(no subject)
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Knopf, 2007
Years ago, I saw the title of this book and it grabbed my imagination. The book didn’t exist at the time; this was originally a sentence in an article that she wrote in 1976. The sentence escaped captivity and was used on t-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers- sometimes without either credit or permission. I used the sentence as my sig. line for a couple of years. Here, Ulrich explores what it means to make history.
Years ago, women were pretty much ignored in history books. It took many years of many people digging through old manuscripts to find the women in history. Now days women’s history books and courses are commonplace, but back when Ulrich wrote that sentence, that was just starting. She frames her book using the work of three women writers: Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf. De Pizan- a professional writer who supported her children with her pen in the 1400s- wrote a book about past women who had achieved power and influence, coming up with queens, warriors, poets, saints, inventors and more with which to people a city of ladies. Christine was ahead of her time, bringing up problems women faced, including violence against them. Stanton was a suffragist and abolitionist with a tremendous writing output. Her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, chronicles the making of a rebel. Told by her father upon the death of her last brother that he wished she were a boy, she figures out that to become a boy, one must become educated. She took care of that, besting the boys in school. Virginia Woolf, writing in the first half of the 20th century, satirized women’s legal and social positions in Orlando, and in A Room of One’s Own, writes primarily about women and fiction but also goes into why women are poor compared to men and why there was so little literature produced by women in the past- because of legal and societal restrictions. These three were pioneers of writing about women’s history, who were rediscovered in the latter half of the 20th century, who were the inspirations for women’s history.
The book is not just about women *in* history but about the movement to bring the history of women to everyone’s attention. Well told in a reader friendly format, this book should be required reading for young women who take their rights for granted.
Years ago, I saw the title of this book and it grabbed my imagination. The book didn’t exist at the time; this was originally a sentence in an article that she wrote in 1976. The sentence escaped captivity and was used on t-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers- sometimes without either credit or permission. I used the sentence as my sig. line for a couple of years. Here, Ulrich explores what it means to make history.
Years ago, women were pretty much ignored in history books. It took many years of many people digging through old manuscripts to find the women in history. Now days women’s history books and courses are commonplace, but back when Ulrich wrote that sentence, that was just starting. She frames her book using the work of three women writers: Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf. De Pizan- a professional writer who supported her children with her pen in the 1400s- wrote a book about past women who had achieved power and influence, coming up with queens, warriors, poets, saints, inventors and more with which to people a city of ladies. Christine was ahead of her time, bringing up problems women faced, including violence against them. Stanton was a suffragist and abolitionist with a tremendous writing output. Her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, chronicles the making of a rebel. Told by her father upon the death of her last brother that he wished she were a boy, she figures out that to become a boy, one must become educated. She took care of that, besting the boys in school. Virginia Woolf, writing in the first half of the 20th century, satirized women’s legal and social positions in Orlando, and in A Room of One’s Own, writes primarily about women and fiction but also goes into why women are poor compared to men and why there was so little literature produced by women in the past- because of legal and societal restrictions. These three were pioneers of writing about women’s history, who were rediscovered in the latter half of the 20th century, who were the inspirations for women’s history.
The book is not just about women *in* history but about the movement to bring the history of women to everyone’s attention. Well told in a reader friendly format, this book should be required reading for young women who take their rights for granted.