This was a great read. 

I am quite well versed in lots of this history already (and living the modern parts!) so much of this is not new to me.

However, it was brilliantly researched and well structured. The earlier parts suffered a little from being a bit all over the place but this can be the nature of writing about women in periods where significant evidence is missing or never existed in the first place.

I really loved the efforts to delineate the gradual devaluing of domestic work. 

I felt the ending became a bit more vitriolic and lost that measured analysis - understandable given this is the life women are currently living in this country and it's not changed nearly enough even in the last 100 years but a shame as it had managed to maintain a cool head up until then. I thought the afterword was unnecessarily repetitive. 

But the book as a whole was lively, I enjoyed the narration from Phillipa Gregory and if you are not well versed in the almost millennia long developments of women's lives in the country, then I can think of no better place to start than here.