Chapter 1
When Women's Words Became a Global Movement
In a peculiar twist of fate, a single sentence from an obscure 1976 scholarly article transformed Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich into an unlikely cultural icon. Her observation that "Well-behaved women seldom make history" escaped academic confines to adorn everything from coffee mugs to bumper stickers, T-shirts to tote bags. The slogan's journey began when journalist Kay Mills used it as an epigraph in 1995, followed by Jill Portugal's request to print it on T-shirts in 1996. Today, it's embraced by an astonishing range of women-from political activists to Sweet Potato Queens, computer scientists to nursing home coordinators. Even Taylor Swift has been spotted wearing the phrase, while Michelle Obama referenced it in speeches about women's empowerment. This accidental fame gave Ulrich unique insights into American culture: while some women contemplated feminism's demise, others were just discovering it. The slogan's ambiguity fuels its appeal-to some a call for rebellion, to others a celebration that "bad girls have more fun." Its widespread adoption proves its central point: women who challenge conventions are the ones remembered.
Chapter 2
The Revolutionary Power of Female Disobedience
The phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history" originated in Ulrich's first scholarly article about funeral sermons for pious colonial women. These "hidden ones," as Puritan minister Cotton Mather called them, lived virtuous lives hoping for heavenly rewards rather than earthly recognition-and indeed, history largely forgot them. This observation wasn't meant as a lament but as recognition of historical invisibility. The words emerged naturally, perhaps influenced by the idea that "happy love has no history" or Ulrich's mother's observation that housework is only noticed when neglected.
People interpret the slogan differently depending on their perspective. Some see it as encouragement to speak one's mind rather than remain "ladylike," while others associate it with attention-seeking "bad girls." A Los Angeles development firm manager initially found it "disrespectful" until learning its historical context. They ultimately paired it with images of Queen Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc on promotional materials. For some, history provides edifying examples; for others, vicarious rebellion.
The real question is how women make history. Marie Curie didn't win Nobel Prizes through tantrums but through excellence-yet her achievement isn't seen as "well-behaved" because women aren't supposed to stand out. The quote resonates because it plays into stereotypes about female invisibility and decorum. Many believe women are less visible in history because their bodies impel them to nurture rather than fight wars or rule nations. As a New Hampshire pastor wrote in 1650, "Woman's the center & lines are men"-suggesting women occupy a fixed center while men progress through history.
History isn't just what happened but what later generations choose to remember-as with Joan of Arc, alternately viewed as saint, witch, virgin, whore, or peasant across centuries, showing how notions of good behavior vary by time and place. Making history requires doing the unexpected, like Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat. Though portrayed as a "humble seamstress" who sparked revolution because her feet were tired, Parks was actually the politically conscious NAACP secretary who had attended desegregation workshops. Her publicly acknowledged good behavior justified her rebellion.
Chapter 3
Three Visionary Women Who Challenged History
Three remarkable women-Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Woolf-made history by challenging the exclusion of women from historical narratives. Though separated by centuries and circumstances, each experienced a pivotal moment of awakening when confronting misogynistic texts.
In Paris around 1400, Christine de Pizan, weary from serious reading, opened a satirical book that disturbed her with its misogyny. Examining more volumes, she found men's negative opinions of women everywhere. Despairing, she experienced a vision of three radiant women: Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice. They came to console her and help build a city where good women's fame would endure. With their guidance, Christine discovered worthy women-queens, warriors, poets, inventors, wives, mothers, and saints-whose stories would build a city fit for the Queen of Heaven.
In Johnstown, New York, around 1825, young Elizabeth Cady listened to widows' complaints in her father's law office and was distressed to learn that married women were considered "civilly dead" under law. When law students teased her that as a wife her possessions could be taken by her husband, she secretly planned to cut the offensive statutes from her father's lawbooks. Her father discovered her plan and gently explained that destroying books wouldn't change laws-instead, when grown, she should persuade legislators to pass new ones. Elizabeth vowed to do just that, eventually traveling across America advocating for women's rights.
In London in 1928, Virginia Woolf sat in the British Museum researching why women were poor compared to men. The more notes she took, the more confused she became, as male authors' opinions multiplied her single question into fifty. While doodling, she drew "Professor von X" writing about female inferiority-an unattractive figure born from the morning's reading. Angered by being told women were "naturally inferior to little men," she wondered why those with power felt compelled to diminish women, concluding that with money and a room of her own, she would write her own books.
Each woman transformed her experience into groundbreaking work: Christine's "Book of the City of Ladies," a sophisticated allegory of female biographies still provocative six centuries later; Stanton's autobiography chronicling fifty years fighting for women's suffrage; and Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," a semi-fictional essay developed from lectures at Cambridge women's colleges. All three challenged narrow definitions of womanhood by reinterpreting history, navigating the equality/difference divide in their own ways.
Chapter 4
Amazon Warriors: Myth, Reality, and Cultural Transformation
The Amazon-the female warrior who defies gender expectations-has captivated imagination across cultures and centuries. In classical mythology, Amazons were women who fought against Greeks in the Trojan War, ruled their own kingdom, mated selectively with men, and gave away male babies. Throughout history, they've been portrayed both positively and negatively: Queen Elizabeth I rallied troops "habited like an Amazonian Queene," while Shakespeare's Henry VI used "Amazon" as an insult for Joan of Arc.
Today, "Amazon" describes athletes, female soldiers, lesbian separatists, comic-book heroines, or even bookstore owners. Europeans "found" them across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, with Spanish explorers naming the Amazon River for warriors they believed they saw on its banks. These stories survive because they're capable of so many interpretations-some see them as evidence of encounters between Greeks and horseback-riding steppe women, others as patriarchal parables where women warriors always lose.
The Dahomey women's army offers a historical example that evolved during the Atlantic slave trade, with kings reserving female captives for their palace guard while selling more profitable male slaves. Though called ahosi or "wives of the king," these women weren't free-oral histories tell of girls jumping into wells to avoid conscription. Yet many thrived in this environment, taking pride in their abilities. Their fearsome reputation served to terrorize enemies but also fed European stereotypes about African "savagery."
In Greek mythology, Amazons appear as Amazones antianeirai-strange beings who were both warriors and women. This combination destabilized the concept of male heroism itself. An Amazon was a hybrid-a monster requiring conquest. As Greek warfare evolved, Amazons became less monstrous and more human. By the fourth century CE, Quintus reimagined Achilles's victory over Queen Penthesilea with a new twist-after killing her in battle, Achilles discovers her beauty beneath her armor and wishes he had "borne her home, his queenly bride."
In America, feminist Mary Daly reclaimed "Amazon" as a positive identity in 1978, urging women to take up "the Sacred Double Axes of Amazons" against patriarchal oppression. Gloria Steinem took a more playful approach, transforming Wonder Woman into a feminist icon. The original Wonder Woman, created by psychologist William Moulton Marston during World War II, was intended as "psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should rule the world," combining "dominant force" while remaining "loving, tender, maternal and feminine."
Political scientist Joshua Goldstein's research reveals that men's dominance in military roles exceeds what biological differences would predict. Despite popular belief, no "war gene" exists. Goldstein argues that culture, not biology, creates the connection between manhood and war. Throughout history, female combatants have demonstrated bravery, devotion, and self-reliance while challenging gender norms. Their legacy often transcends their original causes-few remember which king Joan of Arc championed, yet suffragists and both sides in World War II claimed her image.
Chapter 5
Shakespeare's Forgotten Sisters: Women Writers in Elizabethan England
Virginia Woolf, seeking to understand women's historical poverty, turned to the British Museum but found herself overwhelmed by opinions rather than facts. Frustrated by history's silence on women's lives before the eighteenth century, Woolf created fiction instead-inventing Shakespeare's sister Judith to illustrate why no female writers emerged during the Elizabethan era. When this fictional Judith refused marriage, her father beat her before manipulating her emotionally. Fleeing to London, she was seduced, abandoned, and ultimately killed herself.
Yet contrary to Woolf's belief, women writers did exist in Shakespeare's time. Between 1611-1621, Elizabeth Cary published the first original drama by an English woman, Aemilia Lanyer the first country house poem, Mary Wroth the first prose fiction, and Rachel Speght the first signed polemic. While literacy remained low among common people, aristocratic women benefited from educational reforms.
Shakespeare named his daughters after biblical heroines whose stories were well-known in his time. Susanna comes from the biblical tale of a virtuous woman falsely accused of adultery but saved when the prophet Daniel exposed her accusers' lies. Judith was named for the biblical heroine who saved her people by entering an enemy camp, gaining the trust of General Holofernes, then beheading him while he slept drunk. These stories taught contradictory lessons: women should be both chaste like Susanna and bold like Judith, both innocent and alluring.
Sexual morality was not just a religious concern but a legal one in Shakespeare's England. Court records reveal how juries handled rape cases differently based on age and social standing. Even with child victims, outcomes depended on family reputation. Women themselves enforced sexual propriety through slander cases-three-quarters of London defamation cases were brought by women, half against other women, with "whore" being the insult of choice.
Unlike Woolf's fictional Judith Shakespeare who died in despair, three real talented women of Shakespeare's era-Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Artemisia Gentileschi-managed to develop their artistic gifts despite facing similar challenges. Their success required more than talent and determination-they needed fathers who furthered their interests, access to proper training, and crucially, powerful patrons.
Born in London in 1569 to a Venetian musician in Queen Elizabeth's court, Aemilia Lanyer's life emerged from obscurity through Simon Forman's astrological case notes and her own remarkable 1611 poetry volume. At eighteen, she became mistress to Elizabeth's elderly lord chamberlain, and when pregnant at twenty-three, hastily married a court musician. By forty-two, she had transformed from courtesan to published poet, producing "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum," a work celebrating Christ while defending female worth.
Elizabeth Cary, a child prodigy who taught herself multiple languages, suffered an arranged marriage while still in her teens. Fortunately, her husband's frequent absences allowed her to develop her literary talents. She published "The Tragedie of Mariam" in 1613, a complex closet drama exploring tyranny through the story of a beautiful, outspoken woman who defies her husband and pays with her life.
Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings reveal both her technical brilliance and psychological depth. Her "Susanna and the Elders" arranges the scene vertically, with leering men towering over the nude woman, infusing conventional subject matter with searing emotional weight. Her dramatic "Judith Beheading Holofernes" depicts the biblical heroine in the act of murder, with blood raining down on bedsheets and splattering her luxurious gown.
Chapter 6
From Slavery to Suffrage: Women's Interconnected Struggles
In autumn 1839, Elizabeth Cady and her sisters were summoned by their cousin, abolitionist Gerrit Smith, to meet a beautiful young runaway slave named Harriet Powell in a hidden attic room. For two hours, they wept as Harriet described her horrific experiences, including being sold for her beauty in a New Orleans market. This encounter preceded Cady's own "escape"-marrying abolitionist Henry Stanton against her father's wishes. At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women were denied delegate status, she embraced feminism, later declaring all women "slaves" to male authority.
Though privileged white women were hardly enslaved, Stanton's rhetoric deliberately shattered sentimental notions of female dependency. The stories of Powell, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional characters shared a common argument: slavery violated every norm of womanhood. Slave women were forced to work in fields rather than homes, denied religious instruction, separated from their children, and threatened with sexual violation. Their rebellion-whether through escape, illicit relationships, or even infanticide-placed moral guilt on their masters.
White Americans had long employed slavery as a political metaphor. During the Revolution, property-owning white men claimed Britain had "enslaved" them through taxation without representation. The concept of family itself had authoritarian roots. The English word "family" derives from Latin "familia," originally meaning "a band of slaves," while "pater" initially signified authority rather than biological parenthood.
This tension between formal political rights and informal influence continued through the revolutionary period. Women like Esther Reed organized to support the war effort while carefully avoiding claims to political power. Meanwhile, African American women had much higher stakes-some like Jenny Slew successfully sued for freedom, while Phillis Wheatley pointed out the hypocrisy in Americans' "Cry for Liberty" while exercising "oppressive Power over others."
The women's rights movement in America emerged paradoxically from middle-class women's good behavior. Energized by religious revivalism in the early Republic, women formed missionary societies and sewing circles to aid the poor and promote moral reform. Though asking nothing for themselves, they gained organizational experience writing constitutions, electing officers, managing funds, and hiring employees. Their very effectiveness made it difficult to define the limits of their "sphere."
Women in the antislavery movement proved difficult to silence. They followed the example of British women who had gathered over 187,000 signatures against slavery. When Congress responded to American women's petitions with the infamous "gag rule," women became more determined. The struggle for women's rights became increasingly intertwined with the abolition movement as women found their own voices silenced when speaking against slavery.
Chapter 7
Everyday Women Making Extraordinary History
Virginia Woolf called her "Anon"-the unnamed woman who created poetry, songs, and art without recognition. With feminism's rebirth in the 1970s, interest in these anonymous women surged through oral histories, quilt documentation centers, and school projects. In 1981, Sally Fox began a personal quest to document medieval women's lives through illuminated manuscripts, discovering a 500-year-old image of a woman sculptor that sparked her passion. Searching through libraries across Europe, Fox compiled images of women engaged in countless occupations-from shearing sheep and blacksmithing to mining and masonry.
People throughout history have yearned for idealized "golden ages." While Christine de Pizan looked to antiquity and nineteenth-century Romantics idealized the Middle Ages, early twentieth-century feminists like Alice Clark argued that medieval women had greater economic power when homes were workshops where everyone contributed, before capitalism reduced middle-class women to mere "angels in the house."
Fox's illuminated manuscript images initially seem to support this view of more varied women's work in earlier times. Some images, like the female miner hacking at stone, appear fantastical-she's actually an allegory of rhetoric "mining words"-yet historical records confirm women did work in European mines, gathering ore in Saxony, washing lead in England, and mining salt in Austria.
Fox's calendar echoes medieval "books of hours" that structured daily worship for wealthy laity, with their elaborate illustrations of the Virgin Mary and seasonal labor. These religious calendars influenced later secular almanacs used by ordinary people like Maine midwife Martha Ballard, whose diary recorded seasonal work patterns-shearing sheep in spring, slaughtering hogs in autumn-using tools little changed over centuries.
In times of crisis, women pushed good behavior to the edge of defiance, often outdoing men in audacity. From medieval tax revolts to modern protests, women's collective action has been powerful precisely because it upends expectations. During tax revolts and bread riots, women's presence symbolized the depth of grievances while allowing them some protection-officials often dismissed them as "foolish" or "hysterical," inadvertently giving them room to maneuver.
Alice Walker expanded Woolf's insights in her 1974 Ms. magazine essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," arguing that feminists "have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high-and low." Walker cited examples like quilts made by ex-slaves and her own mother's flower gardens around sharecroppers' cabins, where her mother became "radiant, almost to the point of being invisible-except as Creator: hand and eye."
The Pomo Indians of California demonstrate how women preserve cultural heritage despite devastating oppression. Annie Burke learned basket-making from her mother and grandmother despite government schools that punished native language use. Her daughter Elsie Allen broke with tradition by collecting and teaching Pomo basket-making techniques to preserve this art form, even to non-Indians, saying she was inspired by seeing Chinese people proudly sharing their heritage in a restaurant.
Chapter 8
The Feminist Wave That Transformed America
Where did they come from, those brash young women sprawled in living rooms talking through the night, or crowded into borrowed offices mimeographing manifestos? In the 1960s, as Vietnam protests and Black Power erupted, American women began to misbehave-disturbing meetings, defacing subway posters, and shouting irreverent slogans. Martha Lear labeled this the "Second Feminist Wave" in 1968, a term that stuck despite few Americans knowing much about the first wave that won suffrage in 1920.
The harried housewife became a classic figure of 1960s feminism when Betty Friedan diagnosed "the problem that has no name" in The Feminine Mystique (1963). The book resonated not just with suburban mothers but also with single career women like Susan Brownmiller. Meanwhile, inside government, women seized opportunity when a conservative Southern congressman tried to sabotage the 1964 Civil Rights Act by adding "sex" to prohibited discrimination. Martha Griffiths and her allies turned this ploy into genuine protection for women.
When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission failed to enforce these protections, Friedan and others formed the National Organization for Women in 1966. Simultaneously, a more radical feminism emerged from the civil rights movement when Casey Hayden and Mary King circulated a position paper challenging gender hierarchies within SNCC, comparing male superiority to white supremacy.
The new feminism faced fierce opposition. After Irene Blea organized a Chicana feminism conference, vandals egged and toilet-papered her car in freezing Colorado weather. When the Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in 1971, Phyllis Schlafly mobilized Stop ERA, creating a powerful alliance of women, clergy, and conservative politicians. The FBI investigated feminist groups, confused by organizations with names like BITCH and Uppity Women that had "no leaders, dues, or organization."
The movement experienced wrenching internal conflicts. Black feminists accused white groups of racism. Socialists condemned consciousness-raising as bourgeois self-indulgence. "Leaderless" groups attacked media "stars." Meanwhile, lesbian feminists asserted their identity. When Rita Mae Brown casually called herself the "token lesbian," Betty Friedan muttered about "the lavender menace." At the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970, seventeen women in lavender T-shirts seized the microphones, declaring "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion."
Second-wave feminists rediscovered the past while making their own history. When Alice Walker attended the National Black Feminist Organization's 1973 meeting, she connected it to Frederick Douglass's support of women's rights at Seneca Falls in 1848. Looking at Douglass's picture on her wall, she wondered why she didn't have images of Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth.
Yet women's stories were virtually absent from formal education in the 1960s. Jo Freeman, who entered Berkeley in 1961, later realized she "not only never had a woman professor, I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn't notice." These students joined thousands across the country "collectively inventing women's history." They were guided by pioneers like Anne Firor Scott, whose book The Southern Lady appeared in 1970, and Gerda Lerner, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria who founded an M.A. program in women's studies at Sarah Lawrence College in 1972.
Together, established scholars like Lerner and Scott joined with newcomers to transform the historical profession. In the late 1960s, the American Historical Association remained a "gentlemen's protection society" that had only one female president in its first hundred years. Change accelerated in 1969 when two dozen women organized the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession at the AHA convention.
Chapter 9
Making History Through Remembering
There are many ways of making history. Some enter contests, others create family scrapbooks, and a few devote their lives to bringing about change. Jill Portugal is one such change-maker who, at twenty-three, started a feminist T-shirt business with just $100. Now a school counselor in New England, she still runs "one angry girl," selling shirts with slogans like "Anti-porn star" and "Ignore celebrities."
Scholars make history differently. At Edinburgh University, specialists are creating an online edition of Christine de Pizan's collected works. At Rutgers, historians have spent decades collecting and editing the complete works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The Women Writers Project at Brown has rescued hundreds of Shakespeare's female contemporaries from oblivion. At York University, researchers document the twenty thousand slave refugees who arrived in Ontario in the 1840s-50s.
The accumulation of resources is overwhelming. Where once only a handful of "notable women" existed in printed volumes, now crowds of women-inventors, activists, pilots, photographers, physicians, spiritualists, assembly-line workers, housewives, servants, and slaves-are documented in print and online. Harvard's "Open Collections" program has released half a million pages documenting women's work between 1800-1930. Virginia Woolf would now find hundreds of books on "Women and Poverty" in the British Library.
A fifteenth-century image of Christine de Pizan at her desk inspired textile artist Mary Yaeger to create an unusual emblem. She painted the medieval writer at a computer, then transferred the image to satin with hand-stitched embroidery details. While the original image showed Christine with a dog, Yaeger replaced it with a bright-green dragon that Christine studiously ignores-suggesting that a woman who writes her own stories has no fear of demons.
The piece links contemporary feminism with historical feminism just as Christine connected her own age with stories from antiquity. It embodies the book's conclusion: Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, create and preserve records, and when later generations care. Whether through dramatic actions like scaling mountains or refusing to move to the back of a bus, or through quieter means like keeping diaries, writing letters, or naming children, women have always found ways to leave their mark. Even those who leave only bones make history when someone notices. As historian Gerda Lerner noted, all humans are practicing historians by living and telling stories, but these stories only survive when someone cares enough to preserve them.
