The Slogan

by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

A selection from the admired history Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, the story of how one of feminism’s most popular slogans came to life.  In the opening paragraph of an obscure 1976 scholarly article investigating the prim and proper women celebrated in Puritan funeral sermons, Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich penned the phrase, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Since then, Ulrich’s slogan has been put on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and tote bags, in greeting cards and political speeches, entering the cultural consciousness in all sorts of unexpected ways. In “The Slogan,” Ulrich gives a brief history of her much-quoted words, and sketches out a primer on feminism today and the way it continues to make history. An eBook short.

Genres: Nonfiction

32 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2015

About the author

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001), she has incorporated museum-based research as well as more traditional archival work. Her most recent book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women's history, and material culture. Professor Ulrich's work is featured on the web at www.dohistory.org and www.randomhouse.com.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~amciv/fac...

Reviews

[Navya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short read packs a surprising amount of punch

[Jeff Swystun · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great short read on the scary power of a slogan. In this case we are not talking about a branded product but rather a very real observation and idea. The author penned the now famous line, "Well-behaved women seldom make history", in an academic essay. The essay was no great hit but the line resonated with an entrepreneur who put it on t-shirt.

As Ulrich writes, "Serious history talks back to slogans. But in the contest of public attention, slogans usually wins. Consider my simple sentence. It sat quietly for years in the folds of a scholarly journal. Now it honks its ambiguous wisdom from coffee mugs and tailgates." She examines how people have misinterpreted or purloined the line to the point of it becoming a cottage industry but that is not what grabbed me.

I am amazed how people gravitate to dumbed-down messaging. William Henry wrote In Defense of Elitism, "People like small, manageable worlds – hence our enduring fascination with doll houses, our addiction to epigrammatic best-sellers, our attachment to slogans and buzzwords that address complexity without unraveling it.” He wrote that over twenty years ago and the situation has only grown precipitously worse.

Americans now react to a slogan or tagline to convince them of deeper thinking and reasoned arguments. “Just say No to Drugs”, “Shock and Awe” and “Make America Great Again” are mind-numbingly inane and absolutely deceptive or self-deceptive. Slogans work when they draw you in and convince you to explore and learn more not if you accept them at easily interpreted face value. This is a fascinating read and worthy of more debate.