2025 read #8: Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

580 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 22

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Everything in any given society is the result of a choice. The choice may have been deliberate, something coded into law to achieve a stated purpose on a documented date, or it may have been a gradual drift from a former attitude, but it was a choice either way. It’s endlessly frustrating that a significant political faction is either ignorant of this basic fact, or choosing to obfuscate it to ground their appeals to “traditional values” in some myth of “it’s always been this way, it’s natural.” In human culture, nothing is natural; nothing is a default. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to enforce your own preferred choices on others.

This book is a vast documentation of the choices that have been made in England regarding the roles, liberties, limitations, and expectations placed upon women since 1066. Gregory’s dexterous prose turns a potentially dry recitation of people and places into a compulsively readable narrative, equal parts inspiring and enraging. From the imposition of oppressive Norman laws, to the wholesale invention biblical misogyny in William Tynsdale’s translation, to the creation of binary sexes by elite men of the Enlightenment, to the cultural vilification of single mothers in the 1970s, Gregory traces the step-by-step creation of today’s gender hierarchy, drawn up in imaginary lists of differences between women and men, and enforced through courts, the pulpit, and the university.

Hand in hand with the laws and social movements meant to demonize and marginalize women went acts by the elite to create an enclosed, landowning, cash-driven society. The loss of connection to the land, and the prosecution of those who formerly could make a living off the common, created the conditions for colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the carceral state. I’ve often said the English aristocrats first colonized their own working classes; Normal Women documents the sociopolitical connections between classism, misogyny, and the invention of modern inequality:

The tradition that women work for their families without payment, and that men dedicate themselves to wage earning, became established by the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century — long before the rhetoric of a ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented.

In an era when the worst impulses of the elites — grasping for absolute power, artificially inflating prices for necessities while stripping the working population of livable wages — are racing toward fruition, the history of these cultural choices is a bracing, infuriating, necessary read.