Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history.
In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.
Synopsis
“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.
Editorials
Kathryn Harrison
Ulrich's new book is a work of selection and synthesis; she finds common archetypes in far-flung sources, making connections that are sometimes distant but never tenuous. The "Amazons" chapter is illustrated by examples from archaeological digs in Kazakhstan, South American folk tales and her own cultural backyard, which yields "an Olympic athlete, a female soldier, a lesbian separatist, a comic-book heroine." Her associative logic reveals how A prefigures Q or even Z rather than ordering A before B before C, and brings a female sensibility to what is more typically the linear, cause-and-effect formula of history, a majority of which, Ulrich points out, is written by men.—The New York Times
Michael Dirda
…[Ulrich]for many years taught a core course called "Women, Feminism, and History." Though she never quite says so, I suspect that that course provides the basis for this short survey of feminism from the Middle Ages to the present. But don't worry: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History is by no means jargon-ridden or academic in tone. Ulrich's style is plain and direct, agreeable but without frills, and she moves efficiently right along. The book is a pleasure to read.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
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)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
An often-quoted sentence from a 1976 article written by Ulrich (Harvard; A Midwife's Tale) has become the title and premise of her most recent book. Here, Ulrich explores how and why women make history and how three women-15th-century French poet and scholar Christine de Pizan, 19th-century American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and 20th-century English novelist Virginia Woolf-helped to define and expand the history of women through their writings and their beliefs. Ulrich uses each as a starting point in discussing both real and fictional characters in stories about Amazons, Shakespeare's sisters and his female contemporaries, female slaves in 19th-century America, and the history of ordinary women. Looking at new scholarship in women's history over the past 30 years, Ulrich calls attention to the expansion of this field of study and its influence on a whole new generation of feminists and scholars. A distinctly important and extremely readable contribution to the study of women's history, this book is highly recommended for academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ5/1/07.]
—Susanne Markgren
Kirkus Reviews
A portrait of women engaged in the history-making business, as well as a meditation on the occasional burden of being immensely quotable. Ulrich (History/Harvard; The Age of Homespun, 2001, etc.) wrote the titular sentence, now found on everything from T-shirts and mugs to compendiums of quotable women, in a scholarly article published in 1976. As she tells it, she was at the time "a 36-year-old housewife enrolled in a graduate seminar in early American history." Curiosity about the everyday lives of colonial women prompted an article on the funeral sermons of pious dead-and the sentence that launched a thousand bumper stickers. "My objective," she writes, "was not to lament their oppression, but to give them a history." Three decades and a few feminist movements later, her single line has spawned countless debates over what it means to make history as a woman, as well as what it means for a lady to be well-behaved. Did Marie Curie succeed because she "misbehaved," by pursuing science against the social mores of her time? Or did she succeed by behaving exquisitely well in science? Was Rosa Parks a revolutionary figure because she was a simple seamstress who made a single defiant stance? Or because she was a quiet, hardworking and dedicated member of the NAACP? Engaging in this debate, Ulrich writes primarily (and wonderfully) about the lives of three female writers separated by generations and continents. Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf each chronicled in her own way not just the bold, brash women who defied convention, but also the quieter ones who made history by simply recording their lives. Ulrich is especially interested in the ways individual womenreconcile the competing demands to act out or shut up. An erudite, compelling examination. First printing of 40,000The 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.Ulrich calls the slogan her "runaway sentence" -- it has shown up not just on clothing but on bumper stickers, tote bags, coffee mugs, and greeting cards. She has, over the years, collected responses to her words that have inspired, amused, and, in rare cases, offended her (a magnet with the quote over a leopard-print stiletto and a burning cigarette). But in Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (her "seldom" was changed to "rarely" in some versions), the Harvard historian makes it clear that the sentence -- which, standing alone, resembled an exhortation to women to "misbehave" -- was in fact an exhortation to history to pay attention to the lives of all women, regardless of how humdrum they appeared to be.
This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Ulrich's work. She has built her reputation on the painstaking examination of primary sources that, to less probing eyes, wouldn't seem to yield much (she sums up her career as "[caring] about things that other people find...boring"). Her Pulitzer Prizewinning A Midwife's Tale is a case in point: She takes the often oblique, often terse diary entries of midwife Martha Ballard and transforms them into a vital, captivating history of rural life in Maine during the late 18th century.
It's slightly disappointing that Well-Behaved Women is a departure from that M.O. Its purpose is to explore how women have made it into the historical record, and in doing so it jumps around from era to era and relies more on the work of other scholars than on Ulrich's own research. Thus, the book is not the thrilling work of history we expect from Ulrich; still, like her previous output, it's thought-provoking, lively, and beautifully written.
So which women have made history? Flip Ulrich's quotation -- misbehaving women often make history? -- and you get a clue. Until the relatively recent boom in women's studies, which led scholars like Ulrich to sources like Ballard's dusty diary, it was the fornicators, the adulterers, and the witches who were more likely to show up in written sources like newspapers and court records than those who quietly went about their business. (Then, as now, sex sells.) "History hasn't been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic," Ulrich writes.
Ulrich celebrates women from the past whose misbehavior took the form of writing when females weren't encouraged to do so. She organizes the book around texts by three such women: The Book of the City of Ladies, a collection of female biographies by Christine de Pizan, who lived in 15th-century France; Eighty Years and More, the 1898 memoir by legendary suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's semifictional essay about women and writing. The author doesn't say too much about why she chose these works in particular, but that randomness is somehow fitting in a book that finds Ulrich following her interests wherever they lead her in the service of a larger argument: Women must produce records for future historians to unearth.
Happily, in recent decades, women both ordinary and extraordinary, rebellious and tame, have increasingly been able to grab the historical spotlight. Ulrich credits this development to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s: Among its other achievements, second-wave feminism pushed for the inclusion of women both in textbooks and in the professoriat. Feminist scholars have rescued out-of-print works by de Pizan, Stanton, and countless others from obscurity, and in describing the progress in her field, Ulrich forcefully makes the point that history isn't just a dutiful record of what happened -- it's something that's created "when later generations care."
So knowing where Ulrich was coming from, should you retire your "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History" tote bag if you've meant it not as a comment on history but as a you-go-girl motto for women who act up? Ulrich would surely say no. As a historian, she's no stranger to the ways women have had to flout convention as part of the long struggle for their rights. And, more generally, she's acutely aware of how meaning is always up for grabs. "Historical icons can be appropriated for contradictory causes," she writes. If that's true, then so too can her words. They may have been intended to call attention to the invisible lives of those proper Puritan women, but now they also belong to those who support a woman's right to leave her underwear home in the drawer.
What a different world than the one Woolf lived in. As Ulrich recounts in the book's most compelling section, the novelist, in 1929's A Room of One's Own, set out to discover how British women lived during Elizabethan times. Woolf wonders why "no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet." With the history books basically silent on the subject of women's lives, she turned to fiction to answer her question, inventing Judith Shakespeare, a sister of the Bard who, because of her sex, is unable to develop her gifts as a poet. The imaginary Judith is eventually seduced and abandoned; pregnant, she kills herself. As far as Woolf knew, such would have been the fate of a talented female writer in Shakespeare's time.
Ulrich follows her retelling of Woolf with biographies of Aemilia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary, writers born in the Elizabethan era whose work was discovered centuries later. In a poignant conclusion to the chapter, she writes that Woolf, without knowing it, pursued the wrong path of inquiry. The salient question, in Ulrich's words, isn't why women didn't write, but "why was it that Woolf knew nothing about the women writers who were contemporaries of Shakespeare? The records were there, but no one had bothered to look." Woolf, of course, is now herself an established member of the literary canon; what a touching irony that Room, meant to encourage the flourishing of women's literature, has its own blind spot towards women writers. Overcoming substantial obstacles, women had been making history all along, but in Woolf's lifetime, history hadn't yet caught up with them. --Barbara Spindel
Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.