Normal Women by Philippa Gregory and separating fact from fiction - Susan Dalgety

How can you write a book rooted in the female experience if you do not believe in binary sex

I have never read any of Philippa Gregory’s historical novels, even though the former Edinburgh University student is a phenomenon in the genre. She has written more than 40 novels, most of them set in the Plantagenet and Tudor eras, and all focus on women. She must be getting something right – she has sold more than 10 million copies – and her bestsellers such as The White Queen and The Other Boleyn Girl are classics of their type.

But despite not having any of her work on my bookshelves or on my iPhone, I did order her latest tome, Normal Women, which was published this week. Gregory’s ambitious work promises “a radical reframing of our nation’s story, told not with the rise and fall of kings and the occasional queen, but through social and cultural transition, showing the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of women in society – from 1066 to modern times.”

Exactly the kind of history book I want to read, I thought, as I clicked to buy it. The bed-hopping, double-dealing war-mongering of the British monarchy through the centuries may inspire novelists and film-makers alike, but I want to read about the women who built our country.

Women like my late mother-in-law, Irene, who had to give up an apprenticeship in a Stoke pottery to work in a munitions factory during the Second World War. Or the Fisherrow fishwives who kept the Edinburgh middle class supplied with fresh haddock and mackerel. And all the generations of women like my grandmother who had 12 children, one after the other, destroying her body in the process, or my great aunt who died giving birth in a hospital in Queens, New York, alone and thousands of miles away from her Irish homeland.

Real women. Strong, often silent, normal women. As the author herself writes of the book, “I wanted to recognise the normality of women, however they are named: rioting women, power-mad women, manipulative women, angelic women, cursed women”.

I was undeniably excited when the book landed with a bit of thud on my doormat on Thursday. I started flicking through its 600-plus pages immediately. It is not the kind of book that I usually read chronologically, from page one through to the last page of the index. Instead, I will dip in and out of it, picking out chapters and sections that interest me, or referring to it when I want to check a fact about women at war, or witchcraft.

The opening chapter struck me immediately, as it starts in 1066 with the invasion of England by Duke William of Normandy. Only a few weeks ago, I visited the Bayeux Tapestry in northern France and was astonished by the quality of its craftmanship and skilful storytelling. I marvelled at the 72 metre-long tapestry, created no doubt by an army of nameless women embroiderers nearly 1,000 years ago, and still as vibrant today as it was when it was first put on display.

Gregory points out that there are 632 men depicted on the artwork, nearly 200 horses, 55 dogs, 500 other animals and birds – and only five women, all of them threatened with or suffering violence. She even counted the number of penises on display – 88 on horses and five male ones. This simple calculation offers a vivid picture of women’s place in society at the time and in the centuries to come, invisible and subjugated to male power, political and physical.

This is going to be fun, I thought, pouring myself another coffee and turning to the afterword. I wonder what she has to say about the future of women after spending a decade researching and writing about our past. Dear reader, I was shocked.

Philippa Gregory, who prides herself as a feminist, does not believe in the “myth of two sexes.” She writes glowingly of a modern world where it is impossible to divide humans into two categories, male and female. “It is as fictional as a sorting hat – we are more diverse than and more varied, and more changeable over time, in a richer multiple word than the binary model…” And she points out that in the 1990s, American sexologist, Anne Fausto-Sterling, counted five sexes (male, female, merm, ferm and herm), while French scientist Eric Vilain suggested an “infinite number of biological genders.” It was at this point I dropped my coffee cup.

Of course people’s appearance, personality, and sometimes sexuality, can change over time. It would be a boring old world if they didn’t. Take David Bowie, whose metamorphosis from suburban schoolboy to dress-wearing bisexual to elegant man about New York town, married to a supermodel, is a masterclass in how our personal identity can change over the decades. But he was always male. As I am female, no matter that I have never knowingly displayed a cleavage, prefer trainers to heels and am rather more aggressive than my husband.

How, I wondered, as I laid down Gregory’s homage to ‘normal women’, can she write a book rooted in the female experience if she doesn’t believe in binary sex? The very premise of Normal Women is that for a millennium women were ignored, not because of their personality, but purely on the basis of their sex. This is how the patriarchy works. It is, as Marxist Friedrich Engels wrote, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

I have another book on my bedside table: Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Alice Sullivan and Selina Todd. This book is so explosive that academics at Edinburgh University – Gregory’s alma mater – tried to stop its recent launch at the university.

What dangerous thoughts lie within its pages? Quite simply that sex and gender and ‘gender identity’ are different concepts. Societies invent gender stereotypes, the modern concept of ‘gender identity’ describes personalities, and sex is a biological fact. I wonder if I should send Philippa Gregory a copy. It may help the research for her next piece of fiction.