Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“They didnt ask to be remembered,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel Ulrich wrote in 1976 about the pious women of colonial New England. And then she added a phrase that has since gained widespread currency: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Today those words appear almost everywhere—on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, plaques, greeting cards, and more. But what do they really mean? In this engrossing volume, Laurel Ulrich goes far beyond the slogan she inadvertently created and explores what it means to make history.

Her volume ranges over centuries and cultures, from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who imagined a world in which women achieved power and influence, to the writings of nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and twentieth-century novelist Virginia Woolf. Ulrich updates de Pizans Amazons with stories about women warriors from other times and places. She contrasts Woolfs imagined story about Shakespeares sister with biographies of actual women who were Shakespeares contemporaries. She turns Stantons encounter with a runaway slave upside down, asking how the story would change if the slave rather than the white suffragist were at the center. She uses daybook illustrations to look at women who werent trying to make history, but did. Throughout, she shows how the feminist wave of the 1970s created a generation of historians who by challenging traditional accounts of both mens and womens histories stimulated more vibrant and better-documented accounts of the past.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History celebrates a renaissance in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional historians. It is a tribute to history and to those who make it.

"'In 1976, graduate student Ulrich asserted in an obscure scholarly article that 'well-behaved women seldom make history.' But Ulrich, now at Harvard, made history, winning the Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prizes for A Midwife's Tale — and her slogan did, too: it began popping up on T-shirts, greeting cards and buttons. Why the appeal, Ulrich wondered? And what makes a woman qualify as well-behaved or rebellious? Several chapters of this accessible and beautifully written study are brilliant. In one, Ulrich follows the lead of Virginia Woolf (who invented an ill-fated fictional sister of Shakespeare) by digging into what we know — and don't know — about the women in the Bard's family. In another, she offers a piercing analysis of 'four 19th-century Harriets' — ex-slaves Tubman, Jacobs and Powell, and novelist Stowe — to uncover the interplay of race and gender in questions of liberation. And in a third, richly illustrated chapter, she utilizes a medieval book of days as a window into women's labor through the ages. If other chapters, such as a wide-ranging exploration of the Amazon myth and a rumination on second-wave feminism, don't cohere as tightly or showcase Ulrich's strengths as an extraordinary interpreter of ordinary records, this can be forgiven in a work that is so often sharp and insightful. 26 illus. (Sept. 7) ' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In this engrossing volume, Ulrich explores what it means to make history. She shows how the feminist wave of the 1970s has created a generation that challenged traditional accounts of both mens and womens histories, and which stimulated better-documented accounts of the past.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is currently 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard. Her book A Midwifes Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and several other awards. Ulrichs discovery of Martha Ballard and her work on Ballards diary have been chronicled in a documentary film written and produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, with major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Experience television series. Ulrich, currently a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and many other honors and awards.