Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Well behaved women seldom make history.

If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn't been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars.

Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.

Good women are no fun... The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.

Les femmes bien élevées entrent rarement dans l'histoire

Few people remember good women. They don't forget bad girls.

The difference between a commonly well-behaved woman and a high-bred lady consists in very small things—but what a difference it is!

How few women have any history after the age of thirty!

Well behaved people and dreamers seldom make history. In fact, history has no place for such people.

Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care.

Historically, stories of revolutionary women have been minimized or even left untold.

The invisibility of women in canonical histories might lead us to believe that women have no history. Surely then a female history is an essential tool in the emancipation of women? This is partly because if we have no history we are ‘trapped’ in the present where oppressive social relations can continue unchallenged. Furthermore, history can be seen as evidence that things can and do change.

Of course, there have been unruly women for as long as there have been boundaries of what constitutes acceptable “feminine” behavior: women who, in some way, step outside the boundaries of good womanhood, who end up being labeled too fat, too loud, too slutty, too whatever characteristic women are supposed to keep under control.