Normal Women : 900 Years of Making History

Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasant’s Revolt was started and propelled by women, protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this ambitious and ground-breaking book, she tells the story of our nation over 900 years, but for the very first time women - some fifty per cent of the population - are no longer invisible in this history of England, but are at its beating heart. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records to find highway women, beggars and shepherdesses, through newspapers and diaries to find murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The ‘normal women’ you w