Sometime in the early 1980s, I participated as an advisor to a wonderful oral history project created by a group of women in Warner, New Hampshire.
Intentionally or not, they make a difference.Īs a historian, I am grateful for those who have been willing to share their journeys with others. They push forward into the dark not knowing quite where they are going. They stop wearing button-up shoes and corsets. They refuse to move to the back of the bus. The first people to figure that out often make history. But some rules hurt people others lose their relevance. Rules hold families and communities together. In most circumstances, that is a wise thing to do: children should be taught to obey “don’t walk” signs drivers should stay on the right side of the road, except in countries where the right side is on the left.
Here, I am defining good behavior as playing by the rules, even the unspoken rules, in a person’s own community. Bradstreet was fortunate in having male supporters who carried her poems to London and arranged for their publication in 1650. Sadly, some of those “carping tongues” belonged to other women. They’l say it’s stoln or else it was by chance. If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, Who says my hand a needle better fits, . . . .įor such despite they cast on Female wits: In The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, she wrote, I am thinking of the words of Anne Bradstreet, colonial New England’s first published poet. But when they do, they often lose their reputation for being well-behaved. Yes, well-behaved women can make history. The slogan works because it simultaneously acknowledges and defends misbehavior as a necessary consequence of making history. Without a fixed definition, it evokes whatever anxiety a woman might feel about behavioral codes that constrain her power to act.
Perhaps it is the ambiguity of the term well-behaved. I don’t know why so many people find my words appealing. Above the fray, the winged goddess of victory appears in silhouette, holding aloft a wreath of laurel. On the right, a traffic light registers yellow for caution. One of my favorite examples of the latter shows a bright pink poster in a crowd near Wellington Arch in London. I don’t get royalties when somebody prints my words on mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, greeting cards, or any of the other paraphernalia sold in gift shops or on the internet, but I sometimes get thank-you notes or snapshots of fans carrying hand-lettered signs in marches. You’ve probably seen it: Well-behaved women seldom make history. Although it is a bit disconcerting to admit it, I am most widely known today not for my books, but for a single sentence.
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