What did women do to shape England’s culture and traditions in nine centuries of turmoil, plague, famine, religious reform, and the rise of empire and industry? Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen, offers the answer as she draws on her new book, Normal Women.
With accounts of female soldiers, highwaywomen, pirates, miners, ship owners, international traders, theater impresarios, runaway enslaved women, “female husbands,” social campaigners, and rebels, she discusses the individuals, the prejudice they faced, and how they built a society as diverse and varied as the women themselves.
The “normal women” Gregory profiles rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses as part of their everyday lives. They went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They committed crimes (as well as treason), worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted—a lot.
In conversation with Ali Vitali, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent and author of Electable: Why American Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House…Yet, Gregory shares her radical retelling of her nation’s story—not of the rise and fall of kings and the occasional queen but of social and cultural change, powered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of women from 1066 to modern times.
Copies of Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of History (HarperOne) are available for purchase.
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