Gee… yeah, I guess the 1300s were a pretty boring time to be a woman. As for the 2000s… I’m so bored, like, all the time, nowadays, just being a woman. This is the same kind of thinking that underscores the title (which, BTW, is too long and therefore totally un-hashtagable – who does that, in this day and age? Live tweeting, like, totally ruined.). Said title also left me uncertain whether this was supposed to be a history for girls about everyone, or a herstory-style history of girls for both boys and girls, or a kind of disco-toilets-at-3am thing for girls about girls about how we’re all just the same really, we all have the same heartaches and problems and we’re all so modern why can’t we all get along.

I eventually settled on the latter, partly because I assume the title is trying to reference that whole kind of retro-Girls Own / Glorious Book for Girls type thing that I really have no right to find intrinsically a bit obnoxious but do anyway.

Granted, men and women moved in different social circles during this period, but I think all this is Worsley’s first error: she considers men and women in isolation from each other, rather than how they interact (unless, that, is, they’re ‘interacting’ with the king’s …sceptre). The sainted Amanda Vickery also writes about women in history, but her series on the eighteenth-century home last year was far more inclusive – and actually far more insightful – for focusing on an arguably female-dominated space rather than on one 50% of society to the exclusion of the other (which is, ironically, exactly the kind of short-sightedness a series like this is trying to go against).

The Man: Charles II

Had the first episode of History for Girls – ‘At Court’ – looked simultaneously at king’s mistresses, king’s courtiers and king’s womanizing major poet, I think Lucy W would have been onto a winner – and it would have told us a lot about women in the period. Instead, there is no mention of the Earl of Rochester and his notoriously rakish companions beyond a bit of giggling at the cast-list for Sodom (King Bolloxinian and Cuntigratia, his queen; Clytoris, the maid of honour, &c) in the first episode.

The second episode does look at marriage, and the increased female freedom to choose one’s own husband in evidence during this period; however, there’s nothing about how that freedom might come with certain societal obligations to choose a sober and sensible fellow to espouse. Given that this was the age of the ‘King of Bling‘, whose court frequently witnessed happenings such as the one in the local tavern described by Pepys – Sir Charles Sedley, in the company of a group of friends, ‘took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it, and then drank it off’ in front of a large crowd – it seems silly to ignore the potential implications for women and their societal freedoms. There’s no mention of body parts being dipped in wine and Charles’ own sanction of such behaviour, at all.

Which is a shame, because Worsley does talk about the notorious image of Barbara Villiers (Chief Mistress) with her illegitimate son, posing as the Virgin Mary. Linking the two up through the common appropriation of religious imagery for lewd purposes would have been an interesting move. Instead, we get Barbara V as a strikingly ‘modern’ woman, who has power over the king (but no particular political interest in him) because she’s Mistress Number One. How liberating. How strikingly different from every other period of history, ever.

I really don’t know why otherwise shrewd historians are so mad on the old ‘modern’ chestnut – it also irked me at the Portrait Gallery’s First Actresses exhibition: this eternal language of ‘celebrity’ and ‘PR’ and ‘spin-doctoring’ that either existed in the past (in which case it’s not truly ‘modern’), or it didn’t (in which case your theory is manipulating the facts and distorting our view of the past).

‘Women in this period have a surprisingly modern attitude’, she tells us. So we’re all just the same really, it’s the sisterhood whatever era it’s in, why can’t we all just get along. OK, I get what she’s trying to say: it wasn’t all lead on your face and weird stuff on your nipples to make them look darker (which you learn all about, and that’s quite fun): there’s also something ACCESSIBLE about the past.

Nell Gwynn, one of Charles II's most famous mistresses

But, again, pretty much every period in history is claimed as ‘a point where things start getting modern’. Cardinal Wolsey was the first spin doctor; Anne Boleyn was the first feminist; Fanny Hill was the first businesswoman – isn’t it time we scrapped this cliche and started maybe thinking about ‘modernity’ as a fairly arbitrary concept? It’s an artificial divide intended to make stuff ‘relevant’, which I get, but perhaps it might have been more interesting to think about how aspects of this period’s thinking about women still prevail today than how Nell Gwynn was just like a seventeenth century Angelina Jolie. There’s an implied value judgement here, too: sure, women now rarely have to wear the ‘scold’s bridle’ (which we also learn about), but that’s not to say that everything else is fine and dandy.

I mean, on one level, good on Lucy for trying to make the past accessible at all: it should come as no surprise to Alphabet readers that I have drawn up several blueprints for a t-shirt with Samuel Richardson’s face on it accompanied by the strapline ‘BUT MADAM!’, so I suspect I am not the target audience for the whole accessible-history thing. Horse, gate, bolted &c. But on another level, it is a bit reductive. Which brings me on to my last big gripe: the dressing up.

Now, I love a bit of dressing up, me, but I didn’t really see how necessary this was – you don’t catch Simon Schama trying on fake eighteenth century calves (like padded bras, but for men concerned about their muscular shortcomings being exposed by contemporary fashions for breeches). Kinda wish you did, mind, but Lucy seems to go through an endless stream of minor sartorial humiliations for most of this programme, mostly whilst talking to various Esteemed Academics. I don’t have an intrinsic problem with it, but it did make her look a bit infantile, and I kind of wish it hadn’t.

So, in conclusion: nice bit of fun for a Monday night; enjoyed the shout-out to green-sickness; worth watching if you’re interested in historical bosoms. As far as any deeper insight goes, it’s not really up to scratch, and I wish it had been.

Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looks at the moment immediately after Charles II reversed this rule, and it’s a fun little look at some portraits, caricatures and paraphernalia of women who were allowed on stage, ‘from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’. It’s focused on portraits, but there are some super little earthenware tiles with different actresses on them in Room 3. There’s also a facsimile of the Yellow Pages-style brothel directory, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies; or, The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, illustrating the fall from grace of the once ‘Convent and Garden’ of Westminster Abbey – a bit too close to eighteenth-century Theatreland for PR-comfort. Since its reissue by the History Press this book has now achieved some cult status – the guy next to me, looking at it, said to his companion, ‘You know, Gladys: Harris’ List – that’s the one we’ve got in the toilet’.

Nell (c.1651-87) opens this exhibition – a talented comic actress, although she is popularly most recognised for inspiring Charles II’s last words ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ (she survived him by barely a year, fact fans). There are two portraits of her here, in both of which she’s got her mammaries out. This exhibition would have these as evidence of her ‘skillful manipulation’ rather than ‘brazen hussydom’; the second portrait shows her naked to the waist and looking directly at the viewer with a gaze at once languid and challenging. You might be reminded of Manet’s Olympia, condemned as ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ on its first exhibition at 1863, mainly because the nude is looking directly at the viewer rather than obligingly turning her head away for better ogling comfort. And indeed, such a tension between looking and being looked at probably underscored a lot of the moral uncertainty about the early actresses.

Later on, we get Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), powerful, tragic grande dame. She appears in Room 3 painted by Thomas Lawrence as public intellectual, tutor to the royal children – and at a vantage point that forces us to look up at her imperious face, rather than to avert our eyes from her naked bosom. This is hung alongside a number of grandiose actress-as-Muse paintings, large as their themes, and also including Muses of Comedy and society amateurs like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

But even in the late eighteenth century ‘actress’ still wasn’t a career you’d want for your wife. Thespiennes like Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (1754-1792) and Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829) – both exhibited here – gave up their acting careers, on request, upon marriage. While the eighteenth-century gentleman was not renowned for being into female careers in general, the issue here seems to be more ‘other men looking at your wife’ than anything else: after all, these men were ‘forward thinking’ enough to marry an actress in the first place. Perhaps they were nervous of the number of early actresses, like Nell, who had affairs with kings and nobles. If so, they had a good few hundred years of uncertainty left: Edward VII was still pretty into actresses at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship’ he complained to Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), eliciting the tart response ‘And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.’ (It may have been such impertinence that led to her replacement by another actress, Sarah Bernhardt, shortly afterwards.)

Dorothy Jordan in travesti - engraving after the John Hoppner painting in this exhibition

But, as this exhibition shows, one of the primary moral gripes with these early actresses was actually about something a bit unexpected: the travesti roles many of them built careers on. There are some fascinating visual representations in this exhibition of actresses – like Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816), whose bosom apparently ‘concealed everything but its own charms’ – in their famous ‘breech’ roles, both Shakespearean (stalwarts like Twelfth Night and As You Like It) and just… male (Tom Thumb). It seems that, after decades of young boys aping womanhood, the first actresses set themselves the challenge of continuing the noble tradition: it was conscious decision, rather than occasional dramatic necessity, for many of them to adopt the travesti.

The Immodesty here implied resulted in endless caricatures, many of which are exhibited here. My favourite was entitled ‘An Actress at her Toilet; or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ – though perhaps even stranger were the portraits of various male actors, including David Garrick, in drag – enormous hoop and all – as a kind of forerunner to the pantomime dame.

Take a feminist friend and thrash it out in the Portrait Gallery café with their superior yoghurt and granola, says this reviewer. And visit John Donne on the top floor, if he’s not gone into cleaning yet.

• The First Actresses runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January 2012.