Well Behaved women never made history

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[Beauty for Ashes 257]

The Women's History Boom

Transforming a profession from the inside.

By Megan Marshall

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2007, at 2:05 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Ulrich looks at three women who experienced feminist epiphanies at very different historical moments. She begins with Christine de Pizan, who wrote the Book of the City of Ladies in 15th-century France, celebrating the lives of "worthy women—queens, princesses, warriors, poets, inventors, weavers of tapestries, wives, mothers, sibyls, and saints," after realizing that the books on her study shelves, all written by men, were filled with "devilish and wicked thoughts about women." Ulrich then turns to the United States and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In her memoir Eighty Years and More (1898), Stanton wrote of her youthful vow to agitate for legal reform after reading, in her father's upstate New York law library in the 1820s, the "inexorable statutes" depriving married women of their civil rights. Ulrich's tour of book-inspired awakenings ends with Virginia Woolf, whose question "Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?" led her to the library of the British Museum in 1928. There Woolf found only a dismaying profusion of volumes by men emphasizing that woman was "naturally the inferior" sex—and she wrote her landmark plea, A Room of One's Own, in response.

Interested to demonstrate how women's history has flowered in recent decades, Ulrich devotes the remainder of her book to showing how contemporary historians have tackled many of the questions raised by these earlier writers, employing ever more enterprising, archivally based scholarship. Important to her account, as well, is a survey of the "multiple feminisms" that arose during the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and '70s and led to women's embrace of previously male-dominated professions, not least the profession of history.

Have women changed the practice of medicine, law, or politics by joining those games? The matter is open to debate. By contrast, how history is studied has radically changed—though not as its pioneering polemicists might have imagined. Back in the days of WHRC and the Mormon Sisters Inc., there was plenty of talk of finding our "foremothers" and of writing an alternative "herstory," a favorite neologism of Laura X. Yet it turns out that, as Ulrich's book shows, we didn't need to change the language to discover and tell the stories that Pizan, Stanton, and Woolf were searching for.

For the formative historians of women's lives whose careers Ulrich briefly describes (the founders of the field, Gerda Lerner and Anne Firor Scott), or whose work she cites—not to mention Ulrich's own oeuvre—the most traditional kind of spadework has proved essential to a revolution, in a sense, from within. Serious historians "explore the things that get left out when a person becomes an icon"; recover the all-important details from primary documents and artifacts that can tell us how obscure women and men lived in earlier times. "Historians," Ulrich writes, are "less interested in discovering universals than in tracing change over time."

Armed with new questions, women's historians have transformed a discipline that is defined by the very questions its practitioners ask, expanding the scope and texture of the field and deepening its rigor at the same time. After centuries of asking, women no longer have to wonder, where are the women in our history books? They are there, because sleuths like Ulrich saw the need to look harder at all the "unprocessed" ephemera of women's lives—which in future years will no doubt include a T-shirt or two—and "try to understand."

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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.

[mnieto 2]

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Good God! I can just imagine that hell broke lose among folks when she came up with her own idea how to lead her life!

Reminds me of a Meat Loaf song, called:

"...good girls go to heaven, but the bad girls go everywhere!!!!!"

R.

[Beauty for Ashes 257]

Well I can imagine with my own great grandmother and her sisters and abandoning them and marrying a much younger man.... It makes me wonder when people sit in judgement and squash other people's dreams..... I think that is the worst thing in your life you can do... is push someone elses desires and wants down to some how make your self feel better.... AMAZING QUOTE

WELL BEHAVED WOMEN NEVER MADE HISTORY

LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH

[PetraPerson101 0]

Now, define "behaved" and "going everywhere":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina

I believe educating yourself, working in your own self-interests and going places - are a good thing. However, I do know of a "bad" behaved person ... whose own bad behaviour has landed them in a world of s*** (for lack of a better description.)

Be "bad"/nonconformist within reason.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Goooooo women!!!!

[Jasman0717 9]

Reminds me of a Meat Loaf song, called:

"...good girls go to heaven, but the bad girls go everywhere!!!!!"