Suggestive” is a slippery word, particularly dangerous when ladies are present. Nonetheless, I can think of no better term to describe Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s latest book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. The cover sets the tone by running the title as a slogan on a woman’s t-shirt. While the shirt is demure enough, reading the title requires the viewer to stare at the model’s chest. A male colleague of mine hated the cover, for reasons he preferred not to articulate. I merely found it, well, suggestive. How should one read a feminist call to action emblazoned on the torso of a woman who, in the closely cropped photo, lacks face or hands? An eminent interpreter of visual texts, Ulrich—who presumably did not design the cover, but signed off on it—must have had a motive.
The title and visual presentation find ready explanation in the book’s lengthy introduction, called “The Slogan.” It turns out that the catchy phrase now adorning so many shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons was lifted from an article on Puritan funeral sermons Ulrich published in American Quarterly in spring 1976. Few people noticed the sentence in question until 1995, when it appeared in journalist Kay Mills’ book From Pocahontas to Power Suits. Ulrich recounts the phrase’s independent life, including the substitution of “rarely” for “seldom” and countless unlicensed commercial usages, the way a woman might describe the career of a willful daughter who never quite abandoned her mother’s deepest values. Though Ulrich’s aim in the article was to demonstrate that women could leave a mark on the world without being rowdy or rebellious, she has enough sympathy for naughty girls (past and present) to allow them expression in her own words.
Ulrich keeps a collection of catchphrase kitsch, but it is hard to imagine her sporting any of it. According to published profiles, she is quite well-behaved herself. A Mormon mother of five, she adapted the timing, location, and subject matter of her higher education to be convenient for her family. Fortunately for her, the late 1970s was an ideal time to be digging through archives in New England (where her husband taught engineering) and writing about colonial women. Once a bastion of intellectual history, the colonial era was opening up to the New Social History and its attention to court records, church registries, and other nontraditional evidence. Ulrich was among the first to apply these methodological innovations to women’s history, with the result that her dissertation, published as Good Wives (1982), immediately attracted attention. The autobiographical overtones of this project were not lost on the author, who writes here, “In my scholarly work, my form of misbehavior has been to care about things that other people find predictable or boring.” She noticed faithful spouses.
Ulrich found another kindred spirit in Martha Ballard, an 18th-century medical woman whose diary was happily housed at a library in nearby Maine. Ulrich’s painstaking research on the diary and the community it chronicled produced A Midwife’s Tale (1990), which earned the author a Bancroft, a Pulitzer, and a chair at Harvard. Though Ballard never set out to make history, she catapulted her mild-mannered biographer to the pinnacle of her profession.
In these two books and, more recently, in The Age of Homespun (2001), a history of 18th-century textile manufacturing, Ulrich’s approach has been to identify tiny, concrete details and then to follow the narrative threads bound up in them. The details—diary entries such as “3 6 Clear & very hot,” or objects such as embroidered tablecloths—do not tell their own stories but suggest economic patterns, social networks, labors, emotions, gender norms, and all of the other elements that shape historical moments. This kind of evidence has the advantage of ubiquity; it represents far more lives than are dreamt of in traditional histories, and it is literally lying around (in attics, museums, libraries, yard sales) waiting to be discovered. Less helpfully, such evidence resists being wrestled into the form of a scholarly argument. It invites lots of interpretations instead of proving just one. In the tussle between discovery and argumentation, Ulrich chooses the former. She has methodological reasons for doing so; social history (especially the microhistory and local history branches) often aims to convey complexity and diversity rather than to generate broad theories. The relative youth of women’s history as a discipline also factors in, because intense work on primary sources becomes the support on which later generalizations rest. Small studies must come first.
Yet there is even more at stake for Ulrich as she approaches her data. Preserving the untidiness of the past makes a feminist statement. In the new book, Ulrich quotes A Room of One’s Own, noting, “Virginia Woolf lamented the difficulty of measuring women’s achievements … . She concluded that to comprehend women’s creativity, a writer would have her work cut out for her ‘simply as an observer.’ ” A historian who sets out primarily to “observe” the past opts not to do much of the judging, organizing, and marshaling of evidence that marks more traditional scholarship. This choice makes for lively but, as in the case of Well-Behaved Women, often frustrating reading.
Ulrich begins with epigraphs from Woolf, 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Christine de Pizan, author of an early 15th-century allegory featuring women’s biographies. The ideas of these three female writers, sketched in the first chapter, prompt and very loosely link the contents of the following chapters. Chapter 2, “Amazons,” traces myths and realities of warrior women—a category in Christine’s The Book of the City of Ladies—from ancient Greece to Jessica Lynch. Woolf’s complaint that 17th-century society suppressed women writers occasions a chapter on “Shakespeare’s Daughters,” which looks both at the few successful women writers of Shakespeare’s era and at artistic representations of the Apocryphal figures for whom Shakespeare’s biological daughters, Susanna and Judith, were named. Another comment from Woolf and an image from Christine’s manuscript launch a wide-ranging discussion of women’s work as depicted in a 1985 illustrated planner, The Medieval Woman: An Illuminated Book of Days. Stanton’s recollection of meeting a runaway slave begins a chapter on gender, race, and the significance of white women likening their own situation to slavery. A concluding chapter on second-wave feminism mentions the epigraphers in passing but centers on Ulrich’s experiences and observations of the 1960s and ’70s.
All of these intellectual forays aim to answer two related questions: What sorts of women have made history? And what sorts of history have women made? In both questions, “make” encompasses shifting meanings. First, it signifies achievement, as in “making the grade.” Women make history when they qualify for inclusion in the annals, often by defying convention, causing scandal, or in other ways misbehaving. Second, the word signifies creation. Women make history when they leave records or fashion narratives to explain the past. These records and narratives, as Ulrich both asserts and models in her own writing, are not just “history as usual.” They are so potentially subversive that even penning them can be viewed as a species of protest.
But is women’s history really that dangerous? Ulrich’s method in this book actually undermines such a claim, because instead of concentrating fire on closed doors in the academy, she sprays evidentiary birdshot. For example, in a nine-page section evoked by an image in the medieval daybook, Ulrich remarks on the red heifer as a symbol of Christ; witch hunts; Martha Ballard; Mrs. O’Leary’s cow; recent attempts by a Pentecostal minister and a group of Orthodox Jews to breed a perfect cow for a temple sacrifice; and Starhawk’s theology of the Divine Feminine. The section bears about the only title that could possibly summarize such an array of material: “Cows and Women Making History.”
Though few passages are as chaotic as this one, the book as a whole reads like a hoard of lecture notes shaken onto the floor and swept into small piles. In fact, in the acknowledgements, Ulrich indicates that this book grew from the “Women, Feminism, and History” course she developed for Harvard, and many portions were presented orally at various venues. This genesis likely accounts for the book’s fondness for one-liners, such as, “Although the New York Times reported NOW’s first convention on the women’s pages beneath recipes for turkey and stuffing, experienced activists were poised to take on the turkeys.” This background also helps explain the bewildering diversity of the material, which was intended for piecemeal delivery rather than sustained reading.
It would be tempting to see this collection as a senior scholar’s scrapbook, assembled with more flair than care, except that the approach here is not radically different from what we find in her oft-cited books. Ulrich writes this way on purpose, reveling in the clutter of everyday life, suggesting rather than substantiating. Unfortunately, she dazzles the reader with so many vibrant details that their significance never comes into focus. This book might turn heads, but it is unlikely to change minds about women’s history.
Elesha Coffman is a doctoral candidate in American religious history at Duke University.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
