Book review | Normal Women: 900 Years of Women Making History
By Philippa Gregory | Published by William Collins
Sometimes it's only when a book suddenly appears that you realise it's a book you’ve always wished someone would write. Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History is one such book.
The author is already the bestselling novelist of English historical fiction whose works have been made into successful BBC dramas and Hollywood films, including her 2001 novel of the Tudor dynasty,
The Other Boleyn Girl
which starred Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansen. Despite its eponymous title, the novel strikes at least one blow for all ‘normal women’ rather than the Anne Boleyns of the world:
‘Katharine was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside
just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another. For the women who deserved more than their husband’s whim.’
Normal Women reiterates the historic realisation that ‘every woman felt the lack of respect for women’ and focuses on these 'women of the country' , our Anglo-Saxon or Jacobean or Victorian or 20th century sisters. Although the rich and celebrated are included, more often the heroines are the full spectrum of ‘normal women’ and the roles they undertook: wives, nuns, tradeswomen, moneylenders, spinsters, bakers, bookkeepers, mothers, suffragists.
Scanning Normal Women you realise women’s autonomy hasn’t been a constantly rising line on a graph but has fluctuated, reflected in women's rights being effectively curtailed after 1066 and hinted at through chapter titles such as ‘Women Rising’ giving way to ‘Becoming a Weaker Vessel’.
This makes me uncomfortably aware of the possibility of women’s rights being incrementally taken away from them.
The last chapter ‘Women Today 1945—1994’ features a grim, pages-long list of Englishwomen killed in their own homes during one recent year, 2019, usually by their male partners. ‘Women Endangered’ is the sobering subtitle of this section. This final chapter also reaches contemporary times with April Ashley (originally christened George) and Caroline Cossey, born with XXXY syndrome, who both underwent gender reassignment surgery and registered as women.
The whole book is an absorbing read and being a woman of faith, I'm exhilarated by the author's decision to conclude with the 1994 ordination of women priests in the Church of England finally showing, as she says, beyond all doubt, that ‘normal women are divine.’
'Normal women are divine'
Author: Philippa Gregory
Imprint: WilliamCollinsBooks.com
Published: 26 October 2023
Pages: 688
ISBN: 978-0-00-860170-6
