Ulrich touts women in history

Here's the question: Is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich better known for winning the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in history for "A Midwife's Tale," or for originating the popular phrase, "Well-behaved women seldom make history"?

She wrote the latter statement in a scholarly article about women in history in 1976 — and the phrase has appeared on T-shirts, placards, placemats, mugs, bumper stickers and greeting cards throughout the country, sometimes with attribution and sometimes without.

"It was a weird escape into popular culture," Ulrich said by phone from her home in Cambridge, Mass. "I got constant e-mails about it, and I thought it was humorous. Then I started looking at where it was coming from. Once I turned up as a character in a novel — and a tennis star from India wore the T-shirt at Wimbledon. It seemed like a teaching moment — and so I wrote a book using the title."

Ulrich did not intend the book as "a work of original scholarship" but as a way of "sharing with young people my thoughts about what it takes for women to make history."

So she has written about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton from the 19th century women's movement; Harriet Tubman and other African-American women; Betty Friedan, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King for their 20th century contributions.

She also treats Virginia Woolf, 15th-century writer Christine de Pizan, Amazons, Shakespeare's daughters and gifted painter Artemisia Gentileschi.

The book is a delight to read and is in no way limited to scholars, even though Ulrich has employed strict scholarly methods in writing it. It's a book about how history is made and how women have to decide what matters most, as opposed to what is proper.

It is Ulrich's opinion that women's history has become "very sophisticated — mainstream. We tend to see men and women as players now. The raw material is there. People used to say you can't include women in survey courses in American history because we don't know enough information about them. That argument doesn't work any more."

Ulrich has found that, "It is much more common to integrate men and women in major universities than it used to be. The 'male universal' is still there — but it's harder to get away with that in academic life.

"In some ways, the 19th century was the century of women. Some historians have argued that from the Civil War onward, women's politics drove everything forward. Drew Faust, Harvard's new president, has a book coming out making that case."