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.

Growing up in the 60s, I had always heard that women's history and women in history were buried, obscured, and simply not present. Yet, my most memorable readings were biographies. In my tiny grammar school library, I found books on Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Amelia Earhardt, Jane Addams, Abigail Adams, Joan of Arc, Clara Barton, and Dorthea Dix. My most prized possession today is a Scholastic Book I bought at age 10 on Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor educated at a medical college. As a teen, biographies on Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Louisa May Alcott, and Florence Nightengale described the tension between women's public or vocational interests with the pull of family obligations and life. I cannot understand the view that there was a paucity of information.

However, I do understand that women's history is buried. I attended a textile exhibit at the local art museum many years ago. It featured textiles and tapestries made by the guilds in Europe during the 1200s-1400s. Each was labelled with the guild's name, and even a list of members who made the materials being exhibited. Tucked in the corners in cases were smaller samples: baby bonnets; pockets; aprons, table runners, and other articles of daily life. These items had no names and approxminate dates. It was clear that these items were utlitarian, but kept and treasured for their beauty. It brought to mind Richard Rodriguez's observation that gay and female cultures are cultures of "small effects".

This is illustrated by the field of early childhood and child care. This field covers a variety of modalities for early learning and parent support for young families and their young children under age 6. It is the first field in which many of its founders and basic research literature comes from women. Its approach to the children, families, and even staff development are all small effects. In studying the development of this field, from direct service through policy and program development, one can find the large scale impact of a myriad of "small effects" on how we have come to view children in this society, and how we have re-aligned ourselves to make room for them. There is a Ph.D. in this for someone.

You'd like to be saying whatever is ultimately the most penetrating, piercing, form of saying that housekeeping is a miserable task because it is of such a nature that it must be done when nobody sees it being done. Another word for the type activity we're talking about is maintenance. More important is that we all want it to be done.

Life's short. Nobody, not a man or a woman, looking back, says of himself or herself that he or she has suffered some accumulation of all of any group's suffering (and I hardly think any woman should be given a prize for saying she's kept all the houses that ever existed, even if she feels as though she has, and even if she believes she has). It's like marveling at an accident in which your legs were amputated, and which allowed you to become a victim, and to receive reward, even if it's only in the form of attention. Others who are like you should laud you as a role model for children? It becomes question of quantity, of prudence, like anything else. And then we are back at the present, and with Slate forgetting to mention, for the benefit of those who don't know, that Hillary Clinton believes abortion is always a tragedy.

I'm not sure housekeeping was out of the way in early modern Europe or America. Rather it was so central and ordinary a part of life that it escaped the eye of history. So did housekeepers for that matter. Interesting.... the housekeepers did not escape the eyes of Vermeer or Franz Hals or some of the other important Dutch painters from this era, but then they were busy emphasizing the arts of bourgeois living in a way that retrospective historians, with their emphasis of the significant and outstanding, have not done until recently.

In all fairness, I do think some of the most interesting work on early child-rearing practices has been done by men: Philippe Aries, Phil Greven, John Demos are just a few that have come to mind. But then, do you have to be a woman to do woman's history or an African American to do African-American history or a sailor to do maritime history?

What is good for the goose... (is not to become foie gras)

I was just curious about the key phrase, "Well Behaved Women Seldmon Make History," and so Googled it up.

Ulrich seems like a most worthy and credible source!

The first woman I knew who had this posted on her cube was a disservice to the concept -- being an out of control fright and having no respect for something that could even pass for a semblance of the truth. She worked in govt policy! I should disclose that I am male (but all my ladyfriends have been educated and very well employed). I did tell this one time work friend something on the lines of, "However, poorly behaved women make the wrong kind of history!"

Fortunately, the second cube bearer of this Ulrich phrase is a complete credit to the concept! A very effective professional (also in govt policy). Certainly no wallflower. Thought of as both nice and very effective.

What do we gather from these two vignettes?

Everything in moderation?

What do we ask? Do well mannered men make history at any better rate?