Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"They didn't ask to be remembered," historian Ulrich wrote in 1976 about the pious women of colonial New England. And then she added a phrase that has since gained widespread currency: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Today those words appear on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and more--but what do they really mean? Here, Ulrich ranges over centuries and cultures, from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who imagined a world in which...

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden-and not always stoic-face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In this book we encounter the awesome burdens-and the considerable power-of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising-and, all too often, mourning-her children, and even attaining...

The life of Martha Ballard, a frontier midwife in Maine, is reconstructed through her diary. She lived through the economic boom and bust, and political and social turmoil of the decades following the American Revolution.