I've heard the slogan "Well behaved women seldom make history" here and there. It's a defence of, well, of change-making misbehaviour, I guess.
Last month, Slate, the American online magazine, ran an appreciation of the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of a wonderful book called The Midwife's Tale. Ulrich has specialized precisely in histories of well-behaved women, "ordinary" people with quiet lives and no great influence even in their own times. Her acts of attention to them are quite miraculous.
Ulrich, it turns out, wrote the sentence "Well-behaved women..." in the first paragraph of her first published article. She intended it as a defence of the attention she intended to give to those neglected women.
The phrase "escaped into popular culture," and took on its own life and meaning. Now Ulrich has recovered it as the title of her new book. The essay in Slate is here.
