Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.
History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.
An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.
Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental.
Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care.
But like other well-behaved women they chose to obey God rather than men.
If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn’t been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars.