"Bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body;" "fake eyelashes." These are among the insults thrown around last week in Congress by women in the U.S. House of Representatives. A new low indeed, for the whole country to watch and laugh at. And while women may behave badly just like men, what we saw last week was nothing to emulate and not what the great phrase often depicted on greeting cards —"well-behaved women rarely make history" — epitomizes.
Many women are credited with coining that phrase, including Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Boleyn, and others. Even Princess Leia from "Star Wars" saying "well-behaved women rarely defeat empires" is a popular internet meme. I've learned that the quote actually came from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of Early American history at Harvard.
While she was a PhD student, Ulrich published a scholarly article in the spring 1976 issue of the journal American Quarterly, entitled "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735" about women from early America not usually featured in history books. Well-behaved or virtuous women from that time largely have been lost to history because their lives were considered unremarkable by those who decided what counts as history. Usually, and far too often (frankly), only women who broke social rules or upset social norms were noticed by chroniclers at the time and made it into the history books.
Ulrich wrote, "Cotton Mather called them 'The Hidden Ones.' They never preached or sat in a deacon's bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven't been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all."
While the genesis of this quote reflects how women have either been championed or ignored by history, I can assure you that the phrase did not contemplate the behavior we witnessed last week. Those women did indeed behave badly and did indeed make history, but for all the wrong reasons. What America witnessed was a catfight. As Wikipedia explains that term is used to define "an altercation between two females, often characterized as involving scratching, shoving, slapping, choking, punching, kicking, wrestling, biting, spitting, hair-pulling and shirt-shredding. It can also be used to describe women insulting each other verbally or engaged in an intense competition for men, power or occupational success." Use of the term is considered derogatory and belittling. And while the term has been slowly falling out of favor, it is the one that immediately came to mind watching that spectacle take place on the floor of Congress.
On March 3, 1879, Belva Lockwood became the first woman admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the next year, she became the first woman to argue a case before that court. In the 19th century, women struggled against professional and societal barriers that largely prevented them from working in the legal field. It was not until the 1840s, during westward expansion of the country, that women began to qualify by "reading law" and providing legal services at the city and county levels, even without formal admission to a state or territorial bar.
In 1981, just over a century after Lockwood's inaugural argument, Sandra Day O'Connor took her seat on the bench as the first woman on the Supreme Court of the United States. Reflecting on the women who went before her, and those who would follow her, she later observed: "As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we'll all be better off for it."
Let last week's behavior before the United States Congress not be an example.
Originally published by Connecticut Law Tribune and Law.com.
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