I love perusing the articles on Slate.com---especially today. It turns out that one of my favorite historians Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has published a new book and the good people from Slate have offered a book review of it already.
Back in the 1970s, Ulrich was a recent doctoral graduate from the University of New Hampshire. Her area of focus? The lives of ordinary women in colonial New England. She combed through archives and libraries to unveil what life was like for these overlooked women. In her first published article, she bemoaned the lack of resources about this important---yet seemingly invisible---group of females. "Well-behaved women seldom make history," she wrote as the opening sentence of the piece.
Since the article's publication, Ulrich's words have come to grace t-shirts, cups, stickers, and bumper stickers. Anarchists and hedonists have eagerly adopted the slogan as their motto. All of this attention has deeply intrigued Ulrich and she has centered her newest work on three unconventional women who have made history, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf.
One of the reasons I admire Ulrich so much is because she breaks the commonly-held stereotype that Mormon women are docile and even oppressed. Here is a woman who teaches at Harvard and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Here is a woman who avidly studies feminism throughout history. Here is a woman who I definitely look up to.
I'm so excited for my copy to arrive!
