Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (born July 11, 1938) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian specializing in early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University.

• Well-behaved women seldom make history.
  • Scholarly article about the funeral sermons of Christian women (1970s), cited in Amy Lavoie, "Ulrich explains that well-behaved women should make history", Harvard Gazette (20 September 2007); variant: 'rarely' for 'seldom', quoted as epigraph in Kay Mills, From Pocahontas to Power Suits (1995), introduction

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

• So what do people see when they read that well-behaved women rarely make history? Do they imagine good-time girls in stiletto heels or do-good girls carrying clipboards and passing petitions? Do they envision an out-of-control hobbyist or a single mother taking down a drunk in a bar? I suspect that it depends on where they stand themselves.
  • The Slogan (p. xix)

• Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make history when someone notices.
  • The Slogan (p. xxxiii)

• An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.
  • Ch. 1: Three Writers (p. 36); cf. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)