Accolades for Good Wives | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750

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I have written book reviews on a regular basis for almost a decade. Most of them have been in the field of Mormon/ Utah history, although I consistently try to disclaim my expertise in the area due to a lack of training. Whatever the case, in the course of all those reviews, I am afraid that I got a deserved reputation for being rather harsh. The truth is that when relegated to reviewing Mormon studies, any body would get such a reputation. Most Mormon-studies stuff is just plain terrible, any way you look at it. So what a joy it is to do a book by a Mormon author about something else that turns out to be nothing short of greatl 

Good Wives qualifies in my book of some experience for every accolade a re viewer might dream up. Written in a lucid and imaginative style, it opens a facet of history to view with such clarity and fasci nation that one wonders if it can really be history. Laurel Ulrich’s insights into her subject develop with remarkable strength and even familiarity, perhaps an indirect proof of Sidney Ahlstrom’s truism that Mormonism is the last gasp of Puritanism. Born and reared in the heart of rural Mormondom in southeastern Idaho, Ulrich is currently an assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. No one, from Degler to Cott, and across every intellectual and polemical point in between, has ever written about women in colonial New England with such power and the flavor of truth as does Ulrich in Good Wives. Not only is this work a tri umph of historical dissertation, but it is also a literary masterpiece, ingeniously crafted and full of sentient impact. In short, no one in modern America could have handled the task better than a Mormon woman who is also a New Englander and a first-rate scholar. 

That last statement might require some defense. In addition to writing reviews over the last eight or nine years, I have also been teaching American history, including a course entitled “Women in American History.” Some of the best times I have in that course revolve around my discussions of Puritan women and Mormon women. I spend two days each quarter talking about Mormon women, justifying the expense by citing the current anti-feminist position of the Church and its im pact upon such things as the ERA. But I also maintain that an understanding of current Mormon womanhood is essential to comprehending the spiritual foundations of American culture, namely in Puritanism and its historically pervasive attitudes. Ulrich’s profound insights into colonial womanhood in New England convince me of the veracity of that thesis. 

Using a modified “role analysis,” Ulrich dissects colonial womanhood with command precision. She divides the body of her topic into three parts, each based upon a mythic feminine symbol extant among the Puritans—Bathsheba, or the “virtuous woman,” who taught her son Solomon an appreciation for huswifery; Eve, or the “beguiling woman,” whom God gave man for companionship; Jael, or the “heroic woman,” who lured an enemy into her tent and killed him. John Cotton thought of all three as one, “a comfortable yokemate” who could teach his children, satisfy his need for feminine attention, and assist him in any task conditions the frontier might demand. Ulrich utilizes a vast compendium of fascinating biographical episodes from the lives of scores of New England women to present a crystal image of both the real and the ideal colonial female as she fit into whatever symbolic mold the moment demanded. 

Good Wives entertains as well as it in structs, but the completely casual reader should probably avoid it. It is one of those tough yet moving histories that manage to carry the reader along as would a good novel. One moment we wince at the experiences of a young woman captive of the Indians and the next notice our adrenalin surge as two more women kill and scalp ten of their captors in order to escape. But such tales are incidental to the intent of the book. The author possesses a clever ability to take us well beyond the obviousness of an event into its deeper meanings, often couched in myth and symbol, which, after all, are what really matter in history. “It is from myth that causal energy flows,” wrote William Miller in his essay on the causes of Southern violence, and it is certainly from myth that the traditional female role has become institutionalized in American civilization. It is what all the good wives were supposed to be that mattered, not what they really were. The same is true today and is the great stumbling block of the current women’s movement. In the traditionalist setting, women are supposed to be a great many things that they cannot and (if we are to believe Ulrich) never could be. Women whose lives conform at least to the outward patterns of the happy ideal have a difficult time supporting or even understanding their sisters who struggle against the pain of the real. The female role models of the present age are just as mythic as were those of colonial New En gland we see so distinctly in Good Wives as it examines the economic, sexual, and public spheres of women’s lives. 

So much of women’s history has openly proposed to exalt women, to put them on new pedestals, to tell of their forgotten heroisms and saintly perfections. Ulrich deftly avoids this trap. Some of her char acters are everything but good wives or good anything else. Her book thus adds to its many virtues the quality of balance, a rare attribute in women’s history today. 

Ulrich mentions in her acknowledgments a debt to Mary Ryan, one of the truly superb historians in America today. The influence of Ryan upon Ulrich’s writing is everywhere apparent as the student has come abreast of the teacher. It gives me a warm sense of pleasure to know that one of my own, so to speak, has set a new standard of excellence in women’s history. 

One last thought occurs to me. If it is important to understand today’s good wives” (Mormon women) in order to understand yesterday’s (the Puritans), perhaps the re verse is true also, especially now that we have Ulrich’s masterpiece on the shelf. 

Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), xv+276 pp., illus., biblio., index, $17.50.