Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best. I'd like to begin our episode today with a quote about women, about English women specifically, and the place that they've been relegated to in our popular history.

Quote, when we think of English women of the past, we mostly think of the women of the 1800s and 1900s, big dresses and stagecoaches, bonnets

and balls.

These two centuries were when women's lives were the most limited.

Women were the most inactive, and since they had to give all their wealth to husbands on

marriage, the poorest.

It was the start of the modern world, and women had no place in it. But there

is much more to history than those 200 years, and women were powerful, active, and effective in all

of it. End quote. That passage is from author Philippa Gregory's new book, Normal Women, and I find

this quote, distressingly true, whether it's

pride or prejudice or Downton Abbey, our cultural concept of historical English women, especially here in

America, is most often confined to bonnets and balls, as it says in this quote, but women have been

and always will be so much more. As Philippa Gregory also writes, women have been soldiers, spies, business owners, rulers,

revolutionaries, scientists, and more.

Women have been nearly everything.

And so in the spirit of rediscovering and reclaiming these forgotten stories, I am thrilled

to welcome the incredible novelist and historian Dr. Philippa Gregory. Welcome, Philippa. Hello, good to be with you. Thank you for asking me.

Philippa Gregory is one of the world's foremost historical novelists and nonfiction writers. She wrote her first ever novel, Wideacre, when she was completing her Ph.D. in 18th century literature, and it sold worldwide heralding a new era for historical fiction.

Her flair for blending history and imagination developed into a signature style, and Philippa went on to write many best-selling novels, including the other woman girl and the white queen.

Now a recognized authority on women's

history, Philippa graduated from the University of Sussex and received a PhD from the University of

Edinburgh, where she is a regent and was made alumna of the year in 2009. So congratulations on all

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