It’s the birthday of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (b. 1938), the Harvard historian and Pulitzer-winning author who said in a 1976 scholarly article that “Well-behaved women seldom make history” and later published a book by the same title (2007).

Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho, and grew up in sight of the Grand Tetons. She studied English and journalism at the University of Utah, graduating valedictorian, and earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of New Hampshire (1980); by then she’d married Gael Ulrich, a chemical engineer from MIT, and was raising their five children. (Because some women do that. Have five children, finish a Ph.D., and win a Pulitzer. Kind of show-offy but whatever.)

Ulrich’s first book was Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (1982), and her second, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Her fifth book, Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History, examines the theme of “bad behavior” via three feminist works: Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies (1405), Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Eighty Years and More (1898), and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1928). Ulrich’s latest book is A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (2017). Ulrich herself identifies as both feminist and Mormon.

(I myself identify as feminist and know a great feminist joke but am afraid to tell it. Your loss.)

Have a fantastic Thursday, as Thursdays go, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.