"But When We Cherry-Pick the Past for Icons of Female Rebellion, Are We Really Serving Women, or History?"

"In 2007, Ulrich wrote a book revisiting her accidental feminist slogan, explaining the roots and resonance of her phrase, and the slippery notion of behavior, good or bad. As Ulrich is well-aware, the catchy slogan is misleading out of context—her actual essay subjects were the well-behaved women remembered, not forgotten, in those pious sermons. But Ulrich's real point is not that we need to change how women behave, but instead, how we 'make' history. According to a 2016 Slate survey, fully 75 percent of more than 600 trade history books on the previous year's New York Times best-seller list had male authors. Biography subjects, meanwhile, were more than 70 percent male. But done right, women's history offers more than a corrective to the heroic narratives that men have written for generations. Annette Gordon-Reed's work on Sally Hemings made it impossible to keep telling the same story about Thomas Jefferson. Hemings, of course, did not have the freedom to be a rebel—her good behavior, within the inhuman constraints of her life, allowed her to survive. But in Gordon-Reed's hands, her story, and her presence in history, proved transformative. Done right, women's history changes history."

Joanna Scutts at Slate challenges the idea that well-behaved women seldom make history.