I loved this book. It was like sitting next to a pool with your feet in the water: not a true deep dive, and you are aware that there could be more fun in the water even if it is more work, but it's a perfectly pleasant activity all on its own. A splash of 1960s activism history here. A sploosh of witch trials there. A sprinkle of great women writers. I'm one to be satisfied with an afternoon of sitting by the side of a pool. It's cooling, you're still participating--- ((this metaphor will break

I loved this book. It was like sitting next to a pool with your feet in the water: not a true deep dive, and you are aware that there could be more fun in the water even if it is more work, but it's a perfectly pleasant activity all on its own. A splash of 1960s activism history here. A sploosh of witch trials there. A sprinkle of great women writers. I'm one to be satisfied with an afternoon of sitting by the side of a pool. It's cooling, you're still participating--- ((this metaphor will break down any moment considering the fact that I can't actually swim so I'll just stop here.))

What I mean is, that for such a small book on such a gigantic subject, it is remarkably cohesive. I'm the kind of writer who has to put any major project through at minimum two full, down-to-the-bones restructurings, so just the sheer organization of this book was astounding me. Built on the spine of this wonderful and chameleonic sentence that can mean so many different things, Ulrich pulls all the question threads out and lays it all on the works and perspectives of Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Woolf. As a reader, we knew where we were based on the signposts of City of Ladies, Room of One's Own, and Eighty Years and More. We stood there while we were thrown example after example of short sketches weaving in and out of each other. Stories that answer some questions and ask even more.

What does 'good behavior' look like? How do the ways it's different for men and women affect things? How do individual women reject being well-behaved? What foundation are they working from? What is history? What does it mean to 'make' history? Shape it? Mold it? Achieve the honor of being mentioned three generations down the road? Affect world events? Is making history the job of the women of the past or the scholars who study them? Is 'making history' really the goal? If well-behaved women don't make history, is it fair to blame that on them? Or should we expand history to respect and allow their stories to matter? Can we ever find our voices now, without a concerted effort to end the silences of the past? Is big, radical, political, effective, intentional change the only history that matters? How do the myths and the incorrect assumptions and rumors tell interesting stories alongside the truth of the matters? If a woman is well-behaved but is rumored to be ill-behaved, what then?

It was fantastic. On its ride through women's history we hit so many of my old favorites: Artemisia Gentileschi, how no one actually burned any bras at that first protest in Atlantic City bc they didn't have a permit, Harriet Tubman, the second wave of feminism rediscovering the works of their foremothers. And so many of my new favorites now: the women who stopped paying property tax and the town tried to take their cows, history of Amazon and women warrior tales, the advent of women's studies as a field, ECS's origin story. And also, constantly, more that I wanted and then didn't show up: my beloved medieval woman mystics and their visions, women touted as celebrity sex symbols who didn't put up with sh!t, progressives in the age of union organizations like Nellie Bly, women in my own religious tradition. Instead of being sad they were 'left out,' I found it electrifying. There's so much to learn about out there! Women have such a fascinating and rich history and this book was only able to scrape the surface.

For such a short book, it packs a ton of information. (I also, much to my shame, only /really/ realized how much I speed/skimread my easy-peasy fiction when suddenly the info-per-sentence was, like, three times what I'm used to. secrets revealed.) And, again, in awe of the organization. I also adore the visual rhetoric of the cover, but that's beside the point and this review is long enough already. Anyway, read this book! It's fun and it's serious, it's big questions and amusing anecdotes, it's a great Women's History Month survey. It's written for a general audience, but I think serves as a really good gateway to more scholarly reading about a lot of the subjects that are brought up. It's also not hopelessly depressing, which is worthy of noting because it could easily have been a big bummer, but instead was fun not only because of the treatment of the more recent/familiar movements and figures, but of the feminist fire spirit that filled women on occasion for centuries back in time. It's history about history! What could be better?