Even when wives and husbands both work full time at paying work outside the home, the wife does on average twice the child care and housework of her husband.31 Women aged 26–35 do the most: 34 hours a week. If a woman was paid the current minimum wage of £9.50 for working inside the home for 34 hours and outside the home for 40 hours a week, she would earn a total of £36,556 gross a year. But she is not. She is paid only for the work she does outside the home and so she earns £19,760. By working for free for 34 hours a week, she effectively halves her hourly rate. All this, before she is paid a lesser rate than a man: on average, at the time of writing, a woman earns 90p for every £1 earned by a man – and then zero for the double shift she puts in, on her own, at home.32

  Those who prefer to mystify relationships between men and women describe this unpaid labour sweetly, as being done ‘for love’ and, like True Love, this burden lasts forever. Very old and infirm wives still do the bulk of the housework: cooking, cleaning and emotional servicing long after their husband has retired as a breadwinner. The job of being a wife lasts till death: there is no agreed pay, no holidays, no pension and the hours are interminable.

  The invisibility of women’s work has affected our history. The histories that pluck individuals from obscurity and claim them as heroines do nothing to illuminate the recorded but ignored work of millions, all the invisible women: scientists, inventors and business entrepreneurs whose inventions or patents or fortunes were traditionally registered under their husband or their male partner’s name. As recently as 2018, the BBC History page summed up the presence of women in medieval warfare: ‘Very little filters out from British history during the next 16 centuries about women at war, though British troops encountered Joan of Arc between 1429–31.’33

  That’s one woman (and she’s French!) in 16 centuries of British history? One? You don’t have to be raving feminist to say – surely there were more than that? Even present-day media does not reflect women’s real lives: in 2019, women were quoted in only 29 per cent of general news stories in the UK – in stories about economics or warfare they are consulted even less.34

  Design features male biometrics. Technology from mobile phones to seat belts can only be used in comfort by men. Does anybody doubt that self-driving cars will be adjusted for male dimensions and that women drivers will have to pump up the seat to get their eyes to line up with the technology? New drugs are tailored for men and mostly tested on men; the dosage and side effects for women can still be uncertain, even when the drugs are licensed for release.35 A staggering 80 per cent of drugs withdrawn from the market in the US were causing unacceptable side effects on women.36

  Women patients suffering from heart attack are more likely to survive if treated by a woman doctor according to an analysis of 580,000 heart attack cases over 19 years in Florida, USA. A total of 13.3 per cent women died under the care of a male doctor, compared with 12 per cent who were cared for by a woman.37 The only explanation offered for this discrepancy is that male doctors expect to see heart attacks in men but not in women, and women do not present with enough urgency – women have only themselves to blame for not alerting male doctors that they are in the process of dying before them. In a 2022 report, the Journal of the American Heart Association reported that women who visited emergency departments with chest pain waited 29 per cent longer than men to see a doctor and were twice as likely to be diagnosed with mental illness than heart disease.38 Post-traumatic stress disorder is most common and most severe in women who have been raped, but PTSD is most studied in male veterans.39

  Leaving aside the nature of women – imagined and unknown – women’s genitals were invisible to medical men until the late 1500s. Andreas Vesalius, publishing to universal respect in 1543, explained that only ‘hermaphrodites’ had a clitoris. In the copy of the 1559 edition of Thomas Gemini’s Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio held by Cambridge University, the diagram of the female genital area has been deliberately and very neatly cut away, presumably to spare the blushes of clerical students.40

  In 1559, the clitoris was described as ‘the principal seat of women’s enjoyment in intercourse’,41 but 18 years later, a description of the vagina copied that of Aristotle, and said it was a mirror image of the male genitals, with ovaries where testes would be, but inverted in the female body, specifically designed to accommodate the penis: ‘It is an instrument susceptive, that is to say a thing receiving for taking . . . the likeness of it as it were a yard reversed or turned inward having testicles likewise aforesaid.’42 A 1578 text book for surgeons refused altogether to describe female genitalia, as it would be indecent ‘to lift up the veil of nature’s secrets in woman’s shapes’.43 By the eighteenth century, more physicians and scientists would have seen a flea in the enlarged drawing of Robert Hooke’s bestseller, Micrographia, in 1665, than would have seen an accurate drawing of female genitalia.44

  Anxiety about female sexuality and the hopes of eradicating female desire from ladies’ lives prompted Isaac Baker Brown to introduce the clitoridectomy in the 1860s, creating a covert fashion for the medically valueless and dangerous operation, now still performed but illegal in England as FGM – female genital mutilation.45 The clitoris was briefly sighted in the 1901 edition of Gray’s Anatomy, but disappeared again in the 1948 edition, reappearing later. Today, in otherwise anatomically correct sex dolls made in China (the biggest world producer), the dolls have no clitoris.46

  Even medical drawings of this century are rarely accurate: most often the vagina is depicted as a wide-open hole rather than a closed flexible tube, and the labia are shown as perfectly symmetrical. The size of the clitoris is generally underestimated47 and the obstructive nature of the hymen is greatly exaggerated.48 The clitoris is still frequently described as a small penis, although the internal parts of the clitoris are far bigger than a flaccid penis, connected to a different brain area from that of the penis, and have nothing to do with urination.49 Even pornographic images of the clitoris and the labia are far from biological accuracy, almost always bald, and sometimes surgically altered, sometimes abused.

  Men recorded their mistrust and fear of female genitals very early. The reference to women as ‘weaker vessels’ in the Tyndale Bible of 1522–35, and the later development of imagery of women as leaking vessels, resonates with the theory of humours that saw women as cold and moist, and the fear of female menstruation and lubrication. As Shakespeare’s King Lear says:

  Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above.

  But to the girdle do the gods inherit; beneath is all the fiends’.

  There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit –

  burning, scalding, stench, consumption!50

  Girls are taught very young not to touch their genitals anywhere but for washing in the bathroom and in some families they are never correctly named.

  Even in our supposedly more liberated times, female genitals are objectified by men: drawn in graffiti and photographed in pornography, and massive advertising budgets are spent on advertising to stimulate anxiety about size, shape, hairiness and scent.51

  An advert – withdrawn as late as 2021 – described the ‘foul sweaty smell’ of a healthy vagina, which could be solved by ‘female hygiene sprays’ for the genital area. One product, in the top 10 on one so-called advice site, advertises that it has an ‘exotic kiwi scent’.

  (This is a kiwi.)

  Kiwi bird (GlobalP/Getty)

  Even archaeology has been blinded by archaeologists’ beliefs that the women of societies thousands of years before ours, in faraway countries, behaved in accordance with the timeless and eternal ‘nature’ of our imagining, forever dependent on a superior man – ‘Men . . . become, first, formidable hunters and then, masters of the universe.’52 Unbelievably this was written in 2004 – a misunderstanding of both evolution and modern-day hunter-gatherer societies.

  When a high-ranking Viking warrior, buried with weapons and a war-game board to plan military strategy, was discovered in the Viking graves at Birka, Sweden, in 1878, archaeologists assumed it to be a senior male warrior. As late as 2011, the suggestion that the warrior might have been a woman, as praised in the folklore and ballads about women warriors, was still firmly denied. Six years on, DNA testing proved the warrior was indeed a woman.53

  There the story might end – with a new understanding of the capacities of women and the honour given to them, even in early Viking society. But in 2020, the professor of archaeology at Uppsala University proposed a new spin: that the warrior was a trans man, as he says ‘someone living as a man’.54 So no Viking woman warrior after all, but a person with female DNA and male gravegoods. Not a fully fledged fighting woman with respect from her Viking comrades – but a woman borrowing male goods? Wearing male clothes? Passing herself off as male? And why is this a more persuasive explanation for a woman buried as a Viking hero than the more obvious suggestion that she was a birth female Viking heroine? And that military success can be won by a woman?

  In 2021, at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Hattula, in Finland, archaeologists discovered the grave of a Viking warrior, the body wearing female clothes, on a soft feather blanket with trinkets, and two swords. They believe that the person had Klinefelter syndrome, giving rise to XXY chromosomes.55 This had probably been a person respected in their eleventh-century society, wearing women’s clothing, fighting as a warrior, perhaps understood to be one of the many sexes on the huge spectrum of sexual identity that was then known but which we have tried to forget.

  Now, archaeologists all over the world are re-examining sites previously defined by experts blinkered by their own beliefs. In 2009, a pair of skeletons, discovered holding hands in a 1,500-year-old tomb in Modena, Italy, were known as ‘The Lovers’ and assumed to be a man and a woman. In 2019, improved DNA analysis, using tooth enamel, showed that the hand-clasped pair were actually both male. Other ‘lover’ archaeology finds are now being explored to see if they too sit outside the expectations of conventional heterosex – and may also be homosexual or lesbian lovers – or whether there are other, yet unknown explanations for a pair of bodies being buried holding hands.56

  When history is focused only on men, and women are defined as anything that men are not, we misunderstand so much, and we study so little. We find what we are looking for, and anything that does not fall inside our belief system we ignore. We not only lose sight of real women, but lose sight of what a woman might do, and of the relationships between women: we don’t see daughters, or sisters, beloved friends and women lovers; we lose sight of what, according to sociologists, is the strongest relationship in Western family ties: mothers and daughters.57 Instead we focus on the relationships women have with men: the dependent relationship of a girl with her father, the constantly criticised life of the single woman, the desperate search for a breadwinner husband, the shame of a divorcee, the anxious freedom of a widow. The absence of interest and records about the mother-daughter bond leaves a vacuum which is filled with an excessive interest in heterosexual courtship, marriage and the end of marriage, which becomes the principal topic of fiction, and the only love in History.

  Despite the extraordinary strides that have been made by women since the nineteenth century, our society is still guided by an ancient contempt for women. When women workers complain of women bosses only because they are female, when women critique the behaviour of other women as inappropriate to their sex, when women oppose campaigns for women’s rights, or mothers are disappointed in the birth of a girl, we are seeing internalised contempt. When women campaign to ban abortions, even for women who have been raped: this is internalised contempt, agonisingly exercised on another woman. When women do not fight for rights and freedoms for independent women, they are trading their rights for the safety and protection they hope will be given to them by a dominant husband in a restrictive marriage – and forgetting that the most dangerous place to be a woman is at home with the man she forgives.

  When a woman believes her future happiness and financial security depend upon her marrying the best partner from a small pool, in the brief window of her most fertile time, she becomes hypervigilant about her own appearance and hypercritical of her rivals. She ignores her own desires and ambitions in order to concentrate on the only goal open to her – snagging the best man possible. The ‘male gaze’ views women as objects, reproducing an unending stream of images, teaching women to watch themselves through male eyes in what has been called an ‘inexorable surveillance of women . . . internally reinforced by the women themselves’.58

  When male candidates are favoured for promotion, any woman candidate has a good chance only against another woman. Female colleagues are automatic rivals; quick to criticise, compete and manipulate. There is no chance of networking or sisterhood in these circumstances. The occasional praise of ‘exceptional’ women feeds the rivalry. When a woman accepts the compliment that she is ‘above her sex’, she is enjoying individual praise at the price of denigrating her own sex. As Andrea Dworkin writes: ‘The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to dissociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular (not one of them), she grants the inferiority of her sex class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from which she is never free.’59

  Solitary heroines at the top of their business do not encourage other women just by being there. A single woman in a leadership role will have usually got there by being hugely superior to her male colleagues without frightening the bosses – she will have learned to manage her success by conforming to the culture. She may out-man the men – like Elizabeth I sometimes did, calling herself a king – or out-women the women, as Margaret Thatcher liked to do, praising herself for a soft perm and wearing chiffon. Leaders usually recruit in their own likeness – but this is often an impossible task for a woman who has only got to where she is by outdoing other women candidates for the single opportunity to take the token place. A man reaching the top table is among his peers; he will have been assisted upwards by a network of other men. He knows that it is in his interest, and that of his sons, to continue the tradition of patronage – it’s called the ‘old boy’ network. But a woman reaching the solitary chair placed for a woman at the top table may have been helped by no one, indeed she may have got where she is only by fighting the system, male competitors and female rivals. Without warm memories of university networks, mentors and a helpful introduction from someone’s aunt, she is not in the mood to help someone’s niece.

  There is no ‘nature’ of women, because there are too many versions of women to be encapsulated in one definition. Definitions of women always told them what they could not do; definitions of women are always prohibitions. What I have seen through my research – deliberately focused on women not usually featured in the national history – is not a ‘nature of women’, which is too beautifully broad and infinitely varied to define. But I have seen some trends. When women are banned from profitable professions they continue their vocations under another title and at less pay – but they hardly ever just disappear. When they are formally banned from education, they teach themselves, or learn alongside brothers, or persuade fathers, husbands or mentors to teach them. Even when women are told they are inferior and hopeless, a few stubbornly persist, survive and succeed. And – most importantly – when women are blocked from open power they work underground, in all sorts of networks, forming communities hidden by acceptable female behaviour, masquerading as social meetings, gaining respectability by drawing on tradition – but women denied power end up taking it.

  In the medieval world, women led whenever they could, and whenever they were needed: raising crusades, defending castles, holding towns under siege, setting community standards, conserving the natural world and their access to it, sharing food stores and protecting children. (They also condemned each other, stole, libelled and robbed – that’s diversity!) 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 recognised 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.

  In the modern world, centuries later, women respond to national emergencies, learning trades and skills and risking their lives and happiness to make their contribution during wartime. They create rent strikes, work strikes, support other women, campaign against war and pollution. Women protest curfews, protest courts’ leniency to abusive men, collectively search for missing women and mourn the ones found dead; they open their homes to refugees and staff food banks. Women – with a one in a hundred chance of getting their rapist convicted – still go to the police in the hope of protecting other women, and waive their privacy rights to argue against early release and inadequate sentencing. Women revived ‘reclaim the night’ marches when they were told they should fear the streets, and spoke up in millions of voices in the MeToo movement, and demanded control of their own fertility worldwide.

  Despite assurances that an economically successful future requires poisoned rivers and beaches and cruelty to poor people, homeless people and refugees, despite centuries of being told we are powerless, women still stand up for each other, for children, and for Nature, as we have done since the earliest of times. Sometimes we agree on what really matters to us, sometimes we agree on who we are – and often we don’t: and that’s because we do not have one male-defined ‘nature’ but we are diverse and complex.