Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a historian of early America and the history of women and a university professor at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. Ulrich's innovative and widely influential approach to history has been described as a tribute to "the silent work of ordinary people"—an approach that, in her words, aims to "show the interconnection between public events and private experience."

Life and career

Born in Sugar City, Idaho

Sugar City, Idaho

Sugar City is a city in Madison County, Idaho, United States. The population was 1,242 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Rexburg, Idaho Micropolitan Statistical Area.-History:...

, Ulrich received her B.A. in History at the University of Utah

University of Utah

The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...

, an M.A. in English Literature at Simmons College

Simmons College (Massachusetts)

Simmons College, established in 1899, is a private women's undergraduate college and private co-educational graduate school in Boston, Massachusetts.-History:Simmons was founded in 1899 with a bequest by John Simmons a wealthy clothing manufacturer in Boston...

, and her Ph.D. in History at the University of New Hampshire

University of New Hampshire

The University of New Hampshire is a public university in the University System of New Hampshire , United States. The main campus is in Durham, New Hampshire. An additional campus is located in Manchester. With over 15,000 students, UNH is the largest university in New Hampshire. The university is...

. She is married to Gael Ulrich, a professor emeritus from the University of New Hampshire. The couple have adult children and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

.
In 1991, Ulrich received the Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

in history for A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812.

At the time of A Midwife's Tales publication, Ulrich was a MacArthur Foundation

MacArthur Foundation

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the United States. Based in Chicago but supporting non-profit organizations that work in 60 countries, MacArthur has awarded more than US$4 billion since its inception in 1978...

Fellow from 1992 to 1997, and an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire

University of New Hampshire

. With her appointment to Harvard University

Harvard University

, Ulrich became the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. Most recently, she was recognized as an individual "of distinction ... working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties" when she was appointed the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University.

Writing an article about little-studied Puritan funeral services, Ulrich included the phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history." The phrase was picked up and soon was widely quoted and printed across the country. It continues to be seen on greeting cards, T-shirts, mugs, plaques, and bumper stickers. She recounted how her now-famous quote has taken on a life of its own in an October 2007 interview: "It was a weird escape into popular culture. I got constant e-mails about it, and I thought it was humorous. Then I started looking at where it was coming from. Once I turned up as a character in a novel - and a tennis star from India wore the T-shirt at Wimbledon. It seemed like a teaching moment - and so I wrote a book using the title." Well-Behaved Women examines the ways in which women shaped history, citing examples from the lives of Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement"....

, Christine de Pizan

Christine de Pizan

Christine de Pizan was a Venetian-born late medieval author who challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the male-dominated medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day; she completed 41 works during her 30 year career , and can be regarded as...

, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement...

, Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Harriet Ross; (1820 – 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves...

, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

, and many other notable women in American and world history.

Ulrich was the president of the American Historical Association

American Historical Association

The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...

for 2009.

Midwife's Tale

Her book examines the life of Northern New England midwife Martha Ballard

Martha Ballard

Martha Moore Ballard was an American midwife, healer, and diarist.Martha Ballard is known today from her diary, which gives us a rare insight to the life of the average midwife and woman in 18th century Maine. Born on February 20, 1735, Ballard grew up in a moderately prosperous family in Oxford,...

, 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. Ulrich's revelatory history was honored with the Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize

. A Midwife's Tale also received the Bancroft Prize

Bancroft Prize

The Bancroft Prize is awarded each year by the trustees of Columbia University for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas. It was established in 1948 by a bequest from Frederic Bancroft...

, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize, the William Henry Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the New England Historical Association Award. A Midwife's Tale was later developed into a documentary film for the PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

series "The American Experience", with Ulrich serving as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator.

As Tunc (2010) shows, the book became a landmark in women's labor history since it provides scholars with rich insights into the life of a lay American rural healer around 1800. It rests not on the observations of outsiders, but on the words of the woman herself. At first glance, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary often appears trivial, but as Ulrich found, "it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing" (p. 9). By knitting together "ordinary" sources to produce a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich shows how a skilled practitioner functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale was not only methodologically influential for scholars, significant, but also theoretically important. By showing clearly the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and demonstrating the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, the book revises the understanding of prescribed gender roles. While A midwife's tale is obviously limited in terms of time (1785–1812) and place (rural Maine), it has attracted sustained attention of historians - especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labor, and women's work before industrialization.

Ulrich and Mormonism

Ulrich self-identifies as an active feminist

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

and Mormon

Mormon

The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...

, and has written with great insight about her experiences. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich also co-edited (with Emma Lou Thayne

Emma Lou Thayne

Emma Lou Thayne is a Mormon poet, counted as one of the 75 most significant.She graduated from the University of Utah in 1945. She would later return there to coach tennis and teach English...

) a collection of essays about the lives of Mormon women entitled, All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir.

In late 1992, Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...

's board of trustees vetoed without comment a BYU proposal to invite Ulrich to address the annual BYU Women's Conference. Ulrich did give an address at BYU in 2004.

At Harvard, Ulrich is actively involved in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is the advisor for the undergraduate Latter-day Saint Student Association, the Mormon campus club, and teaches an Institute of Religion

Institute of Religion

Institutes of Religion provide religious educational classes for young single adult and university students who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...

class.

Publications

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. (2007). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 978-1400041596.
Editor, Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History. (2004). Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 1-4039-6098-4.
The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. (2001). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 0-679-44594-3.
All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir, a collection of essays coauthored with the Utah poet Emma Lou Thayne
Emma Lou Thayne
Emma Lou Thayne is a Mormon poet, counted as one of the 75 most significant.She graduated from the University of Utah in 1945. She would later return there to coach tennis and teach English...

. (1995). Aspen Books, ISBN 1-56236-226-7.
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
Martha Ballard
Martha Moore Ballard was an American midwife, healer, and diarist.Martha Ballard is known today from her diary, which gives us a rare insight to the life of the average midwife and woman in 18th century Maine. Born on February 20, 1735, Ballard grew up in a moderately prosperous family in Oxford,...

based on her diary, 1785–1812. (1990). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 0-394-56844-3. Reissued in Vintage paperback, ISBN 0-679-73376-0.
Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. (1982). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 0-394-51940-X. Reissued by Vintage (1991), ISBN 0-679-73257-8.

On-line Articles

"How Betsy Ross Became Famous" in Common-Place Vol. 8, No. 1 (October 2007)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.