Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History » (Reprint)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich received her B.A. from the University of Utah, her M.A. from Simmons College, and her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. She was previously Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and is currently Phillips Professor of Early American History and 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. Her book A Midwife's Tale won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the American Historical Society's John H. Dunning and Joan Kelly Memorial Prizes. Ulrich's discovery of Martha Ballard and work on the diary has 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 is also the author of numerous articles and reviews and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and many other honors and awards.

“They didn’t 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 Pizan’s Amazons with stories about women warriors from other times and places. She contrasts Woolf’s imagined story about Shakespeare’s sister with biographies of actual women who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries. She turns Stanton’s 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 weren’t 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 men’s and women’s histories stimulated more vibrant and better-documented accounts of the past.

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

The Barnes & Noble Review

The web site of the Sweet Potato Queens of Jackson, Mississippi, a determinedly outrageous women's group, features a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History" alongside another that reads "Never Wear Panties to a Party." For Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of the first quote, the fact that these two shirts don't seem out of place together is a measure of how much her words have been transformed since their original appearance in a 1976 scholarly article on the funeral sermons of Puritan women in Colonial America.

List of Illustrations     xi
The Slogan     xiii
Three Writers     3
Amazons     40
Shakespeare's Daughters     74
Slaves in the Attic     105
A Book of Days     143
Waves     191
Afterword: Making History     223
Acknowledgments     231
Notes     233
Index     271