insight feminism provided. I was doing an article for Ms. about sexual
harassment on the job and reading about Henry's wives in my free time,
but it took awhile to put together the fact that Ann Boleyn's position as
lady-in-waiting to Henry's wife Catherine of Aragon was her job, and that,
far from trying to lure Henry away from Catherine, she had spent over a
year tactfully trying to repel his sexual advances. I was writing in feminist
publications about women's right to their sexual desires, and then reading
authors who dismissed Henry's fifth wife, Kathryn Howard, as a "wanton"
and a "juvenile delinquent" because she was actively sexual. I was reading
about feminist theology and about women who suffered martyrdom for
their right to define God according to their own consciences. Slowly, the
idea for this book started to grow.

Meanwhile scholarly books began to come out-- Retha Warnicke's
and E.W. Ives's intriguing interpretations of Ann Boleyn, along with a
number of anthologies, all incorporating some of the ideas on the bur-
geoning scholarly discipline of women's studies. Popular books have fol-
lowed-- Alison Weir The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Antonia Fraser The
Wives of Henry VIII. Both have incorporated some of the scholarly
women's studies books, and both are informed to some degree by popu-
lar feminism. But neither has used the work that seems to me essential in
re-exploring any women's histories ("herstories," as some feminist writers
prefer to call them)--the writings of activists like Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin
, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer
, Ingrid Bengis, Adrienne Rich, and hundreds more in the small
feminist publications around the country over the past twenty years
( Sojourner, Women: A Journal of Liberation, Off Our Backs, Second Wave, etc.).
It was from this work that much contemporary understanding of women's
lives has come--concepts like wife battery, sexual abuse, sexual harassment,
and female culture, as well as challenges to male definitions of such diverse
areas as work and female sexuality. The understanding of God has been
questioned not in terms of Catholicism or Judaism, belief or disbelief, but
in terms of women's need to experience spirituality and divinity in light
of their own experience. My career as a writer had begun in this tradi-
tion, and it seemed to me that through it I could make a contribution to
the study of the remarkable women of Tudor times.

The decision to embark on such a project creates a challenge--how
to bring this approach to a study of women who lived five hundred years
ago without being anachronistic and without projecting wishful thinking
onto people whose lives and perceptions were in so many ways different
from ours. The first step, obviously, is to thoroughly examine their lives-

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