Ulrich, who considers herself a generally well-behaved woman, has indeed made history. As I have tried to show, there is plenty of drama in almost any life,” she said. “The common thread is a search for the little known and the unexpected. She is president-elect of the American Historical Association and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Good Wivesis a study of 16th- and 17th-century New England women, The Age of Homespunexplores the impact of cloth production on women’s lives in early America, and Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe Historydispells rumors about Harvard’s “womanless” past. Ulrich earned a Pulitzer for her book A Midwife’s Talein 1991, and has authored several other books about early American life, particularly the lives of women in that period. “I want my audience and readers to understand their own potential for ‘making history.’” “I don’t think most people realize that women have not been silent participants in the past,” Ulrich said in response to questions about her visit to Mary Baldwin. She serves as a role model for women working to combine an academic career with a family and she often tells female audiences “you have the right to be a whole woman,” said The Chronicle. Ulrich’s path to Ivy League employment was unusual, particularly when viewed in the context of today’s highly competitive job market. One of a handful of professors at Harvard University who have earned distinguished status, Ulrich earned her doctorate from University of New Hampshire while raising five children. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian will be on campus February 13–15 to speak in classes and give a public talk at 8 p.m. Her objective was to “give unremembered and unremarkable women a history, not to make a political statement,” Ulrich said in a 2006 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. A fifth-generation Mormon and now gray-haired grandmother, Ulrich has something to say about how her famous line has been trivialized. The phrase’s rise to popularity - and virtual synonymy with “girl power” - is also the focus of Ulrich’s upcoming visit to Mary Baldwin University as the 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Scholar.
Today, her clever quip, “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” is a favorite for bumper stickers, mugs, T-shirts, and countless other products it has become a call to action for feminist thought around the country.
In 1995, as Ulrich explains in her latest book that takes its title from her 30-year-old academic observation, her phrase was picked up by writer Kay Mills in her book, From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Need to Know About Women’s History in America. Things have not been quite the same since. Then, she says, it “escaped into popular culture.” A seemingly innocuous line from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s first scholarly article - about funeral sermons for early New England women - remained just that for nearly two decades.
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