She uses daybook illustrations to look at women who weren't trying to make history, but did. She turns Stanton's encounter with a runaway slave upside down, asking how the story would change if the slave rather than the white suffragist were at the center. She contrasts Woolf's imagined story about Shakespeare's sister with biographies of actual women who were Shakespeare's contemporaries. Ulrich updates de Pizan's Amazons with stories about women warriors from other times and places. Her volume ranges over centuries and cultures, from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who imagined a world in which women achieved power and influence, to the writings of nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and twentieth-century novelist Virginia Woolf. But what do they really mean? In this engrossing volume, Laurel Ulrich goes far beyond the slogan she inadvertently created and explores what it means to make history. And then she added a phrase that has since gained widespread currency: Well-behaved women seldom make history.Today those words appear almost everywhere on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, plaques, greeting cards, and more. They didn't ask to be remembered, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel Ulrich wrote in 1976 about the pious women of colonial New England.
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