Because You Want to Book Club #14: "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History"

"Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History" was a book I had my eye on for quite some time, but always skipped over because I was already walking out of the library with large stacks of books and movies. A few weeks after I had noticed it, I finally picked it up. It hadn't moved from its spot atop the wall of the library's most recent social science acquisitions.

It wasn't until I got home that I realised it had been written by an author I am actually quite familiar with. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich had written a book called "A Midwife's Tale" that was required reading for my Advanced Placement Grade 12 U.S. History course. I even attended a lecture she gave at Clark University (despite being a professor at Harvard) shortly after "Tale" was turned into a PBS documentary. My American History teacher for three years of high school, the late and dearly missed Robert Cormier who is of no relation to the late and dearly missed novelist, lauded Ulrich's book as the single greatest written account of colonial history ever recorded. She might as well have been praised by Caesar since Cormier was one of the presidents of the American Antiquarian Society. I even remember that out of the 15 books that I read for the course that it was the least boring one of the bunch and I actually quite enjoyed it.

Ulrich is a historian and a feminist dedicated to the preservation of a woman's role in history. The title of the book stems from a phrase she coined and unwittingly made famous (to her own amusement, happiness, and, at times, chagrin) in an obscure journal article she wrote in the late 1970s (after she had already won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1976) deriding the fact that the role of the "average" woman is never talked about in the history books no matter how worthy their accomplishments. The women that often appear in history books were "rebellious", had some sort of thirst for blood and power, or in some cases were just seen as shrill or mad.

"Well-Behaved Women" delineates feminist history through three main starting points: Christine de Pizan, often regarded at the earliest feminist writer, abolishionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Woolf, specifically while writing "A Room of One's Own". From these three subjects, Ulrich makes connections between numerous aspects of worldwide feminist history and the works that inspired them and the ones they ultimately inspired much in the same way Ulrich's quote found its way onto T-Shirts and coffee mugs around the world.

Ulrich, in the two books of hers that I have read, has an amazing talent for balancing the academic and the entertaining. While Ulrich has clearly done intensive research (the last hundred pages are footnotes and citations), the book is never obtuse or unapproachable and her connections throughout recorded history read like an epic of the highest quality.

This is a rare book that I could safely recommend to anyone and everyone. It is relatively short and easier to read than you might expect from a largely academic text, but it flows with the grace and force that sometimes the greatest novels have a hard time achieving. This is an important book and a must read for all social science students.

Grade: A+