“I wanted to show that murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, whores and weavers, farmers and milliners, female husbands, hermits, the chaste, the jousters, painters, nuns, queens, witches and soldiers” mattered, even if not documented, Gregory writes in her introduction. She worked on the book for a decade.
At more than 500 pages, with extensive endnotes and a 30-page index, “Normal Women” is a behemoth you may be inclined to skim, until you realize you’re actually luxuriating in every word. Some may call this “pop history” and maybe it is, but it’s the pop history of a fevered obsessive.
It moves through England’s major historical epochs — the Middle Ages, the Tudor, Stuart and civil war years (all an absolute breeze for women, of course), the Industrial Revolution — until it lands at the ordination of female priests into the Anglican Church in 1994.
At each point, Gregory touches on themes of work, sports, sexuality, slavery, prostitution and protest. She traces changing norms, and women’s elasticating rights and freedoms. Always, there is a man’s ever-present need to define female nature. (Charles Darwin declared “that while men were evolving to greater complexity and strength, women were only becoming more fertile,” writes Gregory.)
Though you might start to feel slightly bedraggled by the drudgery of it all, thankfully Gregory has a novelist’s sense for story, character and moments of levity. We meet Elizabeth Wilkinson, an early-18th-century champion boxer, who “also fought with swords, knives and quarterstaff.” Boxing was a woman’s sport back then and Wilkinson the most famous English fighter until she disappeared from history in the late 19th century, missing her chance to get silk-screened onto a tote bag.
