshall, 34, is reflective of how a new generation of women see Diana.

“There’s been renewed interest in her … [and] her life story raises the kind of issues that the #MeToo movement has raised,” Dr Cindy McCreery, an expert on British royalty at the University of Sydney, says of her students, aged 18 to 22. This includes, she adds, an awareness that “we shouldn’t be blaming the victims”, and that by speaking of their struggles, they are helping the rest of us “be more aware of what’s going on”.

“I kind of assumed they were too young to have knowledge of her,” McCreery says. “I think that there is admiration for her, and recognition of her mental health issues. I think they admire the way she developed her own identity, particularly with her charity work, and things like that very famous set of photographs when she was hugging children of landmine victims, and the AIDS patients.

“One student commented, ‘that was really a big taboo at the time, to touch a person with AIDS’. It was seen as incredible. And that won her a lot of respect from younger people,” says McCreery, noting that The Crown, which portrayed Diana sympathetically, has been influential.

Loading

In Tasmania, many of Associate Professor Giselle Bastin’s students share this view.

“Diana strikes these students as a glamorous icon, one who took on the royal system and went public with her criticism of the institution of royalty – and the media,” says Bastin, a monarchy expert at Flinders University, of her students, aged between 18 and 20. “It seems to resonate with younger people who are themselves engaged in debates … around self-representation in the field of life writing.”

She’s referring to, among other interviews, Diana’s famous 1995 BBC Panorama interview, in which she famously spoke about suffering from bulimia, her husband’s ongoing affair with Camilla Parker Bowles – “there were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded” – and being labelled “unstable” and “mentally unbalanced” by the royal family when she was suffering from postpartum depression.

At the same time, our current culture has finally risen up to meet Diana, who was “ahead of her time”, says Lumby, in recognising that what goes on in the home has national significance.

“We’ve gone through a cultural reckoning in the last decade, an understanding that we have tended to separate the public and private in a way that basically says to women, ‘look, these are your issues, you deal with them’, whether it’s domestic violence or sexual assault or childcare,” says Lumby. In the 1980s and 1990s – even more so than now – budget cuts and mining were considered matters of public importance. Not mental health or relationships, no matter how abusive.

“I mean, the historical injustices towards women continue, but now there is a much broader public conversation about these things.”

Diana’s emotional manner of speaking about her own struggles, and those of others, now jibes with the manner of other feminist role models, in stark contrast to previous generations’ feminists. In the 1970s, “brilliant women” like Wendy McCarthy, Quentin Brice and Fran Summers had to “speak the language of men, often, to be heard”, says Lumby.

Loading

“Whereas I think now, when you think of Grace Tame, the iconic image, her giving [former Australian Prime Minister] Scott Morrison the side eye, so she’s using her body and her emotions to express a powerful political point,” says Lumby. “Like, ‘you don’t get me’. Diana, in a way, also symbolises that. She used her expressions and her body, as well as her emotions, to make what were really powerful [statements], even if they were just about her. They were kind of political statements: ‘Don’t fence me in’.”

Rosewarne agrees. “I think it’s an illustration of a more nuanced version of feminist icon for today in the sense that it’s not now looking for an Amelia Earhart, you know like those figures of Rosie the Riveter.

“Whereas I think now there’s a want for more realistic and flawed feminist icons as well, and I think with her [Diana’s] eating disorders, interesting fashion, interesting politics, celebrity fraternising; it ticks a lot of boxes that would interest young people, and in an aspirational way. As well as we [also] relate to feeling shit about our bodies in a culture that makes us hate ourselves.”

Disrespect Diana these days, says Lumby, and you’re looking down on all women.

“The idea [that] Princess Diana is a really attractive woman who was interested in astrology [and] a bit of a twit, what it is really ultimately [doing] is devaluing things to do with emotions and the body,” says Lumby.

“It doesn’t matter how educated you are as a woman, the reality is women are always thrust into that situation of dealing with emotions in the body and doing the emotional labour in our society.

“They are valued on the basis of their bodies, it’s [tied up] with the politics of domesticity and marriage and child-rearing. That snobbery towards someone like Princess Di is really ultimately a devaluation of women generally.”

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.