Normal Women by Philippa Gregory

Link to buy my books Amazon.co.uk: Ruth A Symes: books, biography, latest updateReview by Ruth A Symes

Written in the colourful and thought-provoking style of Gregory’s historical fiction, this stupendous compendium of the last 900 years of women’s history in England has much to offer the family historian. Injustice against women goes back at least as far as the Norman Conquest, purports Gregory, but for most family historians, it will be her discussion of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which informs and resonates.

Rest assured  – just about whatever the ordinary women in your family experienced over the last few hundred years will be covered here. Work, slavery, marriage, childbirth, criminality, male violence and protest are all tackled through a wealth of entertaining examples supported by reference to changes in legislature. Gregory’ is particularly interested in ‘the huge spectrum of sexual identity that was [known in the past] but which we have tried to forget.’ She puts this down to the start of Civil Registration (1837) which insisted upon recording one of only two options for the sex of a child.

If you have a specific question about the women in your family, you are likely to find information, and similar examples, here to help you. How unusual was it that my ancestor was pregnant at the altar?  20 to 40 percent of brides ‘in English country parishes’ were apparently in this condition in the period 1800-1848. How rare was it for a woman to remain single in the early twentieth century ? There were 1,158,000 single women recorded on the 1921 census.  Gregory fleshes out such half-known statistics with hundreds of vibrant stories that intersect powerfully with the stories of the ‘normal’ women in all of our family trees.