Women Who Are Well-behaved
Women who are well-behaved
do not make history, and they
take second place to the depraved,
whom history gives right of way,
for though officially the word condemns
the women who’re considered lawless,
they’re given diamonds and gems
for being flexible, not flawless.
Kathryn Harrison reviews “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (“We’re No Angels, ” NYT, September 30,2007) :
Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older? ” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies, ” written in 1405; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More, ” published in 1898; and “A Room of One’s Own, ” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 — all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past, ” but what we choose to remember. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past. Pizan, Stanton, Woolf: three women with “intellectual fathers” and “domestic mothers, ” who were “raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning” and “married men who supported their intellectual ambitions.” For each, her “moment of illumination came through an encounter with an odious book” expressing man’s “disdain” for women. Pizan responded to a 15th- century satire containing “diatribes” against her sex, Stanton to law tomes that set forth the rights of husbands and fathers over their wives and daughters, Woolf to “The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, ” an imagined history representing what she discovered in the reading room of the British Museum.
9/30/07
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Related quotes
Well behaved women seldom make history.
quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Well-behaved women rarely make history.
quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The History Teacher
Woman!
Where exactly
Did you put me
In the women's history?
Am I History?
Or a part of it?
And for how long you are lacking me in;
Between
Your History,
Women's History, and
Your archives?
Does time make sense to you
As a History teacher or
As a History professor?
Cause', History, buying time, and rejuvenation
Are for emperors.
Are you making me
An emperor?
Or a Faeroe?
If so,
How precise your are?
And if you can't feel my present presence
how possibility could you feel me through your archives?
poem by Atef Ayadi
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Black History Month
In January...
There they are making history.
In February...
There they are making history.
In March...
There they are making history.
In April...
There they are making history.
In May...
There they are making history.
In June...
There they are making history.
In July...
There they are making history.
In August...
There they are making history.
In September...
There they are making history.
In October...
There they are making history.
In November...
There they are making history.
In December...
There they are making history.
But...
It's nice to know
The shortest month of the year
Was chosen to celebrate
The great deeds of African-Americans!
However...
It is those LEAP YEARS,
That really have the blacks jumping for joy!
Note: 'Black History Month' along with other
works of interest can be found in...
*'MindPrints from Untouched Places-VOL I'*
~Now available online at a PC near you~
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.
quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Strong Women
My family is a family
Of strong women
Of that there is no doubt
These women
Have withstood
The challenges of their times.
All of life’s trials
The worst of the worst
History has not been kind
Deaths, rapes and murders
They have had to live with daily
Live with on their minds.
Unexpected circumstance
Have tested my ancestral women
And they somehow survived
And somehow they managed to live on
Sometimes all alone
And to go on and to thrive.
And now in the Halls of History
They can stand up and be counted
Among those women
Among the best of the best
Those who are still considered to be
Strong Women.
Copyright Christine A Kysely 2010 November 26,2010
(c) Copyright 2010 by Christine A Kysely, All Rights Reserved
poem by Christine A Kysely
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History why do we care
History
a famous person dies
History
a war rages
History
a new invention
History
a building opens
History
what happens if something happens to me
is that history?
no....
So why do we care.....
poem by Andrea Thepoet
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The History Of You And Me
Everytime you think of me.
Write it all down in your diary.
And never forget you were mine.
'Cause you can write a book about love.
And you can write a book about history.
The history of you and me..
On every page that you write.
Move your pen, with those old memories of me.
Holding me in your arms.
'Cause you can write a book about love.
And you can write a book about history.
The history of you and me..
Try not to miss a word.
Don't miss a single word, about those old romantic nights.
The nights you spent with me.
'Cause you can write a book about love.
And you can write a book about history.
The history of you and me..
Yaahh! The history of you and me....
Love Song Poem By Kim Robin Edwards
Copyright 1990,2009..
ALL rights reserved..
poem by Kim Robin Edwards
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The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.
quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
quote by Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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History!
Spoken words are history
Records of some remain a mystery
And when today and tomorrow
Row bitterly over yesterday
Today will become history
With just an empty space
Enlightened by a darkened face
History reminds me of a repetition of events
Dancing to the rhythm of the same kind of achievements
A battle is won or lost
Every love or hatred will eventually be buried in dust
I love you
You love me
Soon our love goes down in history
Someone else will find love a new discovery
So the theory behind is history
Is to have a story that commands all glory
For the inevitable past that will last!
poem by Sylvia Chidi
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Museum of Women Pilots
They were ladies with a task at hand
In an area unknown to most
Usually when it comes to flying
The women would only host
But this museum is dedicated to
The women who learned to fly
If you knew of their determination
You never would ask why
We all know about Amelia Earhart
But she was only one of many
Who knew in the core of their hearts
They had to make flying their journey
We honor them every single one
In a place where they have special slots
In history forever and ever
The museum of women pilots!
poem by Marilyn Lott
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Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
quote by Elizabeth Janeway
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Women in Beijing in one September
Women by the thousands
come marching by
to mark history among nations.
Never again should women
be sold, battered and raped.
Never again should girl
fetuses in the mother`s womb
be doomed to death.
Never again should the women`s
spirit be extinquished.
Can a gathering of women
among nations make up a change?
The marching of women
prompts attention -
a human bomb to announce
that women`s issues are
crucial to our world`s survival.
poem by Elizabeth Padillo Olesen
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History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.
quote by Carl Sandburg
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Well behaved women rarely make history.
quote by Marilyn Monroe
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The History of Now
The recording of culture is history;
but our culture is more than that.
It's the world of human action,
and the myths we make of the fact.
The recording of history is culture,
but our history is more than that.
It informs a hidden agenda.
Unconscious of motive we act.
It's the history of now, the history of now.
It's only the present that exists as endowed.
It's the history of now. The moment - KAPOW!
That knocks you right over and muddies your brow.
Through the prism of language, we know what we know.
We carry our baggage and stories of woe.
Victor and vanquished pride cannot budge,
the dead weight of hatred and ancestral grudge.
We fight our good fights with our hand on our heart;
the music is swelling as loved ones depart.
As sheep to the slaughter, the script cannot chart,
a course more ignoble: the propagandist's art.
The recording of history is culture,
but our culture is more than that.
More than the great individuals,
the scholars so love in their tracts.
The recording of culture is history;
but our history is more than that.
Not simple dates or statistics,
the full horror and gore still attracts.
It's the history of now, the history of now.
A strange contradiction that makes sense somehow.
It's the history of now, a mystery and shroud.
The past and the future: best fiction allowed.
poem by David SmithWhite
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Tales of my past
Don't write me down in history,
In reference to my past deeds,
Works I derived no joy from,
Or mistakes of those years.
Don't write me down in history,
The ages gone show little of what I am,
That part of me is truly done,
My dreams now can say it all.
Don't write me down in history,
The lessons of life flows in my blood,
My blunders are now my teachers,
The scars now my daily pledge.
Don't write me down in history,
I am yet to achieve perfection,
Still I strive for redemption,
Searching the soil for my lost glory,
Don't write me down in history,
The tales of my past I recall,
That was then, this is me,
Woes to your judgment.
poem by Venessa Ambrose
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It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.
quote by Major Owens
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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History
Yesterday is History.
History brings us to this present moment
but it doesn't shape who we are at this present moment.
We can't let our History control us
and who we wish to be.
Our future is our choice,
Not History's.
poem by Tiana Webb
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