Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Well-behaved women seldom make history

Three-Hundredth Anniversary University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Examines three key works by women--the fifteenth-century "Book of the City of Ladies" by Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's memoirs, and Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," to explore the making of history from a woman's perspective.

Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History

Examines the lives of women in northern New England in the century from 1650 to 1750, discussing issues of housekeeping, childbearing, churchgoing, and other triumphs and tragedies of everyday life.

Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750

Good Wives

From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.

Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870

A House Full of Females

Presents the life of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Maine during the eighteenth century, by drawing on the detailed diary she kept for twenty-seven years of her life

The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

A Midwife's Tale

making history through objects

Tangible things

A portrait of early industrialization in America chronicles the production of cloth and its influence on the cultural, economic, social, and political world of early America.

Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

The Age of Homespun

Susan Ericksen

From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Assesses the roles and status of women of early New England in terms of family and community organization, the structure of daily life and work, responsibilities and authority, and more

Ivan Gaskell

Sarah Anne Carter

Sara Schechner

Samantha van Gerbig

"In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, arguing that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past."--Provided by publisher.

Making History Through Objects

Tangible Things

In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past. The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage--from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles--in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history. Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard's remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people's houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip "Dagwood and Blondie." A companion website catalogs the more than two hundred objects in the original exhibition and suggests ways in which the principles outlined in the book might change the way people understand the tangible things that surround them.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

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