Published in 2015
32 pages
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: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001), she has incorporated museum-based research as well as more traditional archival work. Her most recent book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women’s history, and material culture.
What is this book about?
A selection from the admired history Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, the story of how one of feminism’s most popular slogans came to life.
In the opening paragraph of an obscure 1976 scholarly article investigating the prim and proper women celebrated in Puritan funeral sermons, Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich penned the phrase, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Since then, Ulrich’s slogan has been put on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and tote bags, in greeting cards and political speeches, entering the cultural consciousness in all sorts of unexpected ways. In “The Slogan,” Ulrich gives a brief history of her much-quoted words, and sketches out a primer on feminism today and the way it continues to make history.
