BLOODY BRILLIANT WOMEN
THE PIONEERS, REVOLUTIONARIES AND GENIUSES YOUR HISTORY TEACHER FORGOT TO MENTION
CATHY NEWMAN
Wm Collins, 384pp, £20
Channel 4 news journalist Cathy Newman takes up the cudgels on behalf of history’s unsung heroines. In the Sunday Times, Laura Freeman enjoyed an ‘energetic and engaging history’, wondering if it might be more aptly titled ( pace Ken Clarke) ‘“Bloody Difficult Women”. That’s how Newman’s women got things done: by being difficult, defiant and stubborn as donkeys.’
Men have not liked it, reflected Freeman. ‘Horace Walpole called Mary Wollstonecraft a “hyena in petticoats”. Sir Mark Sykes complained that the explorer and Arabist Gertrude Bell was a “silly, chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass”.’
In the Guardian, Hannah Jane Parkinson (despite, oddly, never having previously heard of Jennie Lee) was delighted to find that ‘Newman corrects further historical wrongs in including diverse women often sidelined: women of colour, trans women and those with disabilities.’ And Katie Glass in the
Evening Standard also approved: ‘It highlights women’s power rather than lack of it, as well as its ebb and flow over the centuries: the surprising number of freedoms enjoyed before the prudish Victorian period; the opportunities opened up by the First World War that closed after it.’
Newman has crammed a lot of women into her pages – too many perhaps. Freeman wondered if looking for role models had elevated ‘not particularly interesting stories’, and Glass too found that she ‘packs in so much that some stories are reduced to just a few lines’. But she concluded it was an excellent introduction, as did Liz Dexter on the website Shinynewbooks who was delighted to learn that it was a woman ‘who coined the phrase “Health and Safety”.’