I loved this thought provoking book written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of history at Harvard, and found it both well-written and fascinating. The book gives a nice history of the struggles women have had to overcome over the centuries, as well as excerpts from the writings of these women (i.e. Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, etc…). It’s such fun that I devoured it in about two days. Buy it for every woman you know!

I found the book’s conclusion perhaps the most telling, so I’m going to share it here with all of you.

If history is to enlarge our understanding of human experience, it must include stories that dismay as well as inspire. It must also include the lives of those whose presumed good behavior prevents us from taking them seriously. 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. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars. Today, because more women are educated and communication is easier, more of these projects get noticed, but the work has just begun.

Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records, and when later generations care (pp. 227-229).