Normal women, p.1
Normal Women, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
Part 1: 1066–1348 Doomsday
Doomsday
Country
Abbeys and Convents
Towns
London
Women’s Status
Women’s Work
Women at War
Crime and Punishment
Violence Against Women
Marriage
Women’s Love and Sexual Desire
The Nature of Women
Part 2: 1348–1455 Women Rising
The Great Pestilence
The Peasants’ Revolt
Women Rising
Pushback
Marriage
Single Women
Prostitution
Women Loving Women
The Nature of Women
Courtly Rape
Part 3: 1455–1485 Women at War
Women at War
Women’s Work
Marriage
Prostitution
Part 4: 1485–1660 Becoming a Weaker Vessel
Religious Change
Religious Protest
Women Who Died for Their Faiths
Religious Exiles
Preachers
‘Weaker Vessel’
Manly Qualities
An Unkingly King
She-soldiers
Hard Times for Poor Women
Violence Against Women
Prostitution
Women Enslaved
Upper-class Women’s Work
Middling-class Women’s Work
Labouring Women
Education
Medicine
Witchcraft
Faiths
Women at Play
The Invention of ‘Women’s Work’
Protest
Petitions
Marriage
Widows
Single Women
Women Loving Women
Part 5: 1660–1764 Locked Out and Locked In
Land Grab
Protest
Power Grab
Political Protest
Work
Education
Exclusion
Prostitution
Slaves and Slave Owners
Literary Work
Sport
Romanticism
Love and Marriage in Novels and Life
Women’s Love for Women
Female Husbands
Cross-dressing Women
Single Women
Crime and Punishment
Witchcraft
Violence
Health
Part 6: 1765–1857 Making a Lady
Slavery
Servitude
Slaves Protest Against Slavery
Elite White Women Protest Against Slavery
Working-class White Women Protest Against Slavery
‘Breadwinner Wage’
Women’s Work
Education
Health
Separate Spheres
Sex
Women Divided
Elite Women Protests
Working Women Protests
Crime and Punishment
Rape
Sport
Defining Girls and Training Ladies
Young Victoria
Marriage
Single Women
Sapphism
Women Representing Themselves as Men
Female Husbands
Part 7: 1857–1928 Separate Spheres
Protest
Women Against the Vote
Women for the Vote
Working-class Protest
The Nature of Women
Single Women
Women Loving Women
Female Husbands
Marriage
Victoria, Wife and Empress
Sport
Work
Part 8: 1928–1945 Into the World
Women Get the Vote
Work
Health
Women Loving Women
Women at War
Women Loving Women at War
Women Dressing as Men . . . and Becoming Men
Protest
Demobilisation
The Last Witch
Part 9: 1945–1994 A Woman Today
Women Endangered
Rape
Work
Women in Authority
Protest
Women Divided
Immigration
Health
Sport
Wealth
Women Loving Women
HeteroSex
The Nature of Twentieth-century Women
Spiritual Equality
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I first had the idea for this book around the time that I wrote The Other Boleyn Girl, when I found a woman, Mary Boleyn, who made her own remarkable life but enters history only as the sister to the more famous Anne. She made me think of all the other women whose names and stories are lost, and even the stories my mother told me: about growing up during the war years, of her mother who did not dare to be a suffragette, of her aunt, a scholar who could not graduate from an English university, of the letters she edited, written by her kinswoman – an eighteenth-century feminist. This book is about them, and all the women who ‘lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.1
The first schools in England were church schools and the first scholars were priests, so the first historians were men like the Venerable Bede who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People in AD 731, naming only 18 women in their own right from a population of about 1 million: 0.0018 per cent – statistically invisible. There are only six chronicles surviving from the early medieval period – all written by men, mostly about the kings and their wars, and these are the basis of all the histories of the period.
They set a tradition. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill, published in the twentieth century, is a description not of the ‘peoples’ but of English-speaking men: 1,413 named men, and just 98 named women. What we read as a history of our nation is a history of men, as viewed by men, as recorded by men.
Is 93.1 per cent of history literally ‘His Story’ because women don’t do anything? Are women so busy with their Biology that they have no time for History, like strict timetable choices – you can’t do both? The only women of interest to the male record keepers were mothers, queens, taxpayers and criminals. The records are all written by men – mostly men of the church – and they have little or no interest in women. Women are there, making fortunes and losing them, breaking the law and enforcing it, defending their castles in siege and setting off on crusades; but they’re often not recorded, or mentioned only in passing by historians, as they were just normal women living normal lives, not worthy of comment.
Medieval women only enter the records when the record keepers complain of them: when they are accused in the church courts of adultery or promiscuity, when they are named in the records as gossips, when they appear in the criminal courts charged with thieving or usury or fraud, when they are registered as prostitutes or kidnapped. They’re often named as rioters: every time land was enclosed, women in England broke fences, trespassed, poached, reclaimed the common land. Every hungry year they broke into bakers, corn mills, or the barns where grain was stored for export, and divided it among the crowd and paid the right price. Sometimes the local priest or magistrate would arrive and oversee the weighing and the selling. If the baker or the merchants resisted, windows might be broken and food might be stolen, but usually everyone understood that the poor women – women whose names were not even recorded – were price-setting and rationing food. But then, in the eighteenth century, the mood changed: merchants and the landowners stopped appeasing the crowd and the women were named as troublemakers, identified in the court records and their harsh punishments recorded. Part of my work in writing a history of Normal Women has been recognising the normality of women, however they are named: rioting women, power-mad women, manipulative women, viragoes, angels, witches.
Poor medieval women had a sense of themselves: supporting each other, employing each other, naming other women as their heirs, holding other women to a standard of behaviour – but legally they were owned by their fathers or husbands and bound to stay in their communities. Only in work gangs and guilds could they have a sense of themselves as a group with a distinct shared female life. They did not record themselves as a group, they did not define themselves, describe themselves nor publish, nor are there are many diaries of individual women’s lives: until the English civil wars in the middle of the seventeenth century drove women into writing petitions and demanding rights from the men-only parliament, keeping journals of their experiences, recipes for their medicines, private letters to keep families together and businesses intact, and then – finally publishing, so that women could read about themselves.
They asked why women were not in the Creation story as an equal to Adam? In the explosion of women writing fiction in the eighteenth century, they asked: ‘How is a woman different to a man?’ About 1860, they asked, ‘Why can’t we get a divorce on the same grounds as men?’ Aroun d 1890, they started to ask, ‘Why can’t we vote?’ Around 1950, they asked, ‘Why are we not in History?’ – and women historians began the process of rereading the historical records to find out what the women were doing in their dark and silent past while men were shining a spotlight and amplifying themselves. These are the historians who produced the first great histories of women, succeeded by biographers of heroines and of the family, social historians of movements and then the editors of lists of 10 memorable women or top 20 names. All these publications help put women into history. But the biographies emphasise exceptional individuals, histories of the family see women as daughters and mothers – Biology again! The histories of groups speak of witches or suffragettes or midwives – focusing on bizarre or campaigning groups, not the normality of women’s lives, and the shortlists of women are too short – only 20 women in history? Even Winston Churchill counted 98!
Indebted to all these authors, what I wanted to write was a huge book about women – those engaged in unusual practices and those living uneventful lives, those who were up against their society and those gliding along the top of it, the few we have heard of and the millions that we have not. And I wanted to show that murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, whores and weavers, farmers and milliners, female husbands, hermits, the chaste, the jousters, painters, nuns, queens, witches and soldiers – are all part of women’s history, all part of our national history – even though they lived and died without a man noticing them for long enough to write down their names.
And finally – here is just one, very dear to me:
Elaine Wedd, around 20 years old, a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. This picture reminds me that when we write normal women into the history of our country, we restore ourselves: our sisters, our friends and our foremothers. And this is my mother – a normal woman, like all heroines.
[And Cover] Elaine Wedd (Courtesy of author)
Part 1
1066–1348
Doomsday
Doomsday
The invasion of England by the Norman army in 1066 – Duke William of Normandy versus King Harold of England – would be far more than a regime change for the women of England. It was the hardening of a tyranny by men who captured the kingdom and its fortune, passed it father to son excluding women, created laws enslaving women, composed religion and philosophy to denigrate women; men whose violence was directed at women, and whose need for cash and greed for profit would underpay and overwork women for centuries.
The account book compiled to establish the value of lands for royal taxation could be challenged no more than Judgment Day itself, and was named in the twelfth century as the Domesday Book. For the women of England, the Norman invasion was indeed a day of doom.
The Bayeux Tapestry, a near-contemporary 70-metre long embroidered linen panel, shows an invasion of men: 632 of them. Nearly 200 horses are depicted, 55 dogs, 500 other animals and birds – but only five women, all of them threatened or suffering violence. Anglo-Saxon Queen Edith mourns her husband Edward the Confessor; another woman (probably Ælfgifu, the wife of King Cnut – or Ælfgyva as it is on the tapestry) is being touched by a clerk or priest; a woman flees a burning building with her son; and, in the margin, a naked woman runs from a nude man with an erect penis, and another naked woman defies a naked man who holds an axe.
There are more penises than English women in the tapestry: 88 on the horses, five on the men. The expert designers, weavers and embroiderers – probably English women themselves working for a Norman lord1 – showed allowable male sexual violence arriving with the Normans and tolerated by them.
William of Normandy was a notoriously aggressive leader, who had already brutally conquered his homeland with a battle-hardened army. Their arrival marked the end of an England that had settled into relatively peaceful rule under Anglo-Saxon lords, inspired by a concept of ‘good lordship’, where women had legal rights, some owned land and their own fortune, ruled over their tenants, could marry or separate freely and could choose their heirs.2
A third of the surviving pre-conquest wills were written by women, signing their own names. Wynflæd, grandmother of King Edgar, left a fortune on her death (c.950), and a special bequest to her daughter Æthelflæd of favourite jewellery and an estate: ‘Her engraved bracelet and her brooch, and the estate at Ebbesborn and the title deed as a perpetual inheritance to dispose of as she pleases; and she grants to her the men and the stock and all that is on the estate.’3
The ‘men’ would have been the villeins attached to the land with tenancy and employment agreements, the landless serfs who worked for free and were housed by the lord, and the slaves, who made up as much as 10 per cent of the population,4 captured in war or purchased. They too were landless, unpaid and unfree, mostly white workers. Wynflæd ordered that her slaves be freed, for the benefit of her soul; but two highly skilled among them, ‘a woman-weaver and a seamstress’, she left to her daughters; a cook (probably a slave) was left to her granddaughter Eadgifu, who also inherited two chests, her best bed-curtain, her best tunic and cloak, her old filigree brooch and a long tapestry.5 Other children were to receive a ‘red tent’, a double badger-skin gown, tapestries, bed linen and books.6
Wynflæd was not the only wealthy woman landowner in Anglo-Saxon England. In East Anglia and the town of Oxford, about one in every seven landowners was a woman, and 14 per cent of the tenants on royal lands were named as women.7 The Domesday Book – a snapshot of England at the moment of William’s invasion – listed 16,667 male landowners and 479 women.8 Among these were some extremely wealthy women: Gytha Thorkilsdottir, Countess of Wessex, mother of King Harold, owned massive estates in southern England stretching over 11 modern counties. Harold’s influential and wealthy wife Edith Swan Neck held vast lands. Two of the greatest women landowners of 1086 were not even named in the Domesday Book – they were referred to as the wife of Hugh, son of Grip, and the mother of Robert Malet.9
A woman named Asa, a small landowner in Yorkshire, appeared in the Domesday records claiming her lands after separating from her husband. The jury in the case followed the old Anglo-Saxon law: Asa won and held her land in her own right. She was lucky to come under Anglo-Saxon law – the new Norman laws would rule that no wife could own land or keep it after marriage without a specific settlement. No woman would annul a marriage or divorce without permission from the church courts or Parliament for the next eight centuries.
Another woman tenant, Widow Leofgeat, held 400 acres in Knook in Wiltshire, probably a pension from the Anglo-Saxon royal court where she made the gold fringe to trim royal robes.10 The widow of Manasses, the royal cook, held her dower lands in her own name.11 There was a woman landowner and brewster in Chester and a woman jester or musician-poet – Adelina – who held lands in Hampshire.12 A skilled sempstress, Æflgyd, was paid in land at Oakley in Buckinghamshire for teaching the sheriff Godric’s daughter gold embroidery work.13
The Domesday Book had been commissioned to show the invader the state of the land that he claimed as all his own. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described: ‘After this had the king a large meeting, and very deep consultation with his council, about this land; how it was occupied, and by what sort of men. Then sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out “How many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.”’14
All the lands belonged to the king by right of conquest, and he favoured his chiefs of staff with grants of land. Female ownership all but died out. In 1066, there were 25 women landholders recorded in Essex but only 9 recorded in 1086. Yorkshire listed 19 women in 1066 and 4 in 1086. Suffolk listed more than 50 women owners in 1066 but 43 of them vanished in only 20 years. The great landowners were now all Normans, all male. William did not grant any land to women except kinswomen and a few nunneries.15
Anglo-Saxon women who refused to accept Norman rule found themselves landless. Edith Swan Neck, widow of King Harold Godwinson, lost her widow’s dower of Walsingham Manor and the famous shrine associated with her. Gunnhildr, King Harold’s own daughter, lost all her lands and hid in a nunnery to escape a forced marriage to a Norman lord.16 Lower-class Anglo-Saxon women were robbed, assaulted and raped by the invading soldiers. Although William commanded the nobles to ‘restrain themselves’, the ‘Penitential Ordinance’ ruled that rapists and fornicators should pay nothing more than a fine, and William’s viceregents – Odo of Bayeux and William FitzOsbern – protected their men when they were accused of plunder or rape. English women were abducted and sold into slavery.17
