The Fast and the Feminist

When a Harvard professor speaks, America’s intellectual elite listens. Fame broadcasts their insights in all the usual places: section, book covers, and even on CNN. But, it is not often that Harvard witticisms adorn the bumper of your Honda accord. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard Professor of Early American History, has succeeded in capturing a mobile market with her quote, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has created quite a following. Her girl-power quote has graced pins, mugs, and even a manifesto website by one “Lordess Ariel the Third Esquire.” Now, Ulrich bumper stickers are the latest rage. The company “one angry girl designs” (motto: taking over the world, one shirt at a time) takes feminism to an entirely different level.

At oneangrygirl.net, you can find the “well-behaved women” shirt which is touted as “fab” alongside other shirts with such tasteful catchphrases as “Fuck your fascist beauty standards” (available in Lipstick Pink). Guida, a satisfied customer, writes, “I had the ‘well-behaved women’ bumper sticker on my ten-year-old Dodge Omni. I sold the car, but I was really sad watching the bumper sticker go!”

One angry girl designs began in 1996 with one t-shirt and an angry girl named Jill. In an interview with Feminista!, Jill cites merchandise with the Ulrich quote as her “biggest seller.” “I’ve sold a whole lot of those,” she explains, “but it’s sort of upsetting because it’s not actually my quote.”

The credit, of course, goes to Ulrich, who coined the phrase in a 1976 essay. While a professor at the University of New Hampshire, Ulrich penned “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” which appeared in American Quarterly. Journalist Kay Mills later included the piece in an anthology, and the quote (in actuality, “Well-behaved women seldom make history”) found its way into the mainstream. The original essay focused on those people that Cotton Mather called “the hidden ones” —women who “prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed.” In regards to feminist connotations presently associated with the quote, Ulrich comments, “The whole thing is quite ironic since I’ve made a career of writing about invisible and very well-behaved women.”

Ulrich gave Jill permission to use the quote when she was starting her business in Portland, Oregon. “It seemed like a harmless enough thing to do. I never expected it to take off,” Ulrich admits. “But lots of people have asked me since if they could use it for various reasons. In the past few months, for example, I have heard from a Hewlett-Packard division in the Northwest and from a public health collective in the South.” The Mount Holyoke History Department ordered t-shirts from one angry girl designs with the Ulrich quote emblazoned on it.

Unfortunately Ulrich’s newfound popularity doesn’t translate to the green. People have instead sent her “sightings” of the quote, “which shows up in some pretty wild places but also in things like Creative Scrapbooking.” She has only recently requested that these scouts send her t-shirts.

How does having one’s own bumper sticker compare with having one’s own Pulitzer? “Just as unexpected,” confesses Ulrich, “but what amazes me is that my name gets attached to this thing, and I can’t imagine that many people have a clue who this person is.”

With all the hubbub that Ulrich has inevitably sparked in traffic jams throughout the nation, can she be classified as a “well-behaved woman”? She replies mysteriously, “Depends on who you ask.”