Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on...
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From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781400075270 (1400075270)
ASIN: 1400075270
Publish date: September 23rd 2008
Publisher: Vintage
Pages no: 320
Edition language: English
The use of Stanton, De Pizan, and Woolf to tie everything together is great. I would argue about her definition of well behaved as it applied to Judith Shakespeare, but still an interesting read.
This book felt a bit confused in parts, but I did really enjoy it. It just seemed like it was trying to be a few things at once and so the central argument about well-behaved women making history got a bit lost. I thought it was most effective in the discussion of the abolition and first wave femini...