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Yet there is even more at stake for Ulrich as she approaches her data. Preserving the untidiness of the past makes a feminist statement. In the new book, Ulrich quotes A Room of One's Own, noting, "Virginia Woolf lamented the difficulty of measuring women's achievements … . She concluded that to comprehend women's creativity, a writer would have her work cut out for her 'simply as an observer.' " A historian who sets out primarily to "observe" the past opts not to do much of the judging, organizing, and marshaling of evidence that marks more traditional scholarship. This choice makes for lively but, as in the case of Well-Behaved Women, often frustrating reading.
Ulrich begins with epigraphs from Woolf, 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Christine de Pizan, author of an early 15th-century allegory featuring women's biographies. The ideas of these three female writers, sketched in the first chapter, prompt and very loosely link the contents of the following chapters. Chapter 2, "Amazons," traces myths and realities of warrior women—a category in Christine's The Book of the City of Ladies—from ancient Greece to Jessica Lynch. Woolf's complaint that 17th-century society suppressed women writers occasions a chapter on "Shakespeare's Daughters," which looks both at the few successful women writers of Shakespeare's era and at artistic representations of the Apocryphal figures for whom Shakespeare's biological daughters, Susanna and Judith, were named. Another comment from Woolf and an image from Christine's manuscript launch a wide-ranging discussion of women's work as depicted in a 1985 illustrated planner, The Medieval Woman: An Illuminated Book of Days. Stanton's recollection of meeting a runaway slave begins a chapter on gender, race, and the significance of white women likening their own situation to slavery. A concluding chapter on second-wave feminism mentions the epigraphers in passing but centers on Ulrich's experiences and observations of the 1960s and '70s.
All of these intellectual forays aim to answer two related questions: What sorts of women have made history? And what sorts of history have women made? In both questions, "make" encompasses shifting meanings. First, it signifies achievement, as in "making the grade." Women make history when they qualify for inclusion in the annals, often by defying convention, causing scandal, or in other ways misbehaving. Second, the word signifies creation. Women make history when they leave records or fashion narratives to explain the past. These records and narratives, as Ulrich both asserts and models in her own writing, are not just "history as usual." They are so potentially subversive that even penning them can be viewed as a species of protest.
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