Here's to Women Who Don't Behave

My first-ever bumper sticker was gone in the time it took me to drive home from college for a weekend visit in 1976.

I was a journalism student thrilled to discover that I could finally ask an impertinent question and not be sent to my room when I pulled my battered Pontiac LeMans into my parents' driveway.

My father walked off the front porch and immediately glared at my bumper sticker: JOURNALISTS DO IT DAILY it declared in big, bold letters. Below it in letters light as a whisper: support the first amendment.

"Off," he growled.

"Dad."

"You heard me," his face redder than sunset. "You take that off your car or you're walking back to school."

It was a short argument. He had the title and the keys. I had earth shoes and the prospect of a 90-mile walk.

It took 25 years to find another bumper sticker fit for my car. It hangs over my computers, too, and you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she reacts to these five simple words:

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."

Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote the line in a scholarly article in 1976, using "seldom," rather than "rarely." The change came 20 years later, when journalist Kay Mills unearthed Ulrich's declaration and used it as an epigraph for an informal history of American women.

From there, it caught fire like fake nails over a candle. Ulrich's "runaway sentence" has shown up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers, quilts and even the hood of a 1991 Honda Civic.

I wrote about it after meeting Ulrich in 2003. At that time, she was writing a book about its popularity. Now, Knopf has finally published it.

It's titled — what else? — "Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History" and chronicles the lives of women, many of them not well-known, who made history. It's the kind of book to make a woman muscle-flexing proud.

When I asked Ulrich if she is well-behaved, she laughed.

"Depends on who you ask.

Some people would say I have this reputation for being a great mediator. Others call me a Trojan horse."

Ulrich has had all kinds of opinions and the audacity to express them, even at Harvard. A male colleague once told her they had thought she'd be a more "gracious" addition to their faculty.

She laughed at the memory. And when she told me that Rush Limbaugh had ridiculed the slogan, she giggled.

Ulrich is a feminist, a Mormon, a former homemaker and a grandmother — not your typical Ivy League combination.

"It's good to be an outsider," she said. "You can identify with other outsiders, and it forces you to confront ambiguity."

It's the ambiguity of her slogan, she wrote, that contributes to its appeal.

"To the public-spirited, it is a provocation to action, a less pedantic way of saying that if you want to make a difference in the world, you can't worry too much about what people think. To a few it may say, 'Good girls get no credit.' To a lot more, 'Bad girls have more fun.'"

But it also works, she wrote, "because it plays into longstanding stereotypes about the invisibility and the innate decorum of the female sex."

For me, Ulrich's slogan was a counterpunch to my mother's well-meaning warning that men don't like strong women. What a relief to discover that she was referring to only a certain kind of man, which, coincidentally, I am better off without anyway.

Some men read my bumper sticker and give a harrumph that sounds like gas. Other guys just clear a path. Women, though, overwhelmingly smile, sometimes giving me a thumbs-up or asking how they can get their own declaration of misbehavior.

My dad's reaction remains my favorite.

One evening I watched out the window as he and a friend left my house after dinner. He walked down the driveway, passed my car and then froze when he spotted the bumper sticker.

He pointed to it.

He shook his head.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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