Megan Marshall: The Women's History Boom
[Megan Marshall's biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir.]
During the summer of 1976, as the country was turning its back on defeat in Vietnam with unabashedly patriotic celebrations of its bicentennial, I took a work-study job at the Women's History Research Center in Berkeley, Calif., a choice I viewed as a minor protest against the boosterish mood of the times. The name conjures up now, as it did when I applied for the job from my college dorm room in Cambridge, Mass., a think tank where scholars pored over archival materials in a climate-controlled reading room. In fact, the place was run out of a dank church basement off Telegraph Avenue. The enterprise was presided over in absentia by its founder, Laura X, a St. Louis heiress née Laura Murra, who preferred to spend her days in the house in the Berkeley hills where she had started the organization in 1969.
In a fury after a UC-Berkeley professor had expressed doubt that there was enough material on women to fill a quarter's course, Laura X had dropped her last name, proclaiming that, like Malcolm, "I don't want to have my owner's name, either"—that is, her father's. Then she had proceeded to spend much of her inheritance gathering thousands of books, pamphlets, clippings, diaries, photographs, and oral history tapes documenting women's accomplishments around the world and throughout history in an effort to prove that professor wrong. By 1976, the feasibility of a course in women's history was no longer in question on almost any college campus—and Laura X's dizzying array of sources, most of which were strewn about her Berkeley house, had spun out of control.
I quickly learned that the WHRC's heyday had come and gone, and my summer would be spent helping close down the place. Each day I packed up more files and correspondence to be shipped off to the women's history archive at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library. A recent check on the Schlesinger's holdings shows that the WHRC collection is still "unprocessed" more than 30 years later, but includes, along with reports, minutes, clippings, and pamphlets, "records on interns, volunteers, and staff." Quite possibly I had archived myself that summer.
Laura X's campaign had a lot more in common with Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party than it did with a movement by university-trained historians working from the inside to expand the horizons of the discipline, which gathered force in the mid-1970s and has never let up. At about the same time I was taping up cardboard boxes in Berkeley, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who'd graduated from her own version of WHRC—the Mormon Sisters Inc., of Arlington, Mass., which put out a feminist newsletter celebrating the accomplishments of early Mormon women—to a Ph.D. program at the University of New Hampshire, published her first scholarly article. The article, "Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,"—which appeared in American Quarterly, the 27-year-old journal of the American Studies Association—grew out of Ulrich's desire "to know more about ordinary women." She had mined Puritan funeral sermons for evidence about women whose lives had otherwise gone unrecorded. "Well-behaved women seldom make history," she noted in her opening paragraph, in explanation of her difficulty locating sources.
Ulrich went on to write three impeccably researched books—Good Wives (1982), A Midwife's Tale (winner of a Pulitzer in history in 1991), and The Age of Homespun (2001)—each one using new and ingenious methods to document the lives of "well-behaved" women. She also became a tenured professor in Harvard's formerly all-male history department. Meanwhile, that one-liner from her first article took on a life of its own, ironically seeming to endorse an entirely different, activist style of history-making from the quiet, quotidian one Ulrich preferred to write about.
The sentence "escaped into popular culture," Ulrich writes in her new book by that title, after journalist Kay Mills used it as an epigraph in her survey of American women's history, From Pocahontas to Power Suits (1995). From there, the sentence made its way onto T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and bumper stickers, where it "now keeps company with anarchists, hedonists, would-be witches, political activists of many descriptions"—the spiritual daughters of Laura X—along with "quite a few well-behaved women." It is a motto that has been embraced by, among others, nurses, school teachers, women in retirement homes, and a network of quilters based in Puyallup, Wash., who, according to their T-shirt-dealing spokeswoman, "see themselves as a little outrageous and naughty and out-of-control with their hobby."...
After centuries of asking, women no longer have to wonder, where are the women in our history books? They are there, because sleuths like Ulrich saw the need to look harder at all the "unprocessed" ephemera of women's lives—which in future years will no doubt include a T-shirt or two—and "try to understand."
Read entire article at Slate
During the summer of 1976, as the country was turning its back on defeat in Vietnam with unabashedly patriotic celebrations of its bicentennial, I took a work-study job at the Women's History Research Center in Berkeley, Calif., a choice I viewed as a minor protest against the boosterish mood of the times. The name conjures up now, as it did when I applied for the job from my college dorm room in Cambridge, Mass., a think tank where scholars pored over archival materials in a climate-controlled reading room. In fact, the place was run out of a dank church basement off Telegraph Avenue. The enterprise was presided over in absentia by its founder, Laura X, a St. Louis heiress née Laura Murra, who preferred to spend her days in the house in the Berkeley hills where she had started the organization in 1969.
In a fury after a UC-Berkeley professor had expressed doubt that there was enough material on women to fill a quarter's course, Laura X had dropped her last name, proclaiming that, like Malcolm, "I don't want to have my owner's name, either"—that is, her father's. Then she had proceeded to spend much of her inheritance gathering thousands of books, pamphlets, clippings, diaries, photographs, and oral history tapes documenting women's accomplishments around the world and throughout history in an effort to prove that professor wrong. By 1976, the feasibility of a course in women's history was no longer in question on almost any college campus—and Laura X's dizzying array of sources, most of which were strewn about her Berkeley house, had spun out of control.
I quickly learned that the WHRC's heyday had come and gone, and my summer would be spent helping close down the place. Each day I packed up more files and correspondence to be shipped off to the women's history archive at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library. A recent check on the Schlesinger's holdings shows that the WHRC collection is still "unprocessed" more than 30 years later, but includes, along with reports, minutes, clippings, and pamphlets, "records on interns, volunteers, and staff." Quite possibly I had archived myself that summer.
Laura X's campaign had a lot more in common with Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party than it did with a movement by university-trained historians working from the inside to expand the horizons of the discipline, which gathered force in the mid-1970s and has never let up. At about the same time I was taping up cardboard boxes in Berkeley, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who'd graduated from her own version of WHRC—the Mormon Sisters Inc., of Arlington, Mass., which put out a feminist newsletter celebrating the accomplishments of early Mormon women—to a Ph.D. program at the University of New Hampshire, published her first scholarly article. The article, "Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,"—which appeared in American Quarterly, the 27-year-old journal of the American Studies Association—grew out of Ulrich's desire "to know more about ordinary women." She had mined Puritan funeral sermons for evidence about women whose lives had otherwise gone unrecorded. "Well-behaved women seldom make history," she noted in her opening paragraph, in explanation of her difficulty locating sources.
Ulrich went on to write three impeccably researched books—Good Wives (1982), A Midwife's Tale (winner of a Pulitzer in history in 1991), and The Age of Homespun (2001)—each one using new and ingenious methods to document the lives of "well-behaved" women. She also became a tenured professor in Harvard's formerly all-male history department. Meanwhile, that one-liner from her first article took on a life of its own, ironically seeming to endorse an entirely different, activist style of history-making from the quiet, quotidian one Ulrich preferred to write about.
The sentence "escaped into popular culture," Ulrich writes in her new book by that title, after journalist Kay Mills used it as an epigraph in her survey of American women's history, From Pocahontas to Power Suits (1995). From there, the sentence made its way onto T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and bumper stickers, where it "now keeps company with anarchists, hedonists, would-be witches, political activists of many descriptions"—the spiritual daughters of Laura X—along with "quite a few well-behaved women." It is a motto that has been embraced by, among others, nurses, school teachers, women in retirement homes, and a network of quilters based in Puyallup, Wash., who, according to their T-shirt-dealing spokeswoman, "see themselves as a little outrageous and naughty and out-of-control with their hobby."...
After centuries of asking, women no longer have to wonder, where are the women in our history books? They are there, because sleuths like Ulrich saw the need to look harder at all the "unprocessed" ephemera of women's lives—which in future years will no doubt include a T-shirt or two—and "try to understand."