Even if you don’t recognize her name, you’re most likely familiar with historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s most famous sentence: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” This sentence is part of a scholarly article that Ulrich published in 1976. Decades later, Ulrich revisits her viral meme and the many ways it has been interpreted, often by women who proudly proclaim it as their slogan. Ulrich uses works by three women authors as a lens to examine how this statement has been true for women from the Middle Ages until the present day: Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, Eighty Years and More by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Ulrich’s writing hits the sweet spot between scholarly heft and popular appeal. ( )

Ulrich, who coined the title phrase in a 1976 scholarly article, spends a fair amount of time here discussing how it took on a life of its own, before settling down to explain what she meant.

The problem, she says, is not that well-behaved women don't make history, but that historians haven't done a very good job of reporting on their achievements. Late 20th-century feminists have pretty well created women's history as a legitimate field of study, less through excavation of potshards than through the patient tracking down of those faint records left in letters, journals, and oral history which show ordinary women doing what needed to be done, and building much of the world we recognize today.

She also takes a look at some less-well-behaved women -- Christine de Pizan, who wrote 'The Book of the City of Ladies' at a time when most women not only did not write -- they did not read; abolitionist and women's suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and protofeminist writer Virginia Woolf.

There are passing mentions of many notable points and individuals in the first feminist movement of the mid-19th century, and the "second wave" that came along 100 years later, but few are handled in great detail. The book does, however, provide an excellent jumping-off point for further reading with extensive source notes. ( )

I like feminist history; it's like a long drink of cool water. ( )

My main objection to this book is that I think devoting an entire book to a famous phrase that you yourself coined is maybe a touch self-aggrandizing. Having said that, I loved this exploration of women's history. It's not a survey -- Ulrich uses various examples to illuminate exactly what she was trying to say when she first wrote "Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History." (It's not necessarily what you think.) My favorite chapter was the discussion of slave narratives, although I also have a soft spot for Christine de Pizan so I liked reading about her, too. ( )

Back in the seventies, Ulrich coined the phrase that serves as the book's title in a history article. As it became more and more widely used as a slogan, she decided to write a book about women in history centered around that idea. There's a lot of great info in here about various women, but I'm afraid much of it felt like just one thing after another to me. It didn't really all hang together. YMMV.

***For Book Club ( )