Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (born July 11, 1938) is an American historian of early America and the history of women and a professor at Harvard University. Her 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."

Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho to John Kenneth Thatcher, schoolteacher and superintendent as well as state legislator and farmer; and Alice Siddoway Thatcher. She graduated from college at University of Utah, majoring in English and journalism, and gave the valedictory speech at commencement.

Many years later, she earned a master's degree in English at Simmons College (1971) and a doctorate in history at the University of New Hampshire (1980).

In a 1976 scholarly article about little-studied Puritan funeral services, Ulrich included the phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history." The phrase was picked up and soon went viral, being 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, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, and Virginia Woolf.

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