laurel thatcher ulrich well behaved women

Pizan, Stanton, Woolf: three women with “intellectual fathers” and “domestic mothers,” who were “raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning” and “married men who supported their intellectual ambitions.” For each, her “moment of illumination came through an encounter with an odious book” expressing man’s “disdain” for women. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past.

Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older?” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies,” written in 1405 Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More,” published in 1898 and “A Room of One’s Own,” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 - all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past,” but what we choose to remember. Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Is it an accident of fate that “Well- Behaved Women Seldom Make History” is published as we look ahead to what may become the historic first of a major political party nominating a female candidate for president? Has Hillary Clinton arrived at the forefront by misbehaving? The mostly male forums of public life may patronize women with token attention and even, sometimes, take their words seriously, but they rarely if ever pay attention to a woman as they would to a man, without consciously taking her sex into account. Given millenniums of patriarchy, the issue of women speaking out is necessarily that of their speaking out of turn. Much of what is characterized as female “misbehavior” is a matter of voice - of a woman insisting she be heard, paid not only attention, but also the respect due a being as fully human and necessary as a man. Her study of wives and mothers and daughters as they were remembered in funeral eulogies, the sole record of women who lived and labored in silent obscurity, illustrates a critical point. It was in an article for “American Quarterly,” about the pious and extremely well-behaved colonial women described by Cotton Mather as “the hidden ones,” that Ulrich made her now familiar observation. “The pervasive theme is rebellion.” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich begins her new book, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” struggling to explain - understand - the appeal of an aside she made in the spring 1976 issue of an academic journal, a comment that has become a popular slogan printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers, usually without her permission and often without attribution.

Laurel thatcher ulrich well behaved women