Why Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Volume 59:3 (2020) - Although it is a bit disconcerting to admit it, I am most widely known today not for my books, but for a single sentence. You’ve probably seen it: Well-behaved women seldom make history. I don’t get royalties when somebody prints my words on mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, greeting cards, or any of the other paraphernalia sold in gift shops or on the internet, but I sometimes get thank-you notes or snapshots of fans carrying hand-lettered signs in marches. One of my favorite examples of the latter shows a bright pink poster in a crowd near Wellington Arch in London. On the right, a traffic light registers yellow for caution. Above the fray, the winged goddess of victory appears in silhouette, holding aloft a wreath of laurel.

I don’t know why so many people find my words appealing. Perhaps it is the ambiguity of the term well-behaved. Without a fixed definition, it evokes whatever anxiety a woman might feel about behavioral codes that constrain her power to act. The slogan works because it simultaneously acknowledges and defends misbehavior as a necessary consequence of making history. Yes, well-behaved women can make history. But when they do, they often lose their reputation for being well-behaved. I am thinking of the words of Anne Bradstreet, colonial New England’s first published poet.