Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is an American historian of early American history and a pioneer in the field of women's history. A professor emerita at Harvard University, she is best known for her innovative scholarship that uses everyday documents to reconstruct the lives of ordinary women, most notably in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Midwife's Tale. Her work has profoundly expanded the historical narrative to include domestic life, material culture, and the critical but often invisible roles of women in shaping society. Her famous phrase, "well-behaved women seldom make history," has become a widely recognized feminist slogan.

Early life and education

Born in Sugar City, Idaho, she was raised in a devout Mormon family, an experience that later informed her scholarly interest in religion and community. She completed her undergraduate degree in English at the University of New Hampshire before moving west to earn a master's degree and a doctorate in history from the University of Utah. Her doctoral dissertation, which examined the funeral sermons of New England women, foreshadowed her lifelong methodological focus on unconventional source material. During this period, she also married fellow academic Gael Ulrich and began raising a family, balancing domestic responsibilities with her scholarly pursuits.

Academic career and scholarship

She began her teaching career at the University of New Hampshire before joining the faculty of Harvard University in 1995, where she was appointed the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. Her groundbreaking book, A Midwife's Tale, meticulously analyzed the diary of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife from Maine, to reveal the complex social and economic networks of rural community life. This work earned her the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize in 1991. Her subsequent scholarship, including The Age of Homespun and A House Full of Females, continued to explore themes of women's work, material culture, and the intersection of gender and religion in communities like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"Well-behaved women seldom make history"

The now-ubiquitous phrase originated in a 1976 scholarly article she wrote for American Quarterly about the piety of Puritan women. Intended as a critique of how historians had overlooked virtuous, conventional women, the statement was ironically adopted as a rallying cry for feminist activism. The slogan has since appeared on countless T-shirts, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs, and was the title of a 2007 book where she explored the diverse ways women from Rosa Parks to Elizabeth Cady Stanton have entered the historical record. She has expressed both amusement and thoughtful reflection on the slogan's journey from academic footnote to popular culture phenomenon.

Awards and honors

In recognition of her transformative scholarship, she has received some of the most prestigious awards in academia and public humanities. Following her Pulitzer Prize for History and Bancroft Prize for A Midwife's Tale, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (often called the "genius grant") in 1992. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2009. In 2021, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with the citation praising her for "recovering the lives of unsung women." She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds numerous honorary degrees from institutions like Yale University and Brown University.

Selected works

Her major publications are characterized by deep archival research and narrative richness. Key works include A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990), The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (2001), and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her 2017 book, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, examines the Utah territory and the Latter Day Saint movement through women's diaries and petitions. She has also contributed to collaborative volumes and is a frequent essayist on topics ranging from quilting to the history of Harvard University.

Category:American historians Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Pulitzer Prize winners