“They didn’t ask to be remembered,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel Ulrich wrote in 1976 about the pious women of colonial New England. 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. 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.

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. Ulrich updates de Pizan’s Amazons with stories about women warriors from other times and places. She contrasts Woolf’s imagined story about Shakespeare’s sister with biographies of actual women who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries. 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 uses daybook illustrations to look at women who weren’t trying to make history, but did. 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.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History celebrates a renaissance in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional historians. It is a tribute to history and to those who make it.

Advance praise for Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“A tribute to the women who have made history as well as the scholars who write about them, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s probing and ambitious book casts its net widely. Women warriors, medieval writers, fugitive slaves, second-wave feminists, and even T-shirt entrepreneurs people its pages–and command our attention.”
—Susan Ware, editor of Notable American Women

“If you have any doubt of the revolution in knowledge about women’s history that has taken place since 1970, read this book!”
—Nancy F. Cott, author of No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States

“Gives new meaning to the importance of knowing about women who were ‘bad’ enough to make ‘good’ history.”
—Darlene Clark Hine, author of The African-American Odyssey

“As the bumper sticker based on her earlier work says, well-behaved women seldom (or rarely) make history. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich shows this is sometimes true, but also reveals that at key moments well-behaved women do make history. With dazzling chronological and geographical sweep, Ulrich also demonstrates that historians, both those well-behaved and misbehaving, also make, write, and rewrite history.”
—Daniel Horowitz, author of Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique

“A wonderful book, playful and serious, entertaining and informative, and always inspiring. Ulrich displays an amazing breadth of knowledge about women in all times and places, from Amazons to Wonder Woman to Jessica Lynch.”
—Marjorie Spruill, author of New Women of the New South

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is currently 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard. Her book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and several other awards. Ulrich’s discovery of Martha Ballard and her work on Ballard’s diary have been chronicled in a documentary film written and produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, with major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Experience television series. Ulrich, currently a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and many other honors and awards.