For the past 24 hours, the world has been consumed by the news that Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are expecting their third child, a baby who will eventually find themselves taking out fifth place in the line of succession to the British throne.
But up until a few years ago, that’s a sentence we quite possibly might never have been uttering, because up until 2011, archaic British laws that ruled royal boys were of greater importance than royal girls were still enacted. Laws that, if left unchanged, would have seen a boy skip Princess Charlotte’s right to be fourth-in-line to the throne purely by virtue of gender.
