Normal Women Quotes

“A sixteenth-century London bye-law ruled that men might not beat their wives after 9 p.m. to avoid disturbing the neighbours”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

“What we read as a history of our nation is a history of men, as viewed by men, as recorded by men.”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History―Unveiling the Untold Stories of Women Who Shaped England from 1066 to Modern Times

“New sciences developed, based on observation of the real world, rather than speculation. Rational thought was valued over inspiration, and logic over magic. All the natural world was closely observed and recorded by self-styled "scientists" who thought that the rich diversity in nature would be understood by being defined and categorized. The diversity of human beings, the one human body, that could have both male and female qualities, and change from female to male, did not fit this new hunger for precise and limited labeling. The new philosophers decided that there were only two sexes, fixed and unchanging, completely opposite, male and female, normal and other. They saw this simple binary model because they favored it. They found it because they looked for it, because it fitted their ideas of male and female status. When they saw behaviors or nature that did not support a rigid binary model, they explained them away. The changing sex of the developing fetus, the presence of all the sex organs in early development was ignored. Two sexes, completely opposite, were never a genuine observation, supported by all the other evidence, but an intellectual fashion, in all modernizing Europe thought, invented to explain and justify sexual inequality.”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History―Unveiling the Untold Stories of Women Who Shaped England from 1066 to Modern Times

“The Normans brought patriarchy to England, formalised it in law and kept women from the throne for five centuries.”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

“The top tier of landowners in England remains Norman: 70 per cent of the country is owned by 10 per cent of the people,20 most of them descendants of Norman invaders.”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

“The diversity of human beings, the one human body that could have both male and female qualities, and change from female to male, did not fit this new hunger for precise and limited labelling. The new philosophers decided that there were only two sexes: fixed and unchanging, completely opposite, male and female, normal and other.23 They saw this simple binary model because they favoured it; they found it because they looked for it, because it fitted their ideas of male and female status. When they saw behaviours or nature that did not support a rigid binary model, they explained them away. The changing sex of the developing fetus, the presence of all the sex organs in early development was ignored.24 Two sexes, completely opposite, were never a genuine observation supported by all the other evidence, but an intellectual fashion in all modernising European thought; invented to explain and justify sexual inequality.25”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

“same-sex marriages of women to women in the eighth century. These were legitimate marriages undertaken by parish priests who recorded the marrying women’s names in parish records in the usual way. As England came under the same papal jurisdiction, women-only marriages probably took place in English churches too. The wording of English marriage services from the tenth century speaks of a ‘wife’ and a ‘bride’ and blesses future children of the marriage but does not define the marriage as heterosexual.”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

“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.”
― Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History