More than a sassy slogan...

Are you one of the symbolic creatures out there who finds meaning in ingraining visuals all over your body in the form of tattoos?  I've seen some incredible tattoos out there.  There have been times when I thought that I would get one.  The trouble is... I always come to the conclusion that I would get tired of that particular image I'd chosen...  and it would still be there.  Instead, I went through a bumper sticker stage.  I was even brave enough to put a few brazen sayings on the back of my car.  The trouble there was... they carried a personal meaning for me which was not conveyed to people as they found their car behind me in traffic.  I was driving and didn't have the attention span to divide myself between getting somewhere and offering an explanation.  Or better yet, I'd abandoned my adopted words and wasn't there to defend them.  I ended up taking a razor blade and erasing them from my brief attempt at vehicular exhibitionism. 

I don't know if Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has any tattoos on her Harvard professorial body, but I'm going to make a healthy assumption and say... I bet she doesn't.  After reading the preface of her book I also realized, that while the phrase of her book title was crafted in a clever way, it also carried a deep meaning and correlation to her life's studies.  The name of this book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.
My hands are waving up and down together in unison forming the worship gesture both at the author, and all that she has accomplished in this book.  Before you even get to page one, there is a thirty-four page preface which gives a scholarly rebuttal.  This rebuttal is one not only to the history of her slogan in use over the last several decades, but also one in asserting the accurate history of what that slogan has meant to encapsulate in the scholarly work of her and her counterparts.  Not only is her rebuttal scholarly, it is witty, clever, and overall cheeky in introduction.  It begs women to ask the question before donning the t-shirt, what is the slogan all about?

I'd love to give an answer.  I'd love to spin it all out as astutely as Ulrich does.  That just would not be fair (and I'm not as equipped in the task as she is).  It would take all the spectacular "aha" and "wow" moments out of the reading experience.  While I would dream of doing what Ulrich has done in the career of being a female historian, to outline what her book here is as an overall exhibition of her life's work (a masterpiece really) seems like sacrilege to me.  I want to invoke the sense of mystery so powerfully to any person who chances upon these words that they set out to get their hands on it immediately. 

Every woman should read this book. 

The one discourse I can't help but make as to the contents are those that Ulrich presents in her research findings and discussion on Virginia Woolf.  While I knew that Woolf had a traumatic past, was a writer impelled to devote her lifeblood to her art, and a woman who battled depression to a bitter end... what I did not know was that the impetus for many of her works was grounded in an unsuccessful library search.  Ulrich says, "Virginia Woolf went to the British Museum to find out why women were poor." (Ulrich, 74)  Swimming in data and finding little to sate her curiosity, she stumbled upon one historian (Professor George Trevelyan), and only finding a very short passage exclusively dealing with the subject of women at all, gave up her search in despondency. (IBID)  Ultimately, this failure to find what was being sought after fueled the result of Virginia Woolf's fiction career. (IBID)  What she could not find in her particular search of history, Woolf created in her own worlds. (IBID)  I bring this up because later in the book Ulrich posits a priceless question, why was Virginia Woolf not able to find what she was looking for? (Ulrich, 104)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and a handful of other female historians have found an abundance of what Virginia Woolf was looking for in the library that day.  These "re-discoveries" of women in history haven't yet dried on paper in the ink that they have been written with.  It is a glorious feast, the tastiest hybrid of apples in the grandest multi-colored variety you could dare to imagine.  Folks, the best part is that it's all true, and ripe for the picking.  Come, all daughters of Eve, and picnic at this tree until you are quite full with its fruit.

I mourned this latest discovery of Virginia Woolf's lamentation over not finding women in history.  I had the feeling of wanting to get into a time machine and take back all of Ulrich's work for Woolf to delight upon.  Alas, I let the vision of the time machine fade from my imagination.  In its place the realization stood firm, that without Woolf's suffering in this regard, her works of art would evaporate from existence.

I love quotes and phrases like a junkie loves heroin.  I'm going to covetously guard just how deeply clever quotes and phrases play a role in my life, and just leave it at this: if I ran across the Well- Behaved Women Seldom Make History bumper sticker, my hands would reach out for it.  A mental motion picture of me peeling away the paper would be set in motion.  My fingers would tingle for want of smoothing over wrinkles as I adhered the sticker to the back of my car.  Mostly though, there would be the remembrance (of so much history left untold when I was officially learning it in class) I'd acquainted myself with in the reading of this book, and a humble understanding of what the author meant in voicing the slogan.  I wouldn't ever want to forget it.