I get the sense that Philippa Gregory loves women. Not in a romantic or sexual way (though I don’t know, maybe, I’m not claiming straightness for her), but in the lovely friendly way that we should all want from our historians and doctors and biographers and families. Gregory, famous for her Tudor and Plantagenet novels, the most famous of which is probably The Other Boleyn Girl, has distilled that love for women as a group into Normal Women, a fantastic overview of women’s lives in the British Isles for the last 900 years.
Sounds like a big undertaking, right? Unlike her novels, which mostly focus on one woman at a time, Normal Women looks at the breadth of women’s lives and actions across nearly a millennium. In her introduction, she sets the goal of the book as a counterweight to the grand histories of England, like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People or Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, both of which treat women as mere footnotes. Bede named literally 18 women in his history, out of a population of 1 million; Churchill named 98 women and 1,413 men in his four-volumeset. Gregory names women on every page, tracing their lives to disprove the idea that women weren’t named because they “didn’t do anything.”
For anyone who had a misogynistic history teacher in high school, this book is an absolute breath of fresh air. Gregory shows us that women were there all along, working, traveling, and advising. Starting with the Anglo-Saxons just before the invasion of 1066, she traces how women got written out of public life and therefore public history. The Norman invasion, disastrous for so many people for so many reasons, was especially disastrous for women—before, they were more or less equal to men under the law; after, they couldn’t get divorces, own property, or be protected from violence.1 (Did you know that 70% of today’s British aristocrats are still direct(ish) descendants of the Norman invaders? SEVENTY percent! Almost 1000 years later!)
The Normans brought patriarchy to England, formalised it in law and kept women from the throne for five centuries.
Even as someone who has studied a lot of British history, there were things in here that shocked and surprised me. But there were also women mentioned whose lives I wanted to dive deeper into. More women went on Crusade than I ever knew, and more women disguised themselves as men to fight in other wars than I was ever told. This was knowledge I was denied! Deliberately! I’m very thankful for people like Gregory, who are resurfacing these erased stories.
Written in the same warm and engaging voice that makes us cheer for her historical heroines, Normal Women is delightfully insistent on women’s agency, calling attention to the delightfully normal women who have done historically cool things, much to the chagrin of men who would argue otherwise. Oftentimes, Gregory is giving us only a taste of them, which is what this style of history is for. It’s a bird’s-eye view, a survey course. It’s meant to pique your interest enough that you go searching for deeper biographies and detailed histories.
But that doesn’t mean Gregory skimps here. The paperback—which just came out a couple of weeks ago—weighs in at 688 pages, about 60 of which are just footnotes. I don’t think anyone was saying she’s “just” a novelist, but if they were, this will disprove that. This is the laudatory work of a serious historian, told with verve and vigor. It belongs on every bookshelf, but I think it is especially relevant if you teach history and/or have daughters. After centuries of being written out of the story, Gregory is writing us all back in.
Available at…
There is also a version adapted for teens and YA readers! Still non-fiction, but in a voice that will appeal to a younger audience. Certainly worth checking out if you’ve got teens interested in reading history in your life. Available at…
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