We’ve all seen a t-shirt, bumper sticker, mug or mouse pad with seem variation of the motto “Well-behaved women seldom make history”. I actually own a t-shirt, my mother had a bumper sticker on her Jeep Cherokee, and I think somewhere in a box shoved in one of my closets I might have a tote bag. What I didn’t know was that “well-behaved women seldom make history” was originally from a paper about Puritan women’s funeral sermons, or that it was coined by a Mormon woman working for a New Hampshire College at the time.
This book goes into the lives of the three of the women whose feminism lead her to where she is: Christine de Pizan (author of The Book of the City of Ladies), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (suffragist), and Virginia Woolf (do I have to list her credentials?). Focusing on five topics: the feminism of Renaissance Europe (such as there was) and how it influenced de Pizan, the African_American women of Civil War America and how they influenced Stanton, what women in Tudor England really went through, and how that influenced Woolf, how the Suffrage movement got women part of the way, and finally the leaps and bounds that the women of the 1970’s took (please ignore any backsliding we’ve been doing lately).
I found it a truly interesting book; but then again I grew up with a mother who has a double major (History and English) with a Minor in Women’s Studies, so this book was practically mother’s milk to me. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t make me realize a few things, like how much I take for granted; for example Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and any of Zora Neale Hurston’s books being in print; they only exist thanks to the efforts of feminists in the 1970’s. I also appreciated that Gerda Lerner, one of the scholars she mentions quite frequently, was a mentor of my mother’s when she was getting her Masters in Women’s Studies; Gerda Lerner was indispensable with my mother’s thesis on Emma Goldman. This book was written in 2007, and I’m curious to know how much more information Ulrich would have added, or how much her opinion might have changed if she put out a revised edition nowadays.
One thing slightly unconnected to the book that I found interesting was that this book continues the coincidence that I’ve noticed lately; practically every book I’ve read has somehow or another connected to a book I’d read just before it. I don’t know if that means that I’m reading too many books of similar genres, or that I’ve become hyper-aware of the odd connections life makes; I just think it’s slightly cool and a little weird.