Laurel Thatcher Ulrich > Quotes

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make a history when someone notices.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn't been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Everything in arms. Did not find time to sit down till 2 pm.” The phrase is idiomatic, of course, yet it suggests an attitude. A house could be an adversary. Turn your back, and it rippled into disorder. Chairs tipped. Candles slumped. Egg yolks hardened in cold skillets. Dust settled like snow. Only by constant effort could a woman conquer her possessions. Mustering grease and ashes, shaking feather beds and pillows to attention, scrubbing floors and linens into subjection, she restored a fragile order to a fallen world.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“But like other well-behaved women they chose to obey God rather than men.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Some people are happy to give feminists credit for things they fear—like abortion rights, contraception for teenagers, or gay liberation—but less willing to acknowledge that feminist activism brought about things they support, like better treatment for breast cancer or the opportunity for young girls to play soccer as well as lead cheers.

As Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon observe, "Although the word 'feminist' has become a pejorative term for to some American women, most women (and most men as well) support a feminist program: equal education, equal pay, child care, freedom from harassment and violence," and so on.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Well behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“Women, to use a Biblical metaphor, performed their works under a bushel; men’s candles burned on the hill.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Two of Martha’s helpers, Polly Savage and Sarah Neal, had babies born out of wedlock,”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“The prosecutorial double standard originated in a 1668 Massachusetts law that introduced the English practice of asking unwed mothers to name the father of their child during delivery. At first glance, questioning a woman in labor seems a form of harassment. In practice, it was a formality allowing the woman, her relatives, or in some cases the selectmen of her town to claim child support. The man she accused could not be convicted of fornication (confession or witnesses were needed for that), but unless there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he would be judged the “reputed father” of her child and required to pay for its support. The assumption was that a woman asked to testify at the height of travail would not lie.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Without the diary we would know nothing of her life after the last of her children was born, nothing of the 816 deliveries she performed between 1785 and 1812. We would not even be certain she had been a midwife. In the spring of 1789, Martha faced a flooding river and a rising tide of births. She attended seven deliveries in March and another seven before the end of April, twice her monthly average. On April 23 she went down the Kennebec to visit several families on the west side of the river opposite Bumberhook. This is how she told”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“We know that courts gradually abandoned the practice of fining married couples whose first child was born too soon,”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Yet the subtle shift that led Martha at the end of the week to describe Otis Pierce’s sister Hitty as “Mrs Pierce” is intriguing. Martha usually reserved “Mrs” for married women or for mature daughters of prominent men. 8 No other single mother had been given this honorific. Hitty’s alliance with John Vassall Davis had given her a peculiar eminence.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“What the incident shows is the power of her presence in the community. Cony was threatened by her intervention, presumed or real. It also shows the doctor’s willingness to assert his authority against the claims of a presumably inferior practitioner. This was, of course, what the new medical societies were encouraging physicians to do.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“William Nelson has shown that while fornication prosecutions still accounted for more than a third of criminal actions in Massachusetts between 1760 and 1774, in only one case was the father of an illegitimate child prosecuted—a black man suspected of cohabiting with a white woman.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Well behaved women rarely make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“Only ten men were tried for rape in Massachusetts in the entire eighteenth century, none after 1780. Between 1780 and 1797 there were sixteen indictments and ten convictions for attempted rape, still a small number considering that the population of the state approached 400,000.20 The women’s reticence is hardly surprising, given the rarity of the accusation and the severity of the penalty.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“God as the controlling power in the universe allowed death and sorrow but also provided ways to transform those events into good.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Mary Vial Holyoke was the daughter of a Boston merchant and the wife of a Salem gentleman, Edward Augustus Holyoke, a casual versifier and serious physician who was a member of the town’s economic and intellectual elite.3 The Holyokes enjoyed the barbecues, dances, teas, and “turtles” of the Essex County gentry, yet each of the four major housekeeping roles is clearly apparent in Mary’s diary, as this selection of entries from the 1760s shows: Service and maintenance: “Washed.” “Ironed.” “Scoured pewter.” “Scowered rooms.” “Scoured furniture Brasses & put up the Chintz bed & hung pictures.” “Burnt 5 Chimnies.” “Opened cask of Biscuit.” “Began a Barrel of flour.” “Began upon 22 lb. of chocolate.” “Dressed a Calves Head turtle fashion.” Agriculture: “Sowd sweet marjoram.” “Sowed pease.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750

“Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“Martha’s diary supports the notion that children chose their own spouses; there is no evidence of parental negotiation, and little hint of parental supervision in any of the courtships she describes. The diary also confirms the prevalence of premarital sex. Yet there is little evidence of romance and much to suggest that economic concerns remained central. The weddings in the Ballard family were distinctly unglamorous affairs, almost nonevents. For the women, they were surrounded by an intense productivity, a gathering of resources that defined their meaning and purpose.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Vaughan was convinced that the new therapies, heroic bloodletting and the use of digitalis, usually in combination with opium, were essential to patient care. To his dismay, he had found a man who preferred the quiet operations of established remedies—and prayer. In Benjamin Vaughan’s mind—and perhaps in Daniel Cony’s as well—the lines were clearly drawn. It was a case of prejudice versus science and of “female” versus “approved” therapies.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“A trial for rape, then, was really a contest between the men involved—the husband or father, the accused, the judges, and jury—rather than a judgment of the events themselves. This was, of course, exactly the position taken by Henry Sewall in his letter to George Thatcher. He was far more concerned with the conflict between Joseph North and Obadiah Wood than with what happened between Rebecca Foster and the men she accused. This is surprising, given Sewall’s general concern with moral behavior, yet he was already prejudiced against the Fosters, while his experience as clerk of the U.S. District Court gave him plenty of opportunity to associate with lawyers and to adopt their point of view. His letter, like the play, is essentially comic, a satirical dismissal of rural pettiness masquerading as law. 23”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Alice Metherell of Kittery, Maine, had been convicted of a false oath in an earlier case of bastardy (she had delivered a black child after accusing a white man), she was able in 1695 to get maintenance from John Thompson and even to defend herself against a slander suit from him.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Some have argued that the American Revolution connected women’s private activities to the public sphere by publicizing their contributions to domestic manufacturing and stimulating a new appreciation of their roles as wives and mothers. Others believe it was women’s activities in voluntary societies in the early nineteenth century that first gave them an identity within and beyond the household. 3”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812