How Laurel Thatcher Ulrich caught up with the past

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is Harvard’s 300th Anniversary University Professor, a feminist scholar with a taste for history from the bottom up and an appreciation for the pedagogic power of artifacts like hand-woven cloth and furniture.

In 1990, she unraveled a cryptic 18th-century diary in “A Midwife’s Tale,” which earned a Pulitzer Prize. Soon after came a MacArthur Fellowship, and then — in 1995, when Ulrich was 57 — an invitation to teach at Harvard.

Ulrich grew up in Sugar City, Idaho, the dutiful and precocious daughter in a fifth-generation Mormon family. She studied English at the University of Utah and was already married and pregnant by the time she graduated as valedictorian. She followed her husband east for his graduate studies, fell in with a writerly collective of Mormon feminists, and earned a master’s degree part time.

Ulrich enrolled in a Ph.D. program in history at the University of New Hampshire (she had never taken a history course) and set to work. Her first scholarly paper, on funeral sermons for women, included a line that not only marked her for fame, but was an expression of her own story: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Q: What were your earliest influences as a scholar and writer?

A: I came from a family who read books and talked, then talked about ideas. When I got married I told my husband he hadn’t joined the Thatcher family, he had joined the Thatcher Debating Society.

That was almost literally true because my dad was a debate coach. He taught everything. This was small-town Idaho. In his first job he coached the girls’ basketball team. He did everything, but he was basically a social studies teacher. He had been a debate coach before he became a principal, and then as I grew up he was superintendent of this little consolidated school district that we were in.

He was totally into politics, as the entire family was. My older brother, who was seven years older, had been a debater and naturally went to law school. It was that environment, where you talked, you read, you had a question, you went to the bookshelf, you went to the library.

My dad had wanted to be a lawyer as a young man, but he had no money because he too had come from a rural family. He had gone to the University of Utah. Here I am talking about my father. My father and mother were my primary influences, as is usually the case. My dad had been in theater at the University of Utah, and he had been a debater at the University of Utah. So I ended up going to the University of Utah, which was kind of a family tradition.

My mother went to the University of Utah, and she had — as was true in the 1920s — she did what women did, which was to do the Normal certificate to teach. But then she met my dad, who was boarding at her parents’ house in the small town where she grew up. She got married and had kids and didn’t ever teach. But she was a reader, and she coached speech and drama in church.

This was a little Mormon town, and in our community you did everything. You learned to dance; you learned to play piano. There were 900 people, but it was a town that thought kids should be cultivated. There were three piano teachers, and we did amateur theatricals. In those days you went to church twice on Sunday and twice during the week, practically, in some kind of activity. And everybody had to give talks. There was no professional clergy, so from the time you’re 8 years old you’re probably learning to give little talks.

It was a good environment, even though — you know — pretty small. I should say pretty small potatoes — and that’s of course what everybody grew: potatoes. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, had settled, homesteaded, in that part of Idaho in the late 19th century. So I grew up about 10 miles from where my mother grew up. My grandfather had retired from farming, and divided his farm. So my parents had an 80-acre farm that my dad and brothers ran in the summer. And then my dad taught school in the winter.

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