“They didn’t ask to be remembered,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel 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 almost everywhere—on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, plaques, greeting cards, and more. But what do they really mean? In this engrossing volume, Laurel Ulrich goes far beyond the slogan she inadvertently created and explores what it means to make history.
Her volume ranges over centuries and cultures, from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who imagined a world in which women achieved power and influence, to the writings of nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and twentieth-century novelist Virginia Woolf. Ulrich updates de Pizan’s Amazons with stories about women warriors from other times and places. She contrasts Woolf’s imagined story about Shakespeare’s sister with biographies of actual women who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries. She turns Stanton’s encounter with a runaway slave upside down, asking how the story would change if the slave rather than the white suffragist were at the center. She uses daybook illustrations to look at women who weren’t trying to make history, but did. Throughout, she shows how the feminist wave of the 1970s created a generation of historians who by challenging traditional accounts of both men’s and women’s histories stimulated more vibrant and better-documented accounts of the past.
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History celebrates a renaissance in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional historians. It is a tribute to history and to those who make it.
From the Hardcover edition.
3 有用 野原新之助 2022-07-31 21:48:54
《乖巧的女性很少创造历史》。这句话来自作者1976年写的一篇学术文章，后来成为一句广泛引用的女权口号；2007年，作者把这句口号扩展为这本书。在本书中，作者引用了三位女性作者，克里斯蒂娜·德·皮桑、伊丽莎白·凯迪·斯坦顿、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫，以她们的经历和作品为框架（此外还有更多其他资料），勾勒出女性在历史上的地位：为国家、社会和家庭付出了极大牺牲（或者被迫牺牲），但常常处于隐形人的状态。书名有两个... 《乖巧的女性很少创造历史》。这句话来自作者1976年写的一篇学术文章，后来成为一句广泛引用的女权口号；2007年，作者把这句口号扩展为这本书。在本书中，作者引用了三位女性作者，克里斯蒂娜·德·皮桑、伊丽莎白·凯迪·斯坦顿、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫，以她们的经历和作品为框架（此外还有更多其他资料），勾勒出女性在历史上的地位：为国家、社会和家庭付出了极大牺牲（或者被迫牺牲），但常常处于隐形人的状态。书名有两个层面的解读：首先，女性的活动被限制（因为性别）；其次，历史经常忽略女性的贡献。本书的重心在于回答后一个问题，即通过资料还原女性在历史上的真实形象。作者是研究女性史的历史学家，本书中引用的故事丰富、生动，许多事例是闻所未闻的。我的启示是，不要做听话的人（听话是进步的天敌），不要做盲视的人。 (展开)
0 有用 iwjdjxj 2021-03-04 21:58:51
“If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn’t been very good at capturing the lives of those ... “If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn’t been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic.” (展开)