As a student of women's history in the early 1980s, I found this article touched many of the bases with insight and conviction. I do remember running into the fascinating Laura X at one point. While emphasizing her role as an heiress who functioned in absentia from her office, you minimized an important motive that animated much of her historical work: she was a vociferous advocate for laws against marital rape. The very concept of marital rape was something that many men and women had a hard time understanding back then, but Laura X documented it, brought it up to the cultural surface, and advocated for its victims. We owe Laura X a great deal as her work, including the acquisition of massive resources, helped change social attitudes. Although marital rape still persists, it is no longer tolerated and fewer of its perpetrators escape without legal repercussions.

As for Laura Ulrich, her early work was often slighted by my fellow grad students in history if only because she made women's traditional domestic work so damned interesting. There was a thirst during that time for more adventurous women: labor leaders, religious visionaries, radicals, women writers, professional pathfinders. It is all the more commendable that Ulrich stuck with her quieter sort of work and focused her extraordinary historical sophistication on the lives of less illustrious women. In doing this, she has provided the rest of us with a history of our own.