Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make HistoryAlfred A. Knopf, 2007 - 284 páginas “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 Historycelebrates a renaissance in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional historians. It is a tribute to history and to those who make it. |
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abolitionist activists Aemilia Lanyer African Amazons American Artemisia Gentileschi artist asked became Beecher began called Cambridge century child Christine de Pizan Christine's City of Ladies claimed court daughter diary Eighty Elizabeth Cady Stanton England English father female feminism feminist French friends Gee's Bend Gender Gerrit girls Greek Harriet Jacobs Harriet Tubman heroine historian husband Ibid Jessica Lynch Joan of Arc Judith knew later Lerner Library lives London male married Mary medieval milk mother movement Museum named Oxford painting Penthesilea political Queen quilts radical Room of One's scholars sexual Shakespeare sister slave slavery slogan story Stowe student Susanna T-shirts tell Tidal Wave tion Today told Tragedy of Mariam Ulrich University Press Virginia Woolf well-behaved women wife witch women warriors women's history women's rights Wonder Woman writing wrote Yellin York