For Christine de Pizan, the moment was when she included Amazons, or women warriors, in “The City of Ladies.” For Stanton it was an encounter with a runaway slave that helped shape her position on women’s suffrage. In “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History” (Knopf, September 2007), Ulrich examines a pivotal moment in each of these women’s lives, describing ways in which they broke with conventional behavior in order to re-create themselves and make a place in history.

For these women - who were not historians - history was integral to their own thought and work, and they went on to make history themselves.

Ulrich examines the lives of three women from very different times: Christine de Pizan, who lived in a 15th century French court and wrote “The City of Ladies,” a book of women’s biographies the 19th century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and 20th century writer Virginia Woolf. “This book responds to that curious situation, and, because of the popularity of the slogan, it offers an opportunity to reach out to those who might not take a history course, and encourage them to ask new questions about the nature of history.” “This phrase began in a scholarly context, and moved into popular culture,” says Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor in the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Ulrich breaks down the traditional good girl/bad girl stereotypes, and shows that women - and men - who make history are, in fact, multidimensional and should not be constrained by such a polarizing formulation. The new book explores how and why it is that women who act in unexpected ways tend to be remembered, while more conventional women fade into the past.

However, in the 1970s, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich penned in a scholarly article about the funeral sermons of Christian women that “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The phrase subsequently gained wide popularity, appearing on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items - and it’s now the title of Ulrich’s latest book. Most bumper sticker slogans do not originate in academic publications.

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