well behaved women seldom make history by laurel thatcher ulrich

I recently toured the National Constitution Center and Justice Earl Warren's quote has a similar theme, 'Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.' It is a provocation to action, a way of saying that if you want to make a difference in the world, don't worry about what people think. Ulrich has received emails and inquiries from around the world asking about the phrase as well as receiving personal stories about what the phrase means to those who have seen it. I am proudly wearing my t-shirt today with that expression! Singer Kacey Jones sings a song with the lyrics, 'Cuz well-behaved women rarely make history.' Since then, the famous phrase is found on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, magnets, tote bags, and other items. That phrase entered pop culture in 1995 when journalist Kay Mills used it in her book, From Pocahontas to Power Suits. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich used the phrase, 'Well-behaved women seldom make history' on a scholarly article she published in 1976. It is a tribute to history and to those who make it. Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History celebrates a renaissance in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional historians. Throughout, she shows how the feminist wave of the 1970s created a generation of historians who by challenging traditional accounts of both men's and women's histories stimulated more vibrant and better-documented accounts of the past. She uses daybook illustrations to look at women who weren't trying to make history, but did. She turns Stanton's encounter with a runaway slave upside down, asking how the story would change if the slave rather than the white suffragist were at the center. She contrasts Woolf's imagined story about Shakespeare's sister with biographies of actual women who were Shakespeare's contemporaries. Ulrich updates de Pizan's Amazons with stories about women warriors from other times and places. Her volume ranges over centuries and cultures, from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who imagined a world in which women achieved power and influence, to the writings of nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and twentieth-century novelist Virginia Woolf. But what do they really mean? In this engrossing volume, Laurel Ulrich goes far beyond the slogan she inadvertently created and explores what it means to make history. And then she added a phrase that has since gained widespread currency: Well-behaved women seldom make history.Today those words appear almost everywhere on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, plaques, greeting cards, and more. They didn't ask to be remembered, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel Ulrich wrote in 1976 about the pious women of colonial New England.

Well behaved women seldom make history by laurel thatcher ulrich