Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care.” A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader. A great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves. A Midwife's Tale examines the life of Northern New England midwife Martha Ballard, and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage and sexual relations, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of violence and crime. In this book, Ulrich effectively and simultaneously builds historical knowledge of the colonial world and Martha Ballard's biography. [15] a b c d e f Pearsall, Sarah; Sword, Kirsten. "Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Biography". General Meeting Booklet, 2010 AHA Annual Meeting. American Historical Association. The First Lady dutifully reported interesting observations about Australia in her widely syndicated My Day column. Privately, however, she found the official engagements exhausting and trivial compared with her core mission of visiting US service personnel. In her 1949 memoir This I Remember, it was the impact of meeting American GIs in military hospitals that lingered with her. She wrote:

For Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady most often compared to Roosevelt, Eleanor was so inspirational she is rumoured to have held imaginary conversations with her at crossroads in her political career. However, history is rarely made in those places, even though in part, it is. That is what makes this sentence so powerful: precisely because it touches on multiple truths in subtle ways. There is a place for both: the loud and the quiet.Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.”

For example, let’s think about stereotypes with modern music. Justin Bieber is very disliked and his fanbase often gets eyerolls. I’m not a big fan of him myself. There’s a reason he’s hated, but I want you to ask yourself how you think people typically react to a teenage girl saying that their favorite song is “Baby” by Justin Bieber and then compare it to the reaction people would typically have to a teenage boy saying that his favorite song is “Run It!” by Chris Brown. People will probably form more of a bias against the girl saying she likes Bieber even though Chris Brown has a history of domestic violence, including that time he punched Rihanna in the face on camera. The first entry in A Midwife's Tale puts midwifery in a broader medical context within the Kennebec region, beginning to put Ballard's diary in context of other primary sources at the time. This chapter establishes the relationship between doctors and midwives during this time period. Ulrich also introduces the concept of “social medicine” in this chapter, referring to the sharing of information among midwives and doctors. This is evident in midwife manuals that Ulrich cites. A bravura performance. . . . Ulrich is brilliant here. . . . Few have done as much to so profoundly enrich and enlarge our vision of the past.”— The Boston Globe Finally, inspirational quotes that Eleanor Roosevelt actually said or wrote continue to circulate. To end with one that captures how she herself redefined the possibilities of leadership: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brave Jovanovich, 1981, orig. 1929), pp. 8, 25, 26.

300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita

Lavoie, Amy (September 20, 2007). "Ulrich explains that well-behaved women should make history". Harvard Gazette . Retrieved July 14, 2020.

The awarding of the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 was indeed history-making. Only three prizes for history had been given to women in the Pulitzer’s then seventy-five-year history, and none for a book by a woman about a woman. I think many people thought it was about time, but when the National Endowment for the Humanities gave a million-dollar grant to PBS for making the film, there was a fuss in Congress. There was even a bit of a flap at BYU in 1993 when the board of trustees rejected me as the keynote speaker for a women’s conference, even though I had been royally welcomed when I gave a lecture on campus the year before. There was also celebration in some quarters and disdain in others when I accepted a professorship at Harvard University in 1995. One internet troll complained that the history department’s famous course on the American Revolution was about to be replaced by a course on quilts! a b Dunn, Mary Maples (2002). "Dialogue: Paradigm Shift Books: A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich". Journal of Women's History. 14 (3): 133–139. doi: 10.1353/jowh.2002.0066. S2CID 144544922.While telling the stories of these history-making women, Ulrich illuminates the intended meaning behind the slogan that is the title of her book. When the slogan appears out of context, it becomes open to wide interpretation, and has, subsequently, been used as a call to activism and sensational — even negative — behavior. In fact, Ulrich says, the phrase points to the reasons that women’s lives have limited representation in historical narrative, and she goes on to look at the type of people and events that do become public record.