If other chapters, such as a wide-ranging exploration of the Amazon myth and a rumination on second-wave feminism, don't cohere as tightly or showcase Ulrich's strengths as an extraordinary interpreter of ordinary records, this can be forgiven in a work that is so often sharp and insightful. Rahab and Ruth were gentiles, and were therefore thought to be beyond the reach of God’s covenant love. Deborah, Jael, Bathsheba, and Esther all violated standards for acceptable female behavior in one way or another. And in a third, richly illustrated chapter, she utilizes a medieval book of days as a window into women's labor through the ages. The Old Testament women we most easily recognize were not well-behaved. In another, she offers a piercing analysis of "four 19th-century Harriets" ex-slaves Tubman, Jacobs and Powell, and novelist Stowe to uncover the interplay of race and gender in questions of liberation. In one, Ulrich follows the lead of Virginia Woolf (who invented an ill-fated fictional sister of Shakespeare) by digging into what we know and don't know about the women in the Bard's family. Why the appeal, Ulrich wondered? And what makes a woman qualify as well-behaved or rebellious? Several chapters of this accessible and beautifully written study are brilliant. In 1976, graduate student Ulrich asserted in an obscure scholarly article that "well-behaved women seldom make history." But Ulrich, now at Harvard, made history, winning the Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prizes for A Midwife's Tale and her slogan did, too: it began popping up on T-shirts, greeting cards and buttons.
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