Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
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…
LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH is the author of numerous works on early American history and women's history, including A Midwife's Tale, which won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in History and became the subject of a PBS documentary film. A former MacArthur Fellow and past President of the American Historical Association, she retired from Harvard University in 2018 as 300th Anniversary University Professor. She now lives in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Her online courses "Tangible Things" and "Women Making History" can be found at HarvardX.