Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (born July 11, 1938) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian specializing in early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University. Her approach to history has been described as a tribute to "the silent work of ordinary people". Ulrich was a recipient of a grant from the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1992. Her most famous book, A Midwife’s Tale, was later the basis for a PBS documentary film.

Early life and education

Laurel Thatcher was born July 11, 1938, in Sugar City, Idaho, to John Kenneth Thatcher, schoolteacher and superintendent as well as state legislator and farmer; and Alice Siddoway Thatcher. In 1992, the MacArthur Foundation chose Ulrich as a MacArthur Fellow.

In 1995 she became James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, and director of the Charles Warren Center of Studies in American History, at Harvard University. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003. She also served as President of the American Historical Association from 2009 to 2010, and of the Mormon History Association from 2014 to 2015. As of 2018, Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita at Harvard. In its original iteration, Ulrich meant the quote to indicate that well-behaved women were not studied by historians, not to encourage contemporary women to rebel or be less "well-behaved". The phrase was taken out of context and 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.

A Midwife's Tale

A Midwife's Tale examines the life of Northern New England midwife Martha Ballard, 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. In this book, Ulrich effectively and simultaneously builds historical knowledge of the colonial world and Martha Ballard's biography.

Ulrich's revelatory history was honored with the Pulitzer Prize. A Midwife's Tale also received the Bancroft Prize (prompting a speech by Ulrich which compares her own diary and life to Ballard's), 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 docudrama film for the PBS series American Experience by producer Laurie Kahn-Levitt and director Richard P. Rogers. The film was based upon both Ulrich's book and her archival process, and Ulrich served as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator. The book also helped her secure a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program.

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." The book has also been taught as an exemplar of archival and historical work and explored in conjunction with Ulrich's own life as a historian, writer, and activist.

In 2001, Ulrich wrote The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, published by Alfred Knopf. Historian John Demos praises the book in his review, "Venturing off in a new and highly original direction, she has put physical objects ― mainly but not entirely textiles ― at the center of her inquiry. The result is, among other things, an exemplary response to a longstanding historians' challenge ― to treat objects, no less than writings, as documents that speak to us from and about the past."

Personal life

While she was an undergraduate student, she married Gael Ulrich, now emeritus professor of chemical engineering at the University of New Hampshire. She also co-edited (with Emma Lou Thayne) All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir, a collection of essays about the lives of Mormon women. Ulrich was a co-founder, with Claudia Bushman, Judy Dushku, Sue Paxman and others, of Exponent II, an independent publication on the experience of Latter-day Saint women.

In late 1992, Brigham Young University's board of trustees vetoed without comment a BYU proposal to invite Ulrich to address the annual BYU Women's Conference. Ulrich did give addresses at BYU in 2004 and 2006.

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

Publications

;Books

  • A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870. (2017). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
  • Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. (2007). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
  • Editor, Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History. (2004). Palgrave Macmillan,
  • The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. (2001). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
  • All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir, a collection of essays coauthored with the Utah poet Emma Lou Thayne. (1995). Aspen Books,
  • A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812. (1990). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. . Reissued in Vintage paperback,
  • Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. (1982). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. . Reissued by Vintage (1991),

;Online articles

  • "How Betsy Ross Became Famous" in Common-Place Vol. 8, No. 1 (October 2007), American Antiquarian Society
  • "An American Album, 1857", 2009 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association

See also

  • Mormon feminism

References

Further reading

  • Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, faculty, History Department, Harvard University
  • dohistory.org – an online version of Martha Ballard's diary and information about A Midwife's Tale, a joint project of Harvard University and George Mason University