You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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.
From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.
This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden--and not always stoic--face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages 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 fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best.
Adds 21 new essays and drops some that appeared in the 1984 edition (first in 1978) to reflect recent scholarship and changes in orientation by historians. Adds entirely new clusters on sickness and health, early American medicine, therapeutics, the art of medicine, and public health and personal hygiene. Other discussions are updated to reflect such phenomena as the growing mortality from HIV, homicide, and suicide. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Organised chronologically and then by topic, this volume covers studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods through the Civil War. The remainder of the book focuses on the late 19th and 20th centuries.
"In Yards and Gates, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her contributors argue that there have always been women at Harvard. The illuminating essays, letters, diary entries, and illustrations in this groundbreaking collection look at Harvard history from the colonial period to the present, giving primary attention to women and especially to the history of Radcliffe. They also demonstrate the value of looking at American history through a gendered lens. Here are stories about aspiration as well as marginality, and about women and men who opened once locked gates."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review). Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.
They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history. In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.
Based on the rich museum collections of Harvard University, Tangible Things challenges rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. Through 20 entertaining and inspiring case studies it demonstrates that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past.