Happy Women’s History month! Editor Sophie is here this week to give some context to a frequently remixed, misquoted, and misattributed feminist slogan.

You’ve heard it before, maybe printed on a mug or a T-shirt or pasted across someone’s bumper. You’ve probably seen it attributed to any number of famous historical women, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Mae West to Marilyn Monroe — if, in fact, it’s attributed to anyone at all. Maybe you’ve encountered it remixed to feature a rebel princess or a Disney villainess.

“Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

Wait, back up, because that’s the first thing people tend to get wrong. Properly quoted, it’s actually “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” And, well, it doesn’t mean what you might think it means. You see, the “well-behaved women” line was first written by a historian named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and understanding her and her work is key to understanding the sentiment behind the quote.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is, today, a retired Harvard University professor. Much of her scholarship has focused on women in colonial to pre-industrial America. Her most famous work is probably the 1990 book “A Midwife’s Tale,” which won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for PBS’ “American Experience” series in 1998. “A Midwife’s Tale” is a historical account based on the diary of Martha Ballard, which she wrote in every day for 27 years, from 1785 to 1812, recording her life as a woman, mother, and midwife in rural Maine.

Despite literally thousands of entries creating a first-hand account of Martha Ballard’s unique place in American history, her diary had often been dismissed by earlier historians. In a later journal article reflecting on the recurring theme of housework and domestic labor in Ballard’s diary, Ulrich cites historians who “found much of the diary ‘trivial and unimportant... being but a repetition of what has been recited many times,’” and “filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes.” But Ulrich uses those same “trivial” mentions of household chores to deepen our understanding of the roles of 18th-century frontier women within their homes, families, and communities. Taking on the eight-year task of reading every diary entry, compiling statistical data about Ballard’s life, and writing her own book was, in Ulrich’s own words, her “enterprise in recapturing the historical significance of 'trivia.'” (She’s really speaking our language here, wouldn’t you say?)

So let’s get back to the “well-behaved women” of it all. Ulrich coined that line in the opening paragraph of an article titled “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” which she wrote as a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire in 1976. Here it is more fully situated within the paper:

“They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. 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.”

“They” refers to Puritan women of 17th- and 18th-century New England. In her article, Ulrich was attempting to form a portrait of attitudes towards these Puritan women through a deep reading of three types of ministerial literature: wedding and childbirth sermons and eulogies. You can see how just a few extra sentences completely transforms the meaning of the “well-behaved women” line; Ulrich wasn’t making a call to arms, encouraging women to rebel and stop being “well-behaved.” She was simply making a comment about the ways in which the lives of average, everyday women had been left largely absent from historical narratives — something that would clearly guide her own approach to historic scholarship throughout her life.

For her part, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich seems mostly bemused by the strange journey into popular culture that her words have taken. She even wrote a book in 2007 (titled, you guessed it, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”) exploring what it means to make history — both in the sense of larger-than-life figures leaving their mark on history, but also the way that the very concept of history is constructed by academics and historians. Reflecting on the quote, Ulrich went on to say, “When I wrote that ‘well-behaved women seldom make history,’ I was making a commitment to help recover the lives of otherwise obscure women. I had no idea that 30 years later, my own words would come back to me transformed.”