A Well-Behaved Scholar Makes History

How a quiet professor became an unlikely hero for feminists

When Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote her first scholarly article 30 years ago — an examination of funeral sermons for women in Colonial America — she never expected that a line from the opening paragraph would become a rallying cry for feminists.

You’ve seen the slogan on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and coffee mugs: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” It has been adopted as the official maxim of a raunchy, comic feminist group and used on the best-selling products of One Angry Girl Designs, an online company that fights pornography and violence against women.

It’s a call to be wild and act up — to stop being seen but not heard. And it’s earning Ms. Ulrich about $1,000 a year in royalties.

The irony, though, is that Ms. Ulrich herself could not be better behaved.

She is a Mormon, who spent her 20s and 30s as a faculty wife and mother of five children. She sewed quilts, made bread, and bottled pears, all while taking one course at a time toward her master’s degree and then a doctorate in history. She is an accidental academic whose unconventional career path has landed her at the nation’s most prominent university.

In January Ms. Ulrich, 67, was named one of only 19 distinguished university professors at Harvard University. It hired her 10 years ago after her historical tale of a New England midwife won a Pulitzer.

“I didn’t expect to even have a career,” says Ms. Ulrich. “It’s a fairy tale, so I hate to tell people because it’s not something that typically happens. I realize it sounds like a Cinderella story.”

An Unlikely Feminist

Ms. Ulrich is a fifth-generation Mormon from a prosperous Utah family, whose parents settled in Sugar City, Idaho. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, men are encouraged to “preside” over their families, and women are prohibited from entering the priesthood or leading congregations. But Ms. Ulrich’s parents always encouraged her to pursue higher education and explore her talent for writing.

As a teenager she submitted poems to Seventeen magazine, and it eventually commissioned her to write a short essay called “Sugar City Magic” about how her family celebrated Christmas. She was an English major at the University of Utah by the time the essay was published. When she graduated in 1960, she was married and four months pregnant with her first child.

Ms. Ulrich was a high achiever at Utah — a prizewinning debater who ranked at the top of her class. But like most young women in the early 1960s, particularly Mormon ones, she took a pass on a career. She followed her husband, Gael Ulrich, to Cambridge, where he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During the decade the family first lived in Cambridge, Ms. Ulrich was a typical young Mormon stay-at-home mother. But the women’s movement did not pass her by. She helped start a consciousness-raising group for intellectual Mormon women who called themselves feminists — something Ms. Ulrich acknowledges sounds like an oxymoron.

The women discussed their obligations as wives and mothers, but also their intellectual ideas. And they launched a quarterly feminist newspaper, called Exponent II, that is still in print.

As a feminist and a Mormon, Ms. Ulrich has faced both skepticism and criticism — sometimes from within the church itself. Brigham Young University rejected a proposal to bring her to the campus for a talk in 1993. The university never explained why, but Ms. Ulrich did speak there in 2004.

She says that she and her feminist friends are part of the “unsponsored sector” of Mormonism. But their beliefs seem far from radical. And Ms. Ulrich says the church supports her core values of “family, community, democracy, and antimaterialism.”

With her gray hair and glasses and her oversized sweater, Ms. Ulrich looks a bit like someone’s grandmother — and she is. She speaks in measured sentences, occasionally tinged with dry humor, but never in a way that hints at doubt or regret. She seems to have squared the competing factors of her faith and her feminism.

“You can decide that this institution doesn’t value women in the way you would like it to, and therefore you’re going to go do something else,” she says of her church. “Or, you can decide that this institution, like most human institutions, isn’t perfect, and what you value is so important that you would never give it up.”

Close to Home

While Ms. Ulrich also refused to give up on her idea of herself as an intellectual and a writer, she certainly had to be flexible in her pursuits. In the mid-1960s, she enrolled in a master’s-degree program in English at Simmons College, which she chose because it was the only nearby place where she could study part time. Then in 1971, two courses shy of her degree, she and her family moved to the University of New Hampshire, where her husband began a faculty job in chemical engineering.

Ms. Ulrich finished her master’s degree at New Hampshire. After reading an excerpt from a book by a New Hampshire historian, she enrolled in the university’s new doctoral program in Early American history — even though she had never taken a course in the subject before. As a faculty wife, she paid only half price.

When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, Ms. Ulrich settled on an examination of funeral sermons for early New England women because it was convenient. “I designed my dissertation around the distance from my home,” she says. “I wasn’t going to be able to travel, so I wrote about northern New England because that’s where I was.”

Mr. Ulrich agreed to take over the task of getting the couple’s children off to school each morning, so Ms. Ulrich could spend the morning writing before her youngest daughter came home from preschool. She wrote her dissertation in her bedroom, at a desk constructed of two damaged file cabinets.

Although she did it all without so much as a regular baby sitter, Ms. Ulrich admits that she was at times distracted. “I’ve destroyed many kettles that have burned through to the aluminum,” she acknowledges. “I could walk around the house with the children there, but be thinking about something far away and long ago.”

She also enlisted her kids’ help. Plenty of women earn doctorates after having a child, but few do so after having five. Ms. Ulrich taught hers to cook and wash clothes, and her 15-year-old son Nathan typed her entire dissertation on the university’s mainframe computer. She was never deliberate about making herself marketable in the Ivy League, she says, and chose to attend Simmons and New Hampshire for graduate school because they were convenient. “I was sort of innocent about all of it.”

A Breakout Star

Ms. Ulrich’s academic career unfolded in the kind of serendipitous way that her education had. She began teaching part time in New Hampshire’s history department, and then another faculty wife moved away, leaving a full-time teaching job open. Within a few years, professors in the department asked if she would be interested in a tenure-track position. By that time, she was 46 years old.

It was during her first few years on the tenure track at New Hampshire — in the mid-1980s — that Ms. Ulrich did the research and writing for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Midwife’s Tale, which made her a breakout star in academe and eventually got her noticed by Harvard.

The book is based on the diary of an 18th-century midwife and healer named Martha Ballard. The diary was a terse record of the day’s weather and Mrs. Ballard’s home life and job, which took her over Maine’s frozen Kennebec River countless times each year to deliver babies. Public television showed a documentary based on the book.

Because the diary was sparse on details, Ms. Ulrich did years of research on court records and medical literature to fill in the blanks and make the story come alive. Nancy F. Cott, a professor of history at Harvard, says Ms. Ulrich has a unique combination of imagination and dedication.

“It took incredible patience to slog through details and spend hours and weeks of time finding out things that don’t necessarily add up right away,” says Ms. Cott. “But she can place those things into a holding position and keep them there until it all comes together for her in a way that is conclusive and exciting.”

The book staked out new territory, focusing on seemingly inconsequential events in the life of a common woman — the kind of thing other scholars had typically overlooked. Mark A. Kishlansky, a professor of English history at Harvard, says the book has become “one of the most important works of the 20th century.” And it was one of the reasons he suggested Harvard recruit Ms. Ulrich.

That Ms. Ulrich wound up teaching at Harvard — and garnering one of its prized university professorships — still amazes her. “I was not raised to believe that life began and ended in the Ivy League, which is probably why I’ve survived here,” she says.

She and her husband have now reversed roles. He retired from New Hampshire and followed her back to Cambridge, where the couple share a two-bedroom 19th-century carriage house within walking distance of Ms. Ulrich’s campus office.

When Ms. Ulrich arrived back here in the mid-1990s, there were only two senior women historians at Harvard. She recalls having some “very rough experiences” early on. “A number of times, I was ready to resign because I felt like whatever I proposed was scrutinized in such a way that never, ever would have been scrutinized had it been proposed by someone else.” Read: by a man.

But since then, the department has been flooded with female professors. There are 11 tenured women now. “There’s this joke that Professor Ulrich was a Trojan horse,” she says.

This year Ms. Ulrich’s post on the Faculty Council of Harvard’s College of Arts and Sciences put her front and center in the battle to oust Lawrence H. Summers as president. But in typical fashion, she was too well behaved to talk about his resignation with reporters.

A Whole Life

Although her own path to the Ivy League was highly irregular by the standards of today’s immensely competitive academic job market, Ms. Ulrich still serves as a role model for young women — particularly those who are trying to find a way to combine an academic career with a family. “You have the right to have a whole life,” she tells them. “You do not have to take monastic vows in order to achieve.” Instead of fretting that her graduate students might drop out when they have babies, she has celebrated with them by making quilts for their firstborn children.

Ms. Ulrich says she opposes “the kind of feminism that says: Women can kill themselves. I don’t think that’s progress.”

Still, when it comes to broader questions about the treatment of women at Harvard, Ms. Ulrich has been less outspoken than some of her colleagues. She prefers a quieter diplomacy. But she has used historical analysis to take jabs at the university.

When she first arrived at Harvard, she attended the dedication of the newly renovated Barker Center for the Humanities. She was unnerved to find that only men looked down from the portraits on the walls. When she asked why, she was told there were no women in Harvard’s history.

But with a little digging, she found that women had been affiliated with Harvard since before Radcliffe College was established in 1894. “The first nonacademic employees were women who were in libraries — even though women couldn’t use the libraries,” she says. And yet everyone on the campus kept citing 1972 — the year that female students were first admitted to Harvard dormitories — as the beginning for women at Harvard.

“I said, Let’s stop this nonsense that it’s been only 20 years,” she says. So she edited a book in 2004 on “Harvard’s ‘womanless’ history,” called Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History.

The book is emblematic of the way Ms. Ulrich operates. She lays out the evidence and lets others decide, rather than clobbering people over the head. “She has a feminist agenda,” says Mr. Kishlansky, “but it isn’t a political one.”

She certainly is not the kind of woman who would wear any of the new products that bear her 30-year-old slogan about women and history. She keeps a collection of the T-shirts, buttons, cocktail napkins, and magnets tucked away in a box in her bedroom closet. She is writing a book, due out in 2007, that takes the slogan as its title, examining women’s history from the viewpoints of three female writers from three different centuries.

Ms. Ulrich doesn’t really approve of how her line has been used. “Being my age and a mother and grandmother, I really don’t like the trivialization of this statement, which says: Act up, and that’s all you have to do. That’s silly.”

When she wrote the sentence, Ms. Ulrich says her objective was to give unremembered and unremarkable women a history, not to make a political statement. But she has learned a lot from the way the slogan has been used.

“I like to be liked, and there have been situations where the only way to make a difference is to say, Sorry, this is the way I see it,” she says. “People think of me as this very nice person, and they’re very surprised when I stand up to them.”

In those situations, she says, she sometimes silently recalls the slogan as a way of bolstering her courage. “I say to myself, when I feel like I have to be all things to all people — which is certainly the way I was raised — I say, Hey, well-behaved women seldom make history. I’m going to have to disappoint someone. I’m going to have to misbehave here.”

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 29, Page A12