Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, born July 11, 1938, in Sugar City, Idaho, is an American historian of early America and women’s history. She grew up the daughter of John Kenneth Thatcher, a schoolteacher, superintendent, state legislator, and farmer, and Alice Siddoway Thatcher. Ulrich studied English and journalism at the University of Utah and gave the valedictory speech at commencement. She later earned a master’s degree in English from Simmons University in 1971 and a doctorate in history from the University of New Hampshire in 1980.

After completing her Ph.D., Ulrich joined the faculty at the University of New Hampshire, where she rose from graduate assistant to tenured faculty member and remained through 1995. That year she became James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and director of the Charles Warren Center of Studies in American History at Harvard University. As of 2018, she is 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita at Harvard. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003 and served as president of the American Historical Association from 2009 to 2010 and of the Mormon History Association from 2014 to 2015.

Ulrich is best known for A Midwife’s Tale, her study of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Northern New England whose diary opened a window onto ordinary life in the early American republic. The book examines women’s roles in the household and local market economy, marriage and sexual relations, medical practice, violence, and crime. In 1991, it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize, along with several other awards. It later became the basis for a PBS American Experience docudrama produced by Laurie Kahn-Levitt and directed by Richard P. Rogers, with Ulrich serving as consultant, script collaborator, and narrator. In 1992, the MacArthur Foundation named her a MacArthur Fellow.

What set Ulrich’s work apart was her attention to records that might look plain or repetitive at first glance. Her approach to history has been described as a tribute to “the silent work of ordinary people.” In A Midwife’s Tale, she treated Ballard’s daily entries not as minor scraps, but as evidence rich enough to reconstruct a world. Ulrich wrote that “it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.” Her method showed how domestic labor, medical skill, and local exchange could change the understanding of women’s work before industrialization.

Ulrich also gave American popular culture one of its most repeated historical phrases. In a 1976 scholarly article on little-studied Puritan funeral services, she wrote, “well-behaved women seldom make history.” She meant that historians had often failed to study well-behaved women, not that modern women should misbehave. The line later appeared on greeting cards, T-shirts, mugs, plaques, and bumper stickers. Ulrich responded by writing Well-Behaved Women, a book about how women shaped history through lives such as those of Rosa Parks, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, and Virginia Woolf. Her words still carry force because they point back to the people history can miss, and to the care required to see them clearly.