A few months ago, a meme circulated online in which women asked their unsuspecting boyfriends how often they thought about the Roman Empire. It started when a re-enactor who goes by Gaius Flavius suggested on Instagram that ladies would be frankly shocked by their partners’ answers, and women took the bait. Before you knew it, there were all kinds of random Foot Locker salesmen and financial planners sharing that, why yes, they did happen to know a lot about aqueducts and the Concilium Plebis, because they thought about the Roman Empire all the damn time. Who knew?

Sure, there were many caveats. (Were these mostly White guys? Straight, middle-class guys?) In any case, I was discussing the meme with a man I know, and I asked whether he thought there was a similar common fixation among women — some topic we pondered to an extent that would surprise and baffle our heterosexual partners. He thought for a minute, then offered up: the Royal Family.

The Royal Family. The Meghan of it all, but also the Victoria. The speculation over what kind of woman would have willingly volunteered to be Henry VIII’s sixth wife; the week in middle school when you had the flu, watched Lady Jane, starring Helena Bonham Carter, and ended up researching the line of succession with the precision of a constitutional scholar. I posed this thesis to a Slack group of several hundred women, and about half of those who responded said it was completely ridiculous — things they thought about instead: Laura Ingalls Wilder, serial killers, the Roman Empire — so this column is not for them. This column is for the kindred spirits of the colleague who responded, “I’ve been very curious about Queen Elizabeth Woodville most recently.”

Now that you’re all here, let’s talk about The Crown.

Last Thursday, Netflix dropped the first part of the final season of a show that, for seven years, has chronicled the era of Queen Elizabeth II in the form of prestige history-tainment and has been a real boon for we Royal Family thinker-abouters. In the first season, the Queen was a young woman, played by Claire Foy, thrust on to the throne after her uncle abdicated and her father died of cancer. By the third season, Olivia Colman had taken over the sceptre, playing the Queen through her Margaret Thatcher years (Gillian Anderson in sumptuous curtsy.)

In Season 5, Imelda Staunton took up residence in Buckingham Palace and introduced the Diana era, which comes to a tragic close in Season 6. The first episodes pore over the last weeks of the doomed princess’s life as she — no longer technically a royal, Prince Philip pedantically reminds us — deals with her divorce, starts dating Dodi Fayed, and effortlessly commands more public attention and devotion than all of her former in-laws combined. A luxury sedan speeds towards a tunnel in Paris, and we all know how this is going to end. The Commonwealth descends into frenzied, ostentatious grief, causing a fictionalised Prince William to ask his grandfather, “Why are they crying for someone they never knew?”

I wish I could explain it.

Count me as someone who does not particularly consider myself to be a royal watcher, yet feels as if I was born knowing that Dodi’s father, Mohamed, held a 50-year lease on Villa Windsor, the French estate where Edward VIII lived with Wallis Simpson after he surrendered the throne. And although I don’t know whether my weekly rate would stand up to dudes and their Romans, details of the Royal Family intrude my thoughts more times than can be coincidence. (Did you know Queen Elizabeth II forbade garlic in the palace?) And, yes, I do wish my brain had retained calculus instead.

Nielsen reported in 2017 that viewership of The Crown is about 65 per cent female, FWIW.

I would like to think there is a reason I’ve continued to watch the show and the family it fictionalises. A better reason than the idea that women have all been propagandised by the Grimms and Disney to cast ourselves in frivolous princess fantasies. After all, if The Crown has taught us anything, it is that tiaras don’t guarantee happily-ever-afters, but often thwart them. The flimsiness of fantasies of wealth and marriage and celebrity: that’s worth thinking about.

Early in the series, Princess Margaret enters a disaster of a marriage because the one she wants — to a divorced man — is prohibited by the Crown. Forty years pass, and the family learn nothing: Prince Charles falls for Camilla Parker-Bowles, but is instead steered in the direction of a naive virgin. No one is happy, but the wedding is gorgeous. In Season 6, paparazzi camera bulbs go off with the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, a heavy-handed audio metaphor for the idea that fame is maiming this family on multiple levels. Princess Diana’s demise, as she flees the photographers who made her famous and miserable, seems inevitable.

Then, in one of the season’s more moving scenes, Dominic West’s Charles chastises the Queen for not rising to the challenge of comforting the country through Diana’s death. He accuses his mother of lacking maternal instinct, both towards her subjects and towards him. The Queen defends herself — she is trying to focus on being a supportive grandmother to grieving princes William and Harry, she says — but the accusation weighs on her. In truth, she doesn’t know how to separate being a good grandma from being a good monarch, because the two roles are entwined, even when they’re at odds. William needs privacy and love. But he also needs to be equipped for the life that awaits him when he himself wears the crown, and that preparation involves learning how to deal with a public who believe your personal tragedies are their national ones.

This is where it struck me, how much the story of the Royal Family has been a feminine story. Long before Diana or Elizabeth, even all the way back to Henry’s parade of unfortunate wives. Child-rearing and childbearing are traditionally seen as matters of women, but for centuries they have determined the fate of an entire country — whether it would be Catholic and led by Mary I, Henry’s daughter by his first wife, or Protestant and ruled by his and his second wife’s daughter, Elizabeth. Whether the future monarch would grow up with secure, happy childhood (a good, benevolent ruler) or a loveless, chaotic one (a tyrant).

Love stories and weddings are often seen as matters for women, but for centuries these unions were the ways that wars were prevented or instigated, that states were formed or dissolved. Long before a woman could have expected to be elected as head of state, she could have inherited the position via a lack of an appropriate male heir.

Or she could be plucked from obscurity to wed the future king, then learn that royalty had not saved her from the struggles of ordinary women; it had merely put them on display. Diana was Diana, and she still had the disapproving mother-in-law, the husband who barely tried to conceal his infidelity, the slog of starting over again when you are a single mum of two and you would like an identity beyond mother and ex-wife.

This new part of The Crown ends with Elizabeth kneeling in solitary prayer, grappling with the ghost of Diana and the question of whether she herself has done all she can and should for her children and her nation.

Ancient Rome had aqueducts. The Royal Family had a network of bloodlines flowing under the entire country. A hinky, flawed system that ultimately lands us with Queen Elizabeth II wondering whether she can hold together her family while holding down her job, and, sister, we have all been there before. We think about these things, even if we don’t think about those people.

• Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. In 2022 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the field of commentary. She is the author of several novels, most recently, They Went Left