Book Review – NORMAL WOMEN by Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History. HarperOne, 2024. 688 pp. ISBN: 978-0063304321.

Reviewed by S. Janelle Montgomery, Director, Keith House

Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women aims to add the contributions and experiences of ordinary women to the vast body of English history dedicated to the exploits of elite white men. As Gregory’s first solo non-fiction publication, it marks a significant departure from her catalog of historical fiction, such as The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen. The book tells stories of everyday English women (with a few short forays into the Colonies) from the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the Church of England first ordained women in 1994. 

Organized chronologically around inflection points in English women’s social standing, Normal Women explores thematic detail within each chapter, including the nature of work, marriage, prostitution, rape, gender-ambiguity, legal status, and economic power. It opens with the invading Normans and describes how they formalized patriarchy into law. Next, bubonic plague created labor and inheritance gaps that benefited women, then triggered a backlash. During the Wars of the Roses, women served as military and civil leaders. The reigns of Henry VIII and his daughters, Mary I and Elizabeth I, saw the beginning of cultural campaigns to define women as weak and unreliable and further strip them of economic and legal power, campaigns that continued relentlessly through the era of enclosures and only began to abate during Queen Victoria’s rule. A high male death toll in World War I accelerated the granting of meaningful legal rights to women. Gaining the vote, followed by World War II, gave women new powers and protections. Between 1945 and 1994, progress toward equality struggled against long-standing cultural norms. Throughout, Gregory supplies an abundance of anecdotes and recognizes those who resisted efforts to keep women quiet and impoverished. Her talent for rich detail and elegant phrasing makes lively reading, though weak transitions between the stories reduce some passages to extended lists. 

Unfortunately, Gregory often allows her outrage and desire to craft a good story to color the presentation of facts. For example, she asserts that the Norman invasion triggered centuries of female subjugation and supports this contention in part with a problematic, though attention-getting, interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry. “Nearly 200 horses are depicted . . . but only five women,” she reports. “There are more penises than English women in the tapestry: 88 on the horses, five on the men.” This reading assumes that every human figure without explicit female gender signifiers is male. Yet, as the author points out repeatedly elsewhere, armor and other garments can effectively disguise secondary sex characteristics; that is, some of the clothed bodies could be female. In addition, nudity in medieval art typically invokes original sin and humanity’s vulnerability, making the undressed men subordinate to the queens and ladies represented. In many other instances, Gregory attempts to bolster her arguments with false equivalences and by overgeneralizing unusual situations. 

Normal Women’s strength lies in the stories of thousands of relatively obscure women who have tried over the last 900 years to make England a better place for themselves and their families. Women with money and family connections could often make their own rules; the rest needed looks, charm, luck, or exceptional bravery. Gregory demonstrates that even under crushing legal and cultural constraints, women successfully demanded change when motivated, such as by high food prices or other threats. The accumulated evidence in Normal Women also depressingly demonstrates that English women have not, after nearly a millennium, found consistently effective means to address the inequities of patriarchy. 

Although the cover note says Gregory “trawled through court records” and other primary sources to resurrect the experiences of “normal women,” the footnotes and bibliography suggest that her contribution consists of compiling other scholars’ research across time and subject matter. As an art historian, I appreciated her use of the visual record to complement written accounts. Still, this approach assumes that both types of archives encapsulate something approaching normalcy, and it seems more likely that women who found themselves in court or the subject of stories or paintings would have been aberrations. Sadly, few personal histories have survived 900 years. As a result, Gregory devotes very little of her treatise to the most normal activities of women throughout history and across cultures: bearing children and caring for their families and communities.