Shortly after I finished reading Normal Women, I rocked my friend’s newborn baby to sleep. While she napped in my arms, we traded birth stories. Shortly after that, I sat by my grandmother’s side in hospital, holding her hand as she died.
Birth and death: women’s work since time immemorial. And yet it is strangely absent from this 600-page rollercoaster through British history from 1066 to the present. Its focus is the economic and legal position of women – which, don’t get me wrong, is absolutely fascinating. Did you know that it was the Normans who legally enshrined women’s status as the property of their husband or father, to the extent that their male “owner” was legally responsible for crimes the woman committed?
But its subtitle – “900 years of women making history” – falls slightly flat unless you think of history, like one of Alan Bennett’s History Boys, as just one thing after another. Instead, Normal Women should be thought of as “900 years of female class consciousness” or “900 years of how the development of capitalism consistently downgraded the very real contribution of women to society”.
Although the book at times turns into a bit of a litany of names for the sake of names, it manages to be both mind-openingly comprehensive and illuminatingly particular without becoming unwieldy. Certain section titles (“Crime and Punishment”, “Marriage”, “Protest”) recur again and again across the centuries, making it easy to perceive both the things that change and the things that stay the same.
As we pass through the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which put an end to “high-status, respected women choosing celibate lives, independent of men”; through guilds closing increasingly back-door routes for women to become full members; and through a perceptive critique of the rationale behind the Church of England’s volte face on women clergy, there is always a question lurking in the background – which Gregory largely avoids answering: when was the best time in history to be a woman?
Gregory obviously does not want to overcommit herself to a particular point of view (and in fact largely avoids the temptation to criticise women whose priorities and worldviews differ markedly from her own enthusiasm for abortion and transgenderism) but one could hardly write such an authoritative, well-researched tome without having any opinion on the subject. And so, for example, speaking of the beginning of the 15th century, she quietly notes that “It is too simple and too optimistic to talk about a ‘golden age’ for women. But in the years after the plague had killed so many and women’s riots had broken down the feudal restrictions, equal opportunities were there to be had for the surviving men and women.”
Work and sex, those idols of the 21st century, dominate the assessment of women’s lot. Presumably this is partly to do with available source material: court records feature prominently. But while variations on “Women Loving Women” appear in almost every time period, motherhood does not merit its own section title and menstruation has no entry in the index.
Like all history, the book is most illuminating about the concerns and assumptions of the present day. And so we have an inevitable afterword telling us that even in ye olden days, people recognised that gender is not binary. It’s a shame, really, as we’ve just spent a millennium reading in a generally non-judgmental way about how women have always believed all sorts of things.
Just because someone believed something in the past doesn’t make it true – as someone ought to know who was obviously chuckling away at her keyboard as she detailed the pseudo-scientific things men have believed about the nature of women in the past. And yet this is a book which should be of interest to all Catholics because it gives the lie to so many modern narratives that tell us that a woman can only be one thing. Like pink? You’re a girl. Except that pink used to be a boys’ colour. Wannabe tradwife? Sixty per cent of 17th-century wives kept themselves by their own labour. Womanhood is a catholic (ie broad and inclusive) concept. God created us as we are, and we are many things.
Don’t think of Normal Women as history. Think of it as philosophy with evidence; or as one inference after another.
Suzanne Topham homeschools her three children in Oxfordshire.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.