Overlooked Women Make History

For a book written by a woman, about many, many women, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History” surprisingly speaks to both genders. Engaging from the introduction, 300th Anniversary University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s newest book is an attempt to answer some of the most baffling questions about the relationships between women and men, women and their communities, and women and history. She may not provide any easy resolutions, but she succeeds in making readers curious about the condition of womanhood and its development throughout history—a history that stretches much farther back than the suffrage and feminist movements of more recent times.

Ulrich began writing the book after its titular quotation—which she authored some 30 years earlier—became a wildly popular catchphrase not only among female empowerment groups, but also with girls looking to make some extra cash with self-printed T-shirts. The book consists of a series of anecdotes told within the framework of three famous women’s literary works: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More,” and Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” serve as primary examples of literature that have brought previously overlooked types women to the forefront.

What makes Ulrich’s book insightful as well as worthwhile are the details she provides. Extensive not only in the timeframe it covers, but in the diversity of women Ulrich discusses, the book touches on many female figures throughout history whose stories somehow relate to the lives and works of Ulrich’s three archetypal women.

Ulrich’s examination of the so-called “Amazon”—a woman combative in many realms, whether displaying courage for her country in time of war or raging against the men who commit crimes against her—is authoritative and powerful. Her dialogue on “Shakespeare’s daughters”—women who took to writing or speaking—tackles the sensitive issue of rape while also discussing social attitudes towards female sexual behavior; the juxtaposition of the two creates what Ulrich calls a woman’s attempt to toe the line between invisibility and scandal. “Slaves in the Attic” discusses the coupling of the abolitionist movement with the suffrage movement.

Ulrich’s originality is most evident in her portrait of “the four Harriets,” figures who reveal society’s varying levels of awareness of acts of female bravery. She demonstrates that courageous women can become as prominent as Harriet Tubman, but can equally remain as obscure as Harriet Jacobs, a slave who hid for seven years in her grandmother’s shed; what’s more, by including Jacobs, Ulrich convincingly suggests that her story of overcoming struggle belongs in history’s record books as much as Tubman’s does.

But what makes “Well-Behaved Women” notable can also make it frustrating. While Ulrich does momentarily forge connections between her three central authors and other memorable women at the beginning of each chapter, the lucid transitions and apparent connections begin to unravel near the end. True, she makes her point clear: there have been many examples of women who have earned the right to have their names alongside those of George Washington or Frederick Douglass. But at times, Ulrich’s awkward shift from a two-sentence summary of one woman to a brief mention of another woman diminishes the achievements of each; the reader has to transition so quickly from one story to the next that the details, while presented in full, are lost.

Still, by discussing individuals who are too often absent from mainstream histories, Ulrich illuminates the many ways in which women outside the traditional narrative of female empowerment have contributed to that cause. Because history has failed to take notice of women’s heroics in domestic events and small but meaningful battles, they have cast off the characteristics society expects—politeness and docility—in favor of strength, passion, and independence, in favor of simply doing, whether that means creating art, resisting oppression, or proudly taking care of one’s family. For, just as a group of women in Bangor, Maine, vowed in the midst of the antislavery movement, women can “[claim] the right to define good behavior for themselves. The real sin...is failing to act.”