Well Behaved Women | Bearing Drift

It has been a hard year to be a historian.

I am a PhD student in American history at George Mason University, and one of my concentrations is American Women’s History. It can be a hard history to study, but there is hope in it as well. Women have been carving space out of the patriarchal granite we’ve lived with since before Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband to “remember the ladies,” and our second president dismissed her entreaty by responding, “I cannot but laugh … your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented … you are so saucy.”

On October 8, 1772, a group of eighteen men sat in judgment of Phillis Wheatly, an enslaved girl kidnapped from West Africa and brought in bondage to Boston who was only fourteen when she had her poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” published in 1767. The men included “most respectable characters in Boston,” including enslavers, religious scholars, and the governor of Massachusetts. They were assembled to judge if the 19-year-old in front of them had actually written the poetry she had the audacity to put her name to. The record of the proceeding has been lost if it ever existed, but at the end of the hearing, the men signed a letter of authenticity validating Wheatley’s claim of authorship. She needed the authority of men to give her the right to her own words.

If there is a unifying theme in American Women’s History, it is the constant, never-ending insistence that women exceed expectations to be heard. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s quotation, “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” is often misinterpreted as a call to action. In reality, it was the lament of a historian observing that the archive often silences women unless men deemed their behavior problematic because women had no voice in government, no property, no power, and, therefore, left no records. Women who did not remain in line with expectations needed to be handled, and then men would create records of the steps they took to maintain order and paint the women as the problem. Remember, we were taught to fear the women they called witches and not the men who burned them.

It is one thing to read the misogyny recorded in the historical record, but it is more difficult to read it in the daily paper. Women today stand on the shoulders of generations of mothers, sisters, aunts, and women who chipped away at that granite as the patriarchy insisted on piling the gravel on their feet to slow their progress. As John Wayne said, “They have the right to work wherever they want to – as long as they have dinner ready when you get home.”

As a female historian, reading the current rhetoric about women is like having over 250 years of historical misogyny flood my consciousness every day. Sexist tropes about women’s looks, intelligence, and ability are waves in the deluge that seek to drive women back. However, as a historian, I should know better. Throughout our history, women have been forced to request power from men. Men had to acquiesce to give women the right to vote. Men had to let women into previously all-male institutions. Men ran the churches, the banks, the courts, and the government. As a result, they could determine the timing of women’s advancement. This election changes that paradigm; women are no longer asking men for power. They are taking it for themselves.

Obviously, women will not vote for a woman simply because she is a woman; to say otherwise is to say that women are too stupid to make decisions based on intellect, so they react to baser instincts. Nonetheless, women having a voice unmediated by men is a historical turn. When men refer to the woman running for president as the devil, anti-Christ, and stupid, when they say that she slept her way to the top, that she cheats, and that she can’t handle the job, they are echoing the same patriarchal arguments that were made to keep the vote from us, to keep us from serving in the military, to keep us from controlling our finances, and to keep us from controlling our bodies. When I remember that, I feel my hope returning because I know these are perhaps the last gasps of an exhausted patriarchy struggling to hold onto its control over women.

The patriarchy’s fear of ambitious women is not new. A woman identified only as E. C. wrote in favor of women’s suffrage in the January 21, 1912, edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

“Every revolution, peaceful or militant, is the evolution of a cause, which in development and growth displaces and overturns the accepted theories and conventions of the people and period which witness the change. The woman movement is one of the most far-reaching in the evolution of the ages. Equal suffrage is but one of the many phases of that great development.”

Perhaps tomorrow, the election of our first female president will be the next phase.

Kristina Nohe is the Civics Editor for Bearing Drift.