Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.
YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.
This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were
1) so vital, and
2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.
“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”
Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)
If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?
They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:
If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)
And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.
The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”
Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.
And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.
If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?
That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.
Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).
Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.
Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.
For the record, this is what the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” actually means.
That’s not me just saying that, that’s what the author of the book by that name meant by it:
At the time (1970s) that Ulrich was writing her article, she writes in the book, the discipline of history was not very interested in the everyday ordinary lives of people—especially not interested in the ordinary lives of women. Her statement, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” was a commentary on how her academic discipline was not interested in the activities of “well-behaved women” because they were not considered worth studying. In that context, the words had a mostly literal meaning. … Since women throughout much of history have been encouraged (if not forced) to adopt behaviors sanctioned by men instead of having the freedom to do as they wished, being a “well-behaved woman”—and whether that was good or bad—was based on a person’s perspective. Several posters/graphics currently available featuring Ulrich’s statement have pictures of well-known women who were pioneers/leaders in various fields (including Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg). These women, for the most part, were not considered “well-behaved” by society as a whole, at least at the times they were making the contributions to history for which they became known.
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. Throughout history, “good” women’s lives were largely domestic, notes Ulrich. Little has been recorded about them because domesticity has not previously been considered a topic that merits inquiry. It is only through unconventional or outrageous behavior that women’s lives broke outside of this domestic sphere, and therefore were recorded and, thus, remembered by later generations. Ulrich points out that histories of “ordinary” women have not been widely known because historians have not looked carefully at their lives, adding that by exploring this facet of our past, we gain a richer understanding of history. “People express such surprise when they discover that women have a history. It is liberating that the past can not be reduced to such stereotypes,” says Ulrich. “I hope that someone would take away from this book that ordinary people could have an impact, and to try doing the unexpected. I would like to show that history is something that one can contribute to.”
one way this is so obvious is how people know medieval European farmers spent tons of energy making bread, but what women did is reduced to “idk childcare”?
No they made cloth. All the time.
Yes and also childcare is often gruelling, skillful, unpaid, and extremely essential, under-recognized labour. This is especially true in places/time periods with less access to technology. Homemaking can be extremely labour intensive, and so many advancements have been made that make everyone’s life a lot easier/safer/longer.
So much work is and has been undervalued for being considered feminine. When work that has been seen as mandatory for women is robbed of its legitimacy, capitalism & patriarchy reinforce each other. Women deserve the right to work any job. Gender roles should not stop that work from being recognized as legitimate and important.
Reblogging to add this
Domestic labor has NEVER been undervalued because it was useless. It's been undervalued because WE WERE THE ONES DOING IT.
