Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Even if you don’t recognize her name, you’re most likely familiar with historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s most famous sentence: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” This sentence is part of a scholarly article that Ulrich published in 1976. Decades later, Ulrich revisits her viral meme and the many ways it has been interpreted, often by women who proudly proclaim it as their slogan. Ulrich uses works by three women authors as a lens to examine how this statement has been true for women from the Middle Ages until the present day: Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, Eighty Years and More by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Ulrich’s writing hits the sweet spot between scholarly heft and popular appeal.… (mere)

This book is very interesting way to learn about everyday life in America in the late 1700's-early 1800s. The extracted diary entries themselves are not that interesting; it is Ulrich's extrapolation of events in Martha's life that makes it so. She ties in information from other entries not presented, writings from other contemporaries (usually men), and historical documents to make a cohesive subject. Each chapter seems to develop a specific theme, e.g. medical practice, crime & punishment, marital customs, gardening, local economy and women's contributions, the rebellion of squatters trying to settle land owned by a major corporation. It countered my current assumptions that "women weren't educated" or "women with children out of wedlock were shunned".
While I didn't read all the diary extracts, looking at Martha's spelling was quite interesting and made me wonder that maybe the current theory of encouraging young students to write without regard to spelling might be an excellent way to get them to express themselves.
I hope that Ulrich left a transcript of the diary with the Maine Historical Society for future researchers use.… (mere)

Tangible Things takes us into the bowels of Harvard University and into the stored collections. There are the old things one might expect but there is also a lot of weird stuff: ancient tortillas (1878), an egg-shaped stone from some guy’s bladder; various things Thoreau picked up on his walks around Concord; a wood-carved “pointing finger” wooden spoon from Africa, plaster casts of the heads of some long-dead people, papyrus pieces that have been written on both sides but in different centuries, Lincoln’s life mask…

As noted in the preface, this book was meant to be a retrospective catalog, for an exhibition, but became something else. I bought this book because one of the authors, Ulrich, is a favorite historian of mine (and then, of course, I’m a terribly curious sort…). In my estimations this is not a book one can declare as finished after one trip through its pages…I have been through it multiple times and I'm sure I’ve not read it all.

Photo on cover is of a plaster cast of the clasped hands of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Cast in Rome in 1853… (mere)

Ulrich, who coined the title phrase in a 1976 scholarly article, spends a fair amount of time here discussing how it took on a life of its own, before settling down to explain what she meant.

The problem, she says, is not that well-behaved women don't make history, but that historians haven't done a very good job of reporting on their achievements. Late 20th-century feminists have pretty well created women's history as a legitimate field of study, less through excavation of potshards than through the patient tracking down of those faint records left in letters, journals, and oral history which show ordinary women doing what needed to be done, and building much of the world we recognize today.

She also takes a look at some less-well-behaved women -- Christine de Pizan, who wrote 'The Book of the City of Ladies' at a time when most women not only did not write -- they did not read; abolitionist and women's suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and protofeminist writer Virginia Woolf.

There are passing mentions of many notable points and individuals in the first feminist movement of the mid-19th century, and the "second wave" that came along 100 years later, but few are handled in great detail. The book does, however, provide an excellent jumping-off point for further reading with extensive source notes.… (mere)