Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
“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 wha...more
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published
September 4th 2007
by Knopf
(first published 2007)
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I wish this book had begun with the conclusion. In it, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes:
Confronting these shifting meanings, some people wonder whether history has any value at all. At any given moment it is hard to know whom to believe and what to trust. That's why details matter. Details provide the contexts in which Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Friedan mounted their arguments. Details help us understand the precise circumstances that allowed Artemisia Gentileschi to become an artist, or Harriet...more
Confronting these shifting meanings, some people wonder whether history has any value at all. At any given moment it is hard to know whom to believe and what to trust. That's why details matter. Details provide the contexts in which Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Friedan mounted their arguments. Details help us understand the precise circumstances that allowed Artemisia Gentileschi to become an artist, or Harriet...more
This book is like a teaser or a movie preview - it just cracks opens the door to give you a peek at what's out there so you know that there's a lot more where that comes from. Using her own famous slogan as a launching pad, Ms. Ulrich covers an amazingly broad spectrum of time, class, and geography to give us a taste of the breadth and depth of women's history. For example, she discusses the legends of Amazon warriors, women's suffrage, Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the stories of Judith and Susanna in th...more
Oh Laurel, you don't disappoint. I really enjoyed this book. Perhaps it's the way I approached it, grabbing it up for a quick ten-minute read here and there during the day. Gave me lots of time to think over what I'd read. Brain food.
Reading this: Like sitting in Ulrich’s Harvard seminar. Made me nostalgic for those lovely English grad school discussions. Came away doubly determined to familiarize my girls with the women who lived through the ages.
Still, this book wasn't what I'd expected. I ass...more
Reading this: Like sitting in Ulrich’s Harvard seminar. Made me nostalgic for those lovely English grad school discussions. Came away doubly determined to familiarize my girls with the women who lived through the ages.
Still, this book wasn't what I'd expected. I ass...more
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History covers far too much ground in few too pages. The text attempts to relates to the thesis--that well-behaved women seldom make history--but it often comes across as seeming annecdotal and trite at times. The reader learns a little about the Amazons, a little about second-wave feminists, and a little about Wonder Woman, among others. It's all fascinating, but it prevents a level of depth that most readers yearn for. I did like, however, how the author framed "...more
I know that women's studies scholars have reviewed this book and found it simplistic and repetitive. I, however, am not a women's studies scholar. I am a woman who wants to understand how my culture, stretching back for centuries, has formed the experience of women. I was not at all disappointed. I found this book interesting, entertaining, and educational. I did emerge from it rather grumpy and sharp toward my husband and three boys, but now that my husband is eager to read it as well, I think...more
I wanted to like this book - really. As a child, I would go to the biography section in the public library and just pull books at random off the shelves to take home and read. The librarians didn't know what to do with a child who came up with 11 books and wanting to check them all out. I chewed through those books every week.
I don't know what it is about this book, but the lives of the women she talks about were ... well boring. How do you make history boring? I couldn't finish it and it went b...more
I don't know what it is about this book, but the lives of the women she talks about were ... well boring. How do you make history boring? I couldn't finish it and it went b...more
I was hoping for Ulrich to follow up her excellent forward about the book's title with a more complex approach to "women who make history" (including both the women themselves and the historians who make them into history.) Instead, I was somewhat disappointed in the way the book concluded by a one-sided celebration of 70's feminism. However, nobody must be more aware of the blatant bias in this chapter than Ulrich, who spends much of the book speculating on the power of particular historical le...more
Years ago, I saw the title of this book and it grabbed my imagination. The book didn’t exist at the time; this was originally a sentence in an article that she wrote in 1976. The sentence escaped captivity and was used on t-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers- sometimes without either credit or permission. I used the sentence as my sig. line for a couple of years. Here, Ulrich explores what it means to make history.
Years ago, women were pretty much ignored in history books. It took many yea...more
Years ago, women were pretty much ignored in history books. It took many yea...more
I was a little afraid of this book, I'll be honest. First off, I had no idea that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is LDS until about 30 pages in. This surprises me because I tried (and failed) to read her other book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, which I thought was good, but so boring I fell asleep probably about 275 times reading it. It surprises me that I didn't pick up on it, not surprising that she's Mormon. Anyway, I was suspicious of it because I'm gen...more
I've had mixed feelings about this statement (which I've seen mainly on bumperstickers). I didn't realize until this book that Ulrich coined the phrase (it was in a paper she had written about Puritan women's funeral services). I had read her book A Midwife's Tale as part of a college course. In this book Ulrich explores the statement and where it has gone and meanings it has taken on (it can obviously be interpreted in various ways) and then retells the history of the women's movement through t...more
Its obvious Ulrich did a great deal of research to bring together all of the facts and stories that are in this book and I appreciate that effort and the new awareness it gave me.
I do have an increased interest in women's history, now, and a better understanding and appreciation for women who have played a part in making and recording it.
I get the title now- and understand where it came from and the various meanings that have been derived from it. I think the book generates many interesting poi...more
I do have an increased interest in women's history, now, and a better understanding and appreciation for women who have played a part in making and recording it.
I get the title now- and understand where it came from and the various meanings that have been derived from it. I think the book generates many interesting poi...more
Ulrich takes 3 historical feminist figures (Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Virgina Wolf) and then talks about their work. These women knew nothing of each other, and yet their work has very similar concerns and threads. One of the important points that Ulrich brings up is that feminism tends to start from scratch every other generation because women do not know their history - historians generally ignore women because of their supposed unimportance. We have entered an age (sinc...more
What I liked about this is that the title is misleading in a sense. In the Introduction Laurel laughs at the surprising use of those words, when she first used them they were meant as a statement about all of the day-to-day women, living loving beautiful lives who don't receive any recognition because they aren't acting crazy and doing wild things. It was more a statement for that woman as opposed to a statement for the Amazon warriors or the political protestors. However, most of the book is fi...more
A beautiful book that at several times brings tears of emotion to your eyes. This book is not what you are prepared to see or feel. You aren't prepared to read about Angelina Grimke and her condescension by other women of her time for being an abolitionist or the Pomo Indians, who were denied the right to speak their native tongue but expressed their heritage through basket weaving and teaching their daughters and granddaughters the art. You aren't prepared to learn about Elizabeth Cady Stanton'...more
Feb 05, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine
added it
Unlike her previous works, which focused on a single location, era, or life, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's fifth work of nonfiction takes a broad view of women's history. Though critics felt that her associations and organizing devices were clever, a few questioned some of the connections between stories. Critics also diverged over Ulrich's style: some found it dry and academic; others considered it clear and compelling. Ulrich, a pioneer in women's history in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to produc
...more
Before Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was a Harvard professor, she inadvertently created a slogan—Well-behaved women seldom make history—while writing a scholarly article on Puritan women. Since then, the slogan has appeared on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and in funeral eulogies. After years of seeing the slogan used and misused, Ulrich decided it was time to write a book to clarify what the slogan means to her. She does this by taking the reader back in history through the eyes of the women that lived i...more
I really enjoyed reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale so I was excited for this one. But I had a really difficult time getting past the feminist undertones that to me seemed to devalue motherhood and choosing to devote one's life to raising children and making a home. I also found it to be an incredibly dry and boring review of historical events I've previously studied in better contexts.
What I did gain from this book was an increased appreciation for women in history who have fough...more
What I did gain from this book was an increased appreciation for women in history who have fough...more
Great title and concept behind it. Maybe this is the best part of the book as opposed to the examples. Some of them are compelling such as Christine de Pizan and her book The City of Ladies in the early 1400s. Others such as the contemporary Red Hat Society of women who just want to have fun are less so. Also some of the examples such as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are familiar now to anyone who has been thru some academic or activist version of "Feminism 101."
Personally I wld hv p...more
Personally I wld hv p...more
Overall I found this book very interesting, although there were many interesting places where I wished she'd go a little further with a topic she was discussing, instead of changing focus. Besides the history she covered, I found her discussion of women and academia fascinating, in part because I just completed a graduate degree and have never felt that women are underrepresented in academia(if anything, they were overrepresented in my department), so it was interesting to see how much things ha...more
I enjoyed reading Thatcher Ulrich's scholarly take on an off-hand remark she made in the early years of her academic career. Clearly she has spent a good deal of time thinking about how women have made history and how they are discovered by later researchers and the public. After a chapter on the history of the phrase, she takes the work of three notable women and looks at how they behaved or misbehaved and made history. The works of Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf...more
The last book for the "Women Unbound" challenge (ending in November, I think).
I thought this was a very good overview. There are lots (LOTS) of anecdotes and the sheer number adds many more women to Ulrich's history than if she just focused on de Pizan, Cady Stanton, Woolf, de Beauvior, Friedan, etc. I wanted a little more depth, though, beyond the "Big Three" of de Pizan, Cady Stanton, and Woolf because I felt like we were skimming over the top of history. But it was still interesting and adds...more
I thought this was a very good overview. There are lots (LOTS) of anecdotes and the sheer number adds many more women to Ulrich's history than if she just focused on de Pizan, Cady Stanton, Woolf, de Beauvior, Friedan, etc. I wanted a little more depth, though, beyond the "Big Three" of de Pizan, Cady Stanton, and Woolf because I felt like we were skimming over the top of history. But it was still interesting and adds...more
I learned so much about women from history, ancient and modern, that I now want to delve deeper into their lives and stories -- Christine de Pizan, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, and my Mormon pioneer foremothers who published the pro-suffrage, pro-women's rights periodical "Women's Exponent" in Utah from 1872 to 1914. I love the last line from the book: "Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records, and when later ge...more
I did not find Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History as engaging as I was expecting. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich inadvertently invented the slogan that is the title of this book; it was just a sentence in an article she published in the 1970s, but in the mid-90s someone used it and it took off as a slogan printed on t-shirts, mugs, etc. In this book, Ulrich explores further what this idea really means. She covers a lot of ground in exploring the history of women and how they have made history, and t...more
I've never considered myself a feminist. At the start of 2011, I tried to live my life as one of the guys all the while taking an interest in how the mind works & the differences between the sexes. Eventually, my curiosity drove me to take a look at how women think, I purchased books on the female brain & gender roles and it all lead me to Ulrich's historical account of womens history. I read this book in hopes of coming to terms with my history, along with realizing I was a self hating...more
It took me quite a while to finish this book. Not because it wasn't interesting per se, but mostly because I felt it lacked the kind of complexity that I expected from the title and her introduction. On some level, I expected (following the introduction) that Ulrich was working to re-appropriate the phrase she had coined "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History" with a complex discussion of how women have entered the historical record, and I was hoping that she would provide multiple lenses throu...more
What I love about this book is Ulrich's ability to tell a compelling historical story through biographical sketches of individual women. It is true that each sketch just gives you the taste of the life of an individual woman in another time and another place, but each small vignette reminds the reader that history is comprised of both the ordinary and the great. For most of human history, the lives of women have seemingly been left out of the historical narrative, but Ulrich reminds you that ju...more
My Jen always gives me the best books. This isn't about behaving badly to make history but rather how history has failed to give the well-behaved women their voice. "If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn't been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the s...more
Oh I really liked this. I judge the awesomeness of a book by how often I stop and read passages outloud to McKay. This gets 5 starts solely because I think I could have read every word outloud to him, except he's trying to read the Chronicles of Narnia right now and didn't have time to listen to me read this whole book to him.
It reads in the same way my brain thinks. Lots of details and it goes everywhere. You start talking about Woolf and end up with the Great Chicago Fire. Now that's the kind...more
It reads in the same way my brain thinks. Lots of details and it goes everywhere. You start talking about Woolf and end up with the Great Chicago Fire. Now that's the kind...more
This book is not a diatribe, in spite of the veiny-armed woman on the cover. The title, of bumper-sticker fame, is not a clear statement but a touchstone-- a demonstration of slipperiness of interpretation, of history, of ways of defining women.
This book is a thoughtful and close look at women and history. Women looking at history, history looking back at women, women lost to history and where they went... I'm afraid I can't do justice to the delicate and enthralling way she weaves together medi...more
This book is a thoughtful and close look at women and history. Women looking at history, history looking back at women, women lost to history and where they went... I'm afraid I can't do justice to the delicate and enthralling way she weaves together medi...more
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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. In The Age of Homespun...more
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“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
—
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“Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make a history when someone notices.”
—
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