"Normal Women" by Philippa Gregory

This is a whopper, both in terms of its length and its scope. The bestselling historical novelist, Philippa Gregory, has turned her hand to straight history here and simply cannot write a poor sentence. The book runs to almost six hundred pages and it aims no more or less to present an all-encompassing history of the lives led by ordinary women in Britain from 1066 to the present day. Occasionally she discusses high born women about whom we know quite a lot. Katherine Parr, for example, appears to have been a completely fascinating character. But in the main the examples given in this truly encyclopaedic account concern hundreds of ‘regular’ Katherines, Elizabeths, Annes and Marys who in some way or another, while being unremarkable in the scheme of things, nonetheless left nuggets of information behind in the British historical record. Many of their stories are fascinating and are told with great skill in this book.

Inevitably Philippa relies a lot in the early period on court records in relation to civil disputes, crimes and punishments. These stories serve to remind us just how utterly brutal much British history has been. The makers of ‘Horrible Histories’ do not very far to look for their storylines. We were, by modern standards, a pretty vile lot for most of the past one hundred years.

This is not though a book which just presents one fact after another. Far from it. There is a central thesis that emerges, namely that women were freer, more empowered and more independent in the middle ages than was the case later, particularly after puritanism raised its round and ugly head. It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure that Philippa Gregory is wholly persuasive here in all honesty. It all rather depends on what you consider amounts to 'progress'. Personally I would far rather have been a woman in the later period, even if cossetted and restricted somewhat to the domestic activity, than one living in wilder and more lawless earlier times. I think men had a far rougher time of it. But it is an interesting and thought-provoking case to make.

I found the central section covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most interesting, as here the documentary evidence is so much wider in nature, allowing her to discuss a society that divided itself into 'separate spheres' very much along gender lines in detail and with authority. The details presented are very revealing, not least because Philippa successfully demolishes some widely-held stereotypical narratives about male and female roles in centuries past.

Sadly, for me, though, I really found the final sections much harder going and vastly less persuasive. Hard to stomach at times. Once we get past the First World War, Philippa’s tone becomes increasingly polemical and strident, while the historical interpretation gets less and less compelling. The suffragettes, apparently, played only a negligible role in women winning the right to vote. The whole thing was a ruse to balance the electorate in favour of the well-healed so that working class men returning from the battlefield did not dominate the electorate. Later she claims that the invention of white goods (hoovers, fridges, cookers, washing machines etc) made women’s lives worse, reducing their liberty rather than transforming them for the better. Really really not so.

And as her account moves into living memory the selective use of evidence to back-up revisionist arguments limits the credibility of the account more and more. She suggests - totally wrongly - that the Greenham Common women's camp had something to do with the removal of nuclear missiles. She gives no credit to Gorbachev and Reagan of course, presumably because they were men, and by this stage in the book nothing positive at all is said about the male sex. Her account of the fight to ordain women in the Church of England is comically ill-informed, and I got really furious when she misleadingly quotes Margaret Thatcher's very tongue-in-cheek after dinner 'iron lady speech' straight in order to condemn her for being insufficiently feminist.

Right at the end Philippa's mask slips completely, and as with the twist in a novel's final pages, I found myself re-evaluating the whole book. Here she sets out a pretty radical stance infused with identity politics of an all too familiar kind and which I simply deplore. Masculinity is portrayed as toxic per se, men apparently feeling so threatened by women as a collective group that we gang up on them to prevent them from achieving true equality. Formal legal equality has been achieved, but it means little while the informal power of the patriarchy remains to be beaten. Men are oppressors – including within marriages – while women are victims. So simplistic and pretty offensive in all honesty. She then wades into the transgender debate arguing in favour of a situation whereby people who are biologically male but identify as female should be permitted to use spaces reserved for women and be sent to women’s prisons when convicted of serious crimes, including sexual assaults. When it comes to lesser crimes, Philippa appears to argue that women should not be sent to prison at all on account of the impact incarceration has on their mental health. Why is that so different for men?

My conclusion? I enjoyed reading the first 80% of this book, learned a lot and found the analysis to be original and thought-provoking. It is very effectively written and manages to pack a vast amount of information in. I did though take issue with a lot of the material presented in the final 20% of the book which seems to me to be partial and simplistically agenda-driven.