Well-behaved women seldom make history

I LOVED this book. The very short version is that it's a great bridge between pop history (the broad sweep of the topic + tendency to jump around from person to person or culture to culture are way more common in that genre) and academic history (Ulrich can interpret/analyze primary sources, uses tons of detail and nuance, and footnotes extensively to show her work), perfect for someone who reads the former and doesn't think they'd enjoy the latter.

"Details provide the contexts in which Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Friedan mounted their arguments. Details help us understand the precise circumstances that allowed Artemisia Gentileschi to become an artist, or Harriet Jacobs a writer. Details keep us from falling into the twin snares of 'victim history' and 'hero history.' Details let us out of boxes created by slogans."

That last sentence is the key to understanding what Ulrich was doing with this book. The title is of course one of the most famous feminist slogans - and it was written by Ulrich herself decades ago. But she wrote it as part of her dissertation on well-behaved Massachusetts Puritan women (what would eventually become her book Good Wives), and her point was that it was tremendously difficult to reconstruct these women's lives because it's rule-breaking behavior that gets written down in court documents and polemics. And not rule-breaking behavior like "shattering the glass ceiling" or "demanding to learn to read", but "stealing a cow" or "telling everyone your neighbor's a slut". In the introduction, she traces her words' passage into the mainstream, and without complaining or correcting makes the point that the line dramatically shifted in meaning when it was put on a t-shirt. Then, throughout the rest of the text, which runs from Christine de Pizan to the feminist scholars and activists of her own generation, she subtly but continuously makes the point that the women who did make history in that sense cannot be categorized as "well-behaved" or "badly-behaved". The many, many women she refers to and describes in the book often can be construed as both, and "making history" can be defined in many ways, from the aforementioned court cases to literally writing books about history.

"Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, although bones too make history when someone notices."