4 ideas
Egyptian women reached supreme rule mainly when the male line of succession failed, through an infant heir, a dynasty with no sons, or civil disorder. Elites let a royal woman hold the throne because she could keep the lineage and the institutions going without starting a rival male dynasty. Her power served to protect the patriarchal system, not to overturn it.
A woman was the safest emergency ruler because she could not father a new line of kings. That made her a caretaker who guarded the throne for a legitimate male successor. Ambitious men and factions tolerated her because she was not a lasting threat to the order of succession.
Hatshepsut began as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III, then took the full titles of king. She ruled successfully for about two decades. Some twenty years after her death, her names and images were systematically chiselled off monuments. Cooney reads this as an effort to make the record of kingship look male and orderly again for later successors, rather than as simple personal revenge.
Women on the throne often took on male regalia, titles and iconography, such as the false beard and kingly epithets. This was necessary because the office itself was defined as male. Their legitimacy depended on fitting into masculine forms, so their success strengthened the idea that true kingship was male, and they could more easily be recast as aberrations afterwards.