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Suggestive" is a slippery word, particularly dangerous when ladies are present. Nonetheless, I can think of no better term to describe Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's latest book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. The cover sets the tone by running the title as a slogan on a woman's t-shirt. While the shirt is demure enough, reading the title requires the viewer to stare at the model's chest. A male colleague of mine hated the cover, for reasons he preferred not to articulate. I merely found it, well, suggestive. How should one read a feminist call to action emblazoned on the torso of a woman who, in the closely cropped photo, lacks face or hands? An eminent interpreter of visual texts, Ulrich—who presumably did not design the cover, but signed off on it—must have had a motive.
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The title and visual presentation find ready explanation in the book's lengthy introduction, called "The Slogan." It turns out that the catchy phrase now adorning so many shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons was lifted from an article on Puritan funeral sermons Ulrich published in American Quarterly in spring 1976. Few people noticed the sentence in question until 1995, when it appeared in journalist Kay Mills' book From Pocahontas to Power Suits. Ulrich recounts the phrase's independent life, including the substitution of "rarely" for "seldom" and countless unlicensed commercial usages, the way a woman might describe the career of a willful daughter who never quite abandoned her mother's deepest values. Though Ulrich's aim in the article was to demonstrate that women could leave a mark on the world without being rowdy or rebellious, she has enough sympathy for naughty girls (past and present) to allow them expression in her own words.
Ulrich keeps a collection of catchphrase kitsch, but it is hard to imagine her sporting any of it. According to published profiles, she is quite well-behaved herself. A Mormon mother of five, she adapted the timing, location, and subject matter of her higher education to be convenient for her family. Fortunately for her, the late 1970s was an ideal time to be digging through archives in New England (where her husband taught engineering) and writing about colonial women. Once a bastion of intellectual history, the colonial era was opening up to the New Social History and its attention to court records, church registries, and other nontraditional evidence. Ulrich was among the first to apply these methodological innovations to women's history, with the result that her dissertation, published as Good Wives (1982), immediately attracted attention. The autobiographical overtones of this project were not lost on the author, who writes here, "In my scholarly work, my form of misbehavior has been to care about things that other people find predictable or boring." She noticed faithful spouses.
Ulrich found another kindred spirit in Martha Ballard, an 18th-century medical woman whose diary was happily housed at a library in nearby Maine. Ulrich's painstaking research on the diary and the community it chronicled produced A Midwife's Tale (1990), which earned the author a Bancroft, a Pulitzer, and a chair at Harvard. Though Ballard never set out to make history, she catapulted her mild-mannered biographer to the pinnacle of her profession.
In these two books and, more recently, in The Age of Homespun (2001), a history of 18th-century textile manufacturing, Ulrich's approach has been to identify tiny, concrete details and then to follow the narrative threads bound up in them. The details—diary entries such as "3 6 Clear & very hot," or objects such as embroidered tablecloths—do not tell their own stories but suggest economic patterns, social networks, labors, emotions, gender norms, and all of the other elements that shape historical moments. This kind of evidence has the advantage of ubiquity; it represents far more lives than are dreamt of in traditional histories, and it is literally lying around (in attics, museums, libraries, yard sales) waiting to be discovered. Less helpfully, such evidence resists being wrestled into the form of a scholarly argument. It invites lots of interpretations instead of proving just one. In the tussle between discovery and argumentation, Ulrich chooses the former. She has methodological reasons for doing so; social history (especially the microhistory and local history branches) often aims to convey complexity and diversity rather than to generate broad theories. The relative youth of women's history as a discipline also factors in, because intense work on primary sources becomes the support on which later generalizations rest. Small studies must come first.
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