Back to Blog
![]() ![]() If other chapters, such as a wide-ranging exploration of the Amazon myth and a rumination on second-wave feminism, don't cohere as tightly or showcase Ulrich's strengths as an extraordinary interpreter of ordinary records, this can be forgiven in a work that is so often sharp and insightful. It is the book of a historian about the history of women that rejoices in details and eschews broad-brush statements. And in a third, richly illustrated chapter, she utilizes a medieval book of days as a window into women's labor through the ages. There is a beautiful embrace of complexity, a wonderful delight in ambiguity and amazements, to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s 2007 book of history, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. In another, she offers a piercing analysis of "four 19th-century Harriets" ex-slaves Tubman, Jacobs and Powell, and novelist Stowe to uncover the interplay of race and gender in questions of liberation. ![]() In one, Ulrich follows the lead of Virginia Woolf (who invented an ill-fated fictional sister of Shakespeare) by digging into what we know and don't know about the women in the Bard's family. ![]() Why the appeal, Ulrich wondered? And what makes a woman qualify as well-behaved or rebellious? Several chapters of this accessible and beautifully written study are brilliant. In 1976, graduate student Ulrich asserted in an obscure scholarly article that "well-behaved women seldom make history." But Ulrich, now at Harvard, made history, winning the Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prizes for A Midwife's Tale and her slogan did, too: it began popping up on T-shirts, greeting cards and buttons. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |