I originally wrote that sentence in 1976 in the opening paragraph of a scholarly article about the pious women described in Puritan funeral sermons.  I was commenting on their invisibility in history.  They were invisible because they didn’t--or couldn’t--tell their own stories, but also because historians had mostly ignored them, being more interested in stories about religious dissenters or accused witches than about the ordinary women who sustained their communities day by day.  I have devoted my scholarly career to breaking through the good/bad dichotomy that gets in the way of serious engagement with women’s history.

In my new book, I look at the many meanings my sentence has acquired since 1995 when journalist Kay Mills plucked it out of obscurity and used it as an epigraph for her own book.  But mostly I am interested in spreading the word about a renaissance in scholarship that over the past thirty years has given women--including these once obscure Puritan women--a history.

You are right that people don’t know nearly as much as they might about all sorts of figures in the past.  But today there is less excuse for that sort of ignorance than there was thirty years ago.  Think about this--after women won the vote in 1920 suffragists commissioned a statue of Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott.  It was briefly displayed than consigned to the crypt of the U.S. Capitol.  It did not emerge again until 1997 after another women’s movement gave people a reason to care.  Maybe people today know too little about Stanton and Mott, but they know a whole lot more than they did when I was in college.  Even Ken Burns has gotten into the act with a PBS documentary.  There is now a Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York.  That is worth celebrating.  But it isn’t enough.

A renaissance in history invites us to look beyond the stories of visible leaders like Stanton to scores of women once invisible to history--women like Harriet Powell, the runaway slave who appears briefly in Stanton’s memoir, then disappears.

I sometimes joke that half the questions historians get deal with the present--and the other half with the future!  In fact, historians are no better at predicting the future than anyone else.  I don’t know where women are headed.  But I am convinced that knowing where we have been is enormously useful.  History cannot tell us what to do, but it can enlarge our experience of what is possible.

Yes, it is easier to “go with the flow.” But not all history-making is heroic.  People can make history by igniting a bomb as well as by refusing to move to the back of the bus.  As I say in the book, “Serious history talks back to slogans.”

It is surprising that the world’s oldest republic has not yet had a woman president.  One reason may be that our nation was born in a period--and out of a set of political ideas--that reinforced separate roles for men and women.  But the fact that we haven’t yet had a female president doesn’t mean we have not had female leaders.  Women were politically active in the United States long before they got the vote, and their actions made a difference.  The role of women in the antislavery movement is a good example.  In this case a desire to fulfill the traditional roles of women as nurturers and caregivers led to political engagement, leading impeccable “well-behaved” women to slip over the edge into rebellion.

No, I don’t agree.  This notion is based on surveys that ask people if they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who was female or one who was black (an interesting but incomplete measure of how either race or sex operates in the body politic).  Historically they have often operated together, which is why this presidential primary season is so interesting.  I don’t think it helps anyone to pit one form of bias against another.  Although I cringe at sexist comments directed toward Hillary Clinton, I don’t think her success or failure in the presidential race can be reduced to gender bias.  It may have more to do with ongoing confusion in the United States about the relations of husbands and wives.  For centuries, they were imagined as “one-person” according to the law (and as the old treatises said, “that person was he.").  So how do we evaluate a claim by a former First Lady that she was a full partner in her husband’s administration but will act independently in her own?  It’s all very confusing--and part of an ongoing transition in American politics and American life.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton thought that organized religion kept women in bondage.  In her later years, she even tried to rewrite the Bible.  Yes, she and others have surely underestimated the liberating power of religion.  Obeying God rather than man allowed Christine de Pizan to write history, Joan of Arc to command armies, Harriet Tubman to rescue slaves, or the pious mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to launch an international movement for human rights.  And there are hundreds of other examples.  Once again, serious history forces us to re-examine conventional wisdom.

That’s certainly the stereotype, but if we want to understand the bitter divisions in this country over reproductive choices we need to recognize that women have appeared on both sides of most controversies.  Dismissing those who disagree with us as pawns of the patriarchy doesn’t get us very far.

Sex sells books, moves, beer, automobiles, and vacations in the tropics, so it is hardly surprising that human beings have also used it as a weapon in both personal and public conflicts.  But the uses of sexual slander have varied immensely over time.  Let me just take one example.  In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf created a fictional sister for William Shakespeare who goes off to London, becomes pregnant by a gentleman actor, and dies in despair.  Woolf assumed that in sixteenth-century England, as in her own time, chastity had “a religious importance in a woman’s life.” But in the sixteen century it also had economic significance, which is why girls who got pregnant out of wedlock weren’t necessarily “ruined.” Sometimes they used existing laws to force their lover to marry them--as in fact a pregnant Anne Hathaway did to William Shakespeare.  Sexual slanders existed then, as now.  What we need to ask is not whether they exist, but how they operated in a particular time or place.