I paused on the second-to-last page of Philippa Gregory’s magisterial Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History. In her afterward, Gregory sums up the story she’s just told over 676 pages, a meticulously-researched look at the way opportunity and oppression have ebbed and flowed through the lives of women in England for almost a millennium. 

And by extension, women almost everywhere.

“In the medieval world,” she writes, “women led whenever they could, and whenever they were needed… Without training, and almost without prompting, some women worked collectively, understanding that their lives, their communities and even the natural world had to be defended against a system that was and still is designed to privatise and profiteer.

“The medieval food riot which still rides out, in one shape or another, into the modern world, is the great glamorous joust of poor women against the greater strength of the market and the merchants, the bosses and the landlords and their police—the most chivalric and heroic battle that ever was—under-reported, rarely recognized and mostly forgotten. Time and again, working-class women in history rounded themselves up and went out to keep prices fair, food in the village and common lands open.”

Truth. And not just for women in England. Look at the Canada-wide food riot just this spring aimed at the Loblaw corporation and its subsidiaries. By this I mean the month-long boycott of the Loblaws grocery stores, Shopper’s Drug Mart, No Frills superstores et al organized by case worker and single mother Emily Johnson, 29. According to an article in the Toronto Star, Johnson had been struggling with rising food prices since she started her second maternity leave in 2022. “I was just constantly juggling payday loans, or you know, paying people back,” she told the Star. 

She had good reason. In December, 2023, four academics crunched numbers to find that a family of four in Canada could expect to pay an additional $700 for their groceries in 2024, a staggering rise over 2023 prices, adding up to an annual household food bill of $16,297.20. 

At the same time, Loblaw was posting record profits. In fact, according to the Star, in the first quarter of 2024, Loblaw reported a 10 per cent jump in profits over the same quarter of the previous year, “the largest increase to Loblaw’s quarterly dividend in at least 15 years.” Meanwhile, Loblaws CEO Per Bank earns more than $22 million a year, and presumably doesn’t have to take out payday loans. Board chairman Galen Weston is a billionaire.

Oh, and by the way–Loblaw and its parent company, George Weston, were fined $500 million at the end of July 2024 for price fixing. At the centre of the suit is Loblaw’s admission that its companies were part of an “industry-wide” scheme run between 2001 and 2015 to artificially increase the price of bread. Not lobster. Not caviar. Bread.

Since these aren’t medieval times, rather than urging the women to rampage through the village marketplace, Johnson went on Reddit last November to complain about rising food prices and obscene corporate profits, starting a subreddit called Loblaws is Out of Control. It was a place where, as she told the Star, people “could just kind of collectively screech into a therapeutic void.” Thousands did, and Johnson began to think about organizing a boycott. 

By April of this year, her subreddit had 50,000 members, and Johnson headed of a group of eight volunteers from across the country who nailed down the logistics of a May-long boycott. They laid out a thoughtful program, urging consumers not just to boycott Loblaw and its subsidiaries, but to go to farmer’s markets and shop at their local grocery stores, which like small businesses everywhere have been struggling since the pandemic began.

Then May arrived, and the boycott got underway.

Did it accomplish anything? I haven’t found a good follow-up article on Loblaw’s finances, so it’s hard to know. Personally, I boycotted our nearest Loblaws supermarket, where the huge parking lot and giant superstore had proved convenient after I broke my ankle in late 2022, letting me hobble through my shopping in one go. This past May I started back to our local fruit and vegetable mart, the nearby fishmonger’s, our butcher’s, baker’s—no candlestick maker’s—and I’m keeping it up. It’s good exercise, not to mention friendlier. The butcher also has better meat than Loblaws and the fruit and veg store is cheaper. Yet I went to Loblaws once in June for heavy items (cat litter) and it was still quite busy, if not bustling. Nor did I notice a big drop in prices. Maybe the boycott is best read as a real-world version of Johnson’s subreddit, a screech of rage into the void. 

The void in this case being the lack of conscience among Loblaw’s executives.

I doubt Philippa Gregory would be surprised, since her book is a long history of women fighting for our rights and (spoiler alert) losing. She is the author of 31 books, most of them works of historical fiction set in England between the 15^th and 18^th centuries. Her most famous novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, was made into a lovely movie about King Henry VIII’s lover Jane Boleyn and her sister Anne Boleyn, whom Henry took as his queen before ordering her execution. The film stars Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also intended to read the novel, and didn’t. In fact, I’m unfamiliar with Gregory’s fiction, since I’m interested in a later historical period than the one she focuses on, my own reading and writing usually centring on the 19^th and early 20^th centuries when I venture into the past.

Yet Normal Women showed me the enormous amount of research Gregory does for her novels, helped by three women credited in her acknowledgments: Zahra Glibbery, Victoria Atkins and Anna Cusack. Picturing the files of data, no doubt digital and probably paper—boxes, basements, attics full of paper—leaves me cross-eyed with admiration. And years of compiling information about the lost lives of ordinary women has left Gregory able to address in great and convincing detail the rollercoaster Englishwomen have ridden over the centuries–which also gives a hint about women’s lives elsewhere.

On a macro level, Normal Woman is the story of women taking advantage of periodic calamities to achieve a degree of power. It seems to require a calamity. In 1348, the bubonic plague arrived in England, killing 30 to 40 per cent of the population in the first year alone. There were five million English people in 1300. By 1400, there were only 2.5 million. So few priests were left that women were allowed to take confessions from the dying. They took over family trades. In London, Agnes Ramsay inherited her father William’s construction business in 1349, becoming a prominent architect. Girls soon made up a third of the apprentices named in medieval rolls, and graduated to roles as master craftswomen, paid the same wages as men. Then—guess what? As England repopulated, and boys grew to adulthood, the number of tradeswomen and female apprentices began to drop, then flatlined, along with their wages. 

Gregory shows that this process of progress and retreat happened again and again throughout history. Whenever men marched off to war, women stepped in to defend their homes and villages, bringing in harvests, running the trades and taking up arms. I wrote last time about Elizabeth Treffry, who in 1457 came up with the idea of pouring molten lead from the walls of a castle to drive off marauding pirates. Then—guess what? When the men marched home, women were pressured back into the kitchen. This was true even in the 20^th century, when legions of Rosie the Riveters worked in munitions factories during the Second World War, only to be told when the war ended to go away and become Fifties housewives. 

On a micro level, Gregory backs up her case with a novelist’s eye for detail. I slipped torn pieces of paper into Normal Women whenever I came across a good factoid, and the book soon bristled with scraps. 

“Despite the hardship of their own lives,” Gregory writes, “many working-class women called for the abolition of slavery, signing the petitions in their thousands and boycotting slavery goods. Women famously led the rejection of produce such as sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate,” all cultivated by slaves, “although very poor women could not afford such luxuries for their families. Lydia Hardy wrote to her husband Thomas—the founder of the London Corresponding Society, the first working-class political association—from Chesham in 1792: ‘The people are here as much against that as enny ware and there is more people I think hear drinks tea without sugar than there is drinks with.’” (page 309)

“New theories about women’s bodies were based on the dissection of corpses and use of the newly invented microscope. The word ‘vagina’ was invented in the seventeenth century to define a ‘female’ organ that previously had been named as an internal or reversed ‘yard’—a penis.” (page 214)

Meanwhile, Gregory often writes about women who seem to have been trans and lesbians before the terms were coined. “A clergyman in 1737 officiated at the wedding of John Smith and Elizabeth Huthall, and later recorded his doubts: ‘By Ye opinion after matrimony my Clark judged they were both women. If ye person by name John Smith be a man, he’s a little short fair thin man not above 5 foot.’ But apparently the wedding went ahead, and the authorities were not alerted.” (page 265)

What is extraordinary, and a little exhausting, is the rapid-fire switch Gregory notes between the times women gained a degree of freedom and the time, a very few decades later, when it was taken away. That’s still the case. In the U.S., abortion rights were legalized in 1973 in Roe vs. Wade, and lost only 50 years later when the right-wing Supreme Court overturned the ruling, allowing many states to pass anti-abortion laws. This has already had grave effects on the lives of women.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in her June 25 newsletter, “A study published yesterday in the pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Pediatrics) shows that the idea of returning women to roles as wives and mothers by banning abortion has, in Texas, driven infant death rates 12.9% higher. The rest of the country saw an increase of 1.8%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies increased almost 23% in Texas while they decreased for the rest of the nation, showing that the abortion ban is forcing women to carry to term fetuses that could not survive. 

“When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to ‘eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.’ Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state.”

Cox Richardson also reports that the Southern Baptist Convention has recently called for a ban of in vitro fertilization, which it describes as ”morally wrong.” Lawmakers in Texas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma are currently threatening to eliminate no-fault divorce, noting that women file for divorce more frequently than men, and that under no-fault laws men can’t contest it, which these Republicans claim threatens the American family. Yet in The Guardian, journalist Eric Berger reports that after no-fault divorce was put in place across the U.S., domestic violence rates dropped by about 30%, the number of women killed by an intimate partner fell by 10%, and women’s deaths by suicide dropped by 8–16%.

It’s not much solace to read in Gregory’s book that although women keep losing our rights, we usually regain them. The problem is, the rebound takes decades, and usually happens after a calamity. War, pestilence, famine. Only after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop into town, scattering death and destruction, can women’s rights can be reborn.

Fluently written, sobering, and at times inspiring, Normal Women is an enormously valuable resource. Congratulations to Philippa Gregory.

And poor us.