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

Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History sets itself up as an empowering and comprehensive review of the many contributions women have made throughout history. Gregory is most renowned for her historical fiction novels, however, in this non-fiction book, she uses the same writing approach and critical research to explain how “ordinary” women, the ones who were not queens, rich or famous made a difference throughout history yet their achievements are not well recognized. This book spans a history of almost a thousand years and is a brilliant celebration of women and their strength, creativity and survival through the ages and across the spectrum of society.

This review explores the organization of the book, major themes, historical information included in the work, the significance of Gregory’s work in current discourses on gender and history, and history remembrance. The Williams that appears in Gregory’s text as she spins tales concerning everyday womankind is not only the defector who gives up on history’s masculinist mythmaking but also the pragmatist who overwrites the familiar male achievements, royal personalities, and well-known battles.

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Overview and Structure

Normal Women is divided into historical periods beginning with the twelfth century and ending at the present. Separated into thematic parts, this book reflects the life of women in different epochs and demonstrates how they responded to the changes in society, laws, and expectations as well as the power shifts. Rather than concentrating on queens, duchesses, or highborn ladies—who often take centre stage in historical accounts—, Gregory draws attention to women who led ordinary lives: as peasants, tradeswomen, wives, mothers and rebels.

The book is divided into several parts, which are:

The Medieval Woman (1100-1500): This section is dedicated to women in Medieval Europe; their position in the feudal society; their involvement in farming; and their line of work with the church.

The Renaissance and Reformation (1500-1700): Gregory analyzes how the interacted shifts of the Renaissance and the Reformation benefited women in education, self-direction, and involvement in religious endeavours.

Industrialization and Empire (1700-1900): This part discusses how the Industrial Revolution and imperialism brought new opportunities and riding waves of changes for women especially the working class and colonial women.

The Modern Woman (1900-Present): In this segment of the program, Gregory looks at the evolution of female roles in the twentieth- and twenty-first century: women’s suffrage and civil rights, their struggle to receive fair wages today, and more.

In all these sections, Gregory narrates the life of unique women who may not be prominent but contributed to society and their families and or nation in one way or another.

Key Themes

1. Women as Agents of Change

Paradoxically, the freedom of the Normal Women lies in their subordination to the laws and narrow gender roles: women have always been active subjects. Gregory emphasizes that women tried to encircle a complex and not only react to male-centred performances.

For instance, in the medieval segment, she reveals how women played a crucial role in running estates during the absence of men in warfare. These women were not only responsible for agricultural productivity but also for the commercial as well as financial aspects. Although an estate was headed by a man, the woman was the one effectively managing the estate in the man’s absence at most of these estates. This way, Gregory demonstrates cases of wives and daughters who did manage to defy the legal codes and gain more power over the property and the decisions.

In the Reformation section, Gregory discusses women who got involved in religious reform movements. As with today, movements are often named after key protagonists such as Martin Luther or John Calvin, but Gregory points out the women who promoted Protestantism, sheltered reformers or demanded religious toleration. Despite this, their work only extended behind male figures, but their contributions were incredibly significant in instigating religious as well as social changes.

2. Gender, Class and Race in Girls

Quite expectedly, Gregory also focuses on how both class and race predetermine the gendered experiences of women. The book is not an apologia for womanhood and for that reason, it does not offer a clear cut of all forms of womanhood; instead, it offers an analysis of how the various classes and ethnicities affected the roles women could play in society. For instance, though upper-class women might have been more educated or had more leisure, they were pinned to their social restraints a lot more. On the other hand, working accredited more independence in some aspects but suffered from tighter economic inferiority.

Turning to industrialisation, Gregory goes through the lives of working-class women who were among the first to occupy factories. She talks about how women worked in textile mills and coal mines under tremendously hard conditions where they worked for long hours and became part of early labor reform movements. They struggled for increased wages, slanted working hours, and safe working conditions whose fruits women of the later generations reaped from the labour rights gained through the struggles of these women.

The book also discusses the effects of empire and colonization in women, especially in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. There Gregory raises the issue of the active participation of European women in colonial Ventures to get tread and richness from the oppressed Indigenous women who were subject to forced displacement, rape and servitude. In the same breath, she narrates revolutionary stories of women of colour bucking the system of imperialism, and she paints the ladies as carrying out these acts with courage.

3. Education and Knowledge

The second major theme of Normal Women is the emancipation of women through education—or the lack thereof they have. Historically, education among women was marginal, but Gregory makes certain that in cultures out there, women craved knowledge. Whether it was in picking up trades, preparing herbs or passing information among women, the aforesaid women have invariably been good learners and teachers.

For example, during the Renaissances, Women such as Isabella d’Este, and Margaret of Navarre brought about the literate circle and supported artists.

Some of the women though less apparent in public life engaged themselves in debates, scrabble, letter writing and reading. P. 34 Gregory describes how these women ensured they passed information to the next generations, in some instances though, they could not go to school.

The trends initiated in the earlier periods get steered further in the modern phase and Gregory provides her insights on the benefits of formal education and the opening of universities for women. She traces how education transformed into a means to the enlargement of citizenship rights culminating in political, scientific and literary involvement. Amazingly, Gregory paints ‘history of women’ intellectual history, in which even when they lacked institutional and structural authority, they learned and transmitted knowledge.

4. Privileges are something people perceive as something that is received without having to pay for it, family, motherhood and domestic work.

In the course of the book, Gregory focuses on what has been traditionally classified as a ‘woman’s province’ —the domestic space. Nevertheless, instead of considering domestic labour insignificant or of a lesser value than the industrial one, Gregory ennobled it and proved that the work of mothers, daughters and wives was a vital part of keeping society аlive. Women’s domestic roles were imperative, whether operating as household heads, child rearers, farmers or producers of cloth and food.

In Normal Women, the typical theme of motherliness is expressed not only in the direct significance of baby-making but also in the aspect of kinship and the ability to unite people. Listening to the account from Gregory, one can hear stories of women who being caregivers in their homes gained considerable measures of local power over their families and neighbors. For instance, during wars or triggering political unrest, women took up the required roles of supporting those around them, instructing them and nursing them back to health in case of ails.

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Historical Considerations and Critical Commentary

One of the book’s assets is Gregory’s capability of intertwining personal narratives with more encompassing historical processes without apparent shifts. It is not just that she tells history and retells it in her own words but she questions how women’s presence has been erased or marginalized in dominant and official narratives of history. In Gregory’s work readers are encouraged to rethink what they expect from history and the author provides different viewpoints where women are presented as active participants.

For instance, Gregory points out the activism of women in the suffrage movement to consist of the movement in addition to more or less recognized heroes like Emmeline Pankhurst and include the working women of late Victorian Britain. She goes deeper into providing a history of black women and other women of colour who struggled not only for the rights of women but also against racism in the struggle.

Gregory also presents critical sociopolitical concerns pertinent to memorialization and who gets to write history. She maintains that, by concentrating more on kings, queens, and warriors, earlier histories concealed the work, imagination and headship of plain women. Normal Women is the kind of book that redresses the imbalance and allows people a broader and more diverse perspective on history.

Contemporary Relevance

Given the social concern about gender equality, representation, and historical distortion in the present society, Normal Women appear in today’s society. In addition to contributing new information to readers’ chronicle knowledge, Gregory’s book also opens readers’ wondering how the history has been written and how it has been remembered. of her concepts which are relatively unique even today is the concept of Intersectionality – about gender, race and class.

In addition, Gregory offers modern readers examples of strong, enduring, and innovative ‘normal’ women to turn to, which might be easier to relate than kings and queens or movie stars to contemporary readers. These women experienced some of the hurdles that many women go through even to this day, employment, wage-earning, family issues, and demand for their political and social rights.

Conclusion

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History is a fascinating, empowering, and thorough read that puts women back in their rightful history. This book by Philippa Gregory is as informative as it is entertaining to read, which can be solely attributed to the author’s ability to do her research and weave a good story out of it in addition to her skills. In approaching the history of women in the lives of everyday people, Gregory provides a new audience for History and thus a nuanced view not far removed from modernity.

It is not a history book for academic historians or women-identified scholars only but for anyone who wants to get the spirit of historical actualization of the world by everyone, especially women. Delving through patriarchal history and questions of contextual relevancy, Gregory underlines that history is made by ‘no one’ but all those ordinary, or normal, women.

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