Queen Camilla has marked 2024’s International Women’s Day with a special reception at Buckingham Palace – featuring a miniature incarnation of herself.
The reception also coincided with the end of the WOW Girls Festival Bus Tour, which has been delivering workshops and activities across the country to promote gender equality among young people at schools and community groups. Camilla is President of Women of the World.
Camilla marks International Women’s Day. (Royal Family)
For the engagement, Her Majesty was joined by Mathilde, Queen of the Belgians and The Duchess of Gloucester. The Belgian Queen has previously joined Camilla to other gender-focused initiatives, like the UN’s 16 days of activism against gender-based violence in 2022.
Birgitte recently carried out a joint engagement with Camilla, when the duo presented The Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
Viewing the WOW bus, Their Majesties and the Duchess met young people who were taking part in activities in the recording studio and craft sessions on board.
It was here that Queen Camilla received her own Barbie doll, who was wearing the exact same outfit – a blue Fiona Clare dress with an Amanda Wakeley cape and Eliot Zed boots. Her hair and jewellery were also closely replicated!
The Queen with her Barbie doll. (Royal Family)
Looking at the doll, Her Majesty joked ‘You’ve taken about 50 years off my life – we should all have a Barbie. I’m very very grateful. Thank you very much for doing that, it’s wonderful.’
Krista Berger, Senior Vice President of Barbie and Global Head of Dolls, had flown from Los Angeles to present the Barbie to Her Majesty, stating: ‘We were just tickled that the Queen wanted to play Barbie.’
The late Queen was also immortalised in the form of a Barbie doll, in 2020.
Inside the Palace, a range of high-profile guests, including actress Dame Helen Mirren, Spice Girl Mel B and her daughter, Phoenix Brown, Dame Kelly Holmes and Doreen Lawrence.
Speaking in the Bow Room at the Palace, Queen Camilla began her speech with a show and tell.
The objects in question were ‘two stones that, on 27th May 1914, were thrown at the Palace during a Suffragette protest’.
One stone featured a label reading: ‘If a constitutional deputation is refused, we must present a stone message’, whilst the other stone held the message: ‘Constitutional methods being ignored drive us to window smashing’.
Camilla met schoolchildren at Buckingham Palace. (Royal Family)
Her Majesty explained The Times report a few days later: ‘Between 11 and 12 o’clock on Wednesday, two women succeeded in evading the sentries at Buckingham Palace and entered the quadrangle. They threw stones at the windows and broke two panes of glass before the sentries intervened. The women were taken to the police station in the precincts of the Palace, but the Master of the Household refused to prosecute and they were released’.
The Queen added: ‘The stones were then handed to Queen Mary, who decided to keep them for posterity’.
Camilla joked how she wasn’t encouraging guests to ‘evade sentries, or throw stones, or do anything unconstitutional – not least because I am not quite sure how today’s Master of the Household would react’ but to think about what the Suffragette stone-throwers represented: hope to women who threw them would not be ‘victims of their history, nor of the social and economic forces that were ranged against gender equality’.
Her Majesty delivered a speech. (Royal Family)
Camilla explained that guests had been invited because they ‘represent hope for women in the present and in the future’.
Universal suffrage – that is equal voting rights for women as men – was finally achieved in the UK in 1928, while women over 30 with property had been allowed to vote 10 years previously.
The guests’ ‘achievements and your courage are great causes for celebration’, Camilla shared, also expressing she was ‘enormously impressed to hear of the mentorship that has been offered’ as part of the WOW Bus and hoped that discussions have ‘challenged and strengthened those present’.
Closing her speech, The Queen recalled the words of Christabel Pankhurst: ‘Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand besides us, fight with us’ and added how guests should ‘let your lives be the stones that will shatter glass ceilings everywhere and inspire generations to come’.
