Talk:Queen regnant

Language that could be more neutral

Since I edited this and it was reverted, I'm posting it here as suggested by WP:STATUSQUO. The reason given to why it was reverted was that it was "not sexist in this context - also mentioned guardian of, husband of. Wife of is accurate and descriptive)", yes well, those aren't sexist phrases and every sexist phrase is descriptive but not welcome nor neutral. Women have never claimed to own their husbands or their decisions in history, especially in the context of royalty and royal families and guardians are everywhere, especially for the young and ill. Not many queen consorts have had much say over their lives separate from their reigning husband and this article specifically mentions that the title is shared and dependent on someone else's sovereignty. While the phrase is not cited exactly in the Manual of Style in the gender neutral section, the section includes a link to an essay Writing About Women which does address the usage of the phrase (When discussing a woman who is married to a man, write "A is married to B" instead of "A is the wife of B", which casts the male as possessor. Avoid the expression "man and wife", which generalizes the husband and marks the wife.) This essay is used by the WikiProject Typo Team in their moss project, using the phrase "is the wife of" specifically with the suggestion to replace it with "is married to", a more neutral phrase in the context of Wikipedia. You could argue these suggestions refer to singular, named women but is there really much difference when it comes to anonymous feminine nouns like offices vs. actual names? Penguinmlle (talk) 21:39, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

The phrases "husband of", "guardian of", "mother of", "widow of", and "wife of" that are in this article describe the concepts of "prince consort", "queen regent", "queen mother", "queen dowager" and "queen consort". None of those suggest the woman in question is the owner of her husband, or owned by her child, or owned by her husband. They are purely relationship description terms describing the meaning of words. This is not an article about a specific woman, it is an article about a general topic of "queen regnant" and those other terms are describing related and potentially confusing roles. Since there is no issue with the other relationship descriptions and for parallelism at least the definition of "queen consort" should be described similar to the other relations described. Also note that for "prince consort" the woman is sovereign and definitely the one in control and the man's role is dependent on his wife's. Not many prince consorts have much say over their lives separate from their reigning wife. That is just how royalty works for either sex. Geraldo Perez (talk) 22:15, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

It's a fact that in the history, especially royal history, women have not been viewed as a separate entity to their husbands and sons in the way laws were written and society was carried out--that's the whole reason why it's not neutral now and why "husband of" or "prince consort" don't help your reasoning. Prince Albert had more freedom than Queen Elizabeth Woodville just by their gender and you can read accounts to back that up. People ignoring tidbits like that and saying this is the way things have always worked is also the reason why these discussions need to be had and why there are people working on neutral language on Wikipedia.

Regardless of your offense to using "married to" or my use of "sexist", you didn't even come close to answering my question but you decided to repeat what you said in your edit comment only longer, so please excuse me if I don't return to this "conversation" with you. I'm not a part of the neutrality projects, not a sociologist, and not interested in royalty beyond a tiny interest so I have little to care about here beyond avoiding an edit war with an admin and explaining my reasoning with links. Penguinmlle (talk) 23:29, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

My "offense" was to lack of necessity for the change of substituting words of identical meaning for what was already in the article. By itself it wouldn't matter just a different way of saying the exact same thing, but in the context of the rest of the article it is jarring to use a different descriptive method for only 1 of the 5 terms being defined. I must admit that I do, however, find it amusing that "wife of" is considered demeaning to a woman by some but "widow of" isn't. Geraldo Perez (talk) 00:15, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Picture of Elizabeth II

Would the Queen of Denmark need to be the main photo of this article given she's the only Queen regnant? RyanPLB (talk) 07:00, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This was the first thing that came to my mind when I opened the article and saw Elizabeth on it. The second was coming to the talk page... SentientBall (talk) 21:18, 1 November 2023 (UTC)