"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 a renaissance
in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional
historians. It is a tribute to history and to those who make it.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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