The behavior of women

Today I had the great pleasure of finding this book inside my mailbox. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a historian at Harvard who is best known for her biography of the New England midwife, Martha Ballard, The Midwife’s Tale, is also the author of this bumper-sticker sentence.

Who knew? Ulrich herself could never have guessed her sentence’s fate when she wrote the article “Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” which appeared in American Quarterly in the spring of 1976. Here’s the original context:

Cotton Mather called them “the hidden ones.” They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. 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.

I’m to appear on a panel with Ulrich on October 11 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York to talk about women making their own rules and changing their lives and the world around them. I love the prospect of hearing what Ulrich has to say about the subject and thinking about Mary of Every Past Thing in this context.

There was an interesting story by Megan Marshall on Ulrich’s book last week in Slate.

(Megan Marshall herself is the author of the splendid hat-trick of a biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.
Talk about women changing the world around them. Anyone who’s thinking anything about the history of that period or Transcendentalists and their contribution to our culture should read this book.)

“The sound my country makes”

Reviewing Marianne Wiggins's latest novel, The Shadow Catcher, has sent me back to reading Sebald, and both of them, and Grace Paley too, oh, and the fact of my own novel out in bookstores, and my reaction last week to the commuting of Kenneth Foster's sentence (Something good actually happened? Something good actually happened?) has me thinking about my own uneasy relationship to the culture I live in. More on that later, no doubt.

In the meantime, a little Sebald. From Vertigo:

"How I wished during those sleepless nights that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all."

And this idea of his that has long interested me, from an interview with Arthur Lubow:

“There is so often about the standard novel something terribly contrived, which somewhere along the line tends to falter,” he said. “The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along, that’s fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on. Very often you don’t know who the narrator is, which I find unacceptable. The story comes through someone’s mind. I feel I have the right to know who that person is and what his credentials are. This has been known in science for a long time. The field of vision changes according to the observer, so I think this has to be part of the equation.”