Looking at a Candid Photograph of Myself

Marion Rust’s interpretation of my work in “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women’s Studies” surprised and delighted me. It surprised me that anyone would give such serious attention to personal essays tucked away in obscure journals. It delighted me because it told me things about myself and my work that I did not know. Reading it gave me the kind of pleasure I get from seeing candid photographs of myself taken on the sly by my son, not because those photographs are always flattering but because they are both kind and true. Rust’s careful reading of my scholarship in the light of my personal essays has inspired me to think anew about my own convictions and my ways of expressing them.

Remarkably, Rust managed to write a detailed review of my work without ever mentioning my most popular production: a five-word slogan that we all know too well. In a way, however, she did ponder the question of whether well-behaved women make history. Her essay suggests, if I read it correctly, that they can and do. In her opening pages she argues that my historical work has thrived precisely because it is disciplined, rigorous, and obedient to rules—men’s rules. In Rust’s words, “Ulrich repeatedly declares her allegiance to the very model that kept both her and her subject matter out of the picture: precisely, it would seem, to bring them into the light” (149). Rust asks whether A Midwife’s Tale “succeeded so well at avoiding contamination by unruly personality that it brings up short those who feel less capable of such rigor” (149).

In contrast, my seemingly casual personal essays are filled with my own personality and fueled by advocacy. The voice may be humorous; the agenda is not. In essay after essay, she explains, I take on the double bind of identity politics that subjects Mormon feminists to disdain both from those in their own community who fear their convictions and from feminists dismayed that they would defend their faith. In these passages Rust portrays my historical work as in some sense conformist and perhaps even self-serving. In my essays, however, I come out from the screen and act up. Rust concludes that in the essays, “freedom from academic oversight” allowed me to produce work that is “both highly self-referential and imbued with a deep sense of purpose” (151). Having set up this vivid contrast between my scholarly work and my first-person essays, Rust then makes a quick U-turn, demonstrating that the same sensibility is at work in both. In her estimation, my approach in both genres has been “productively oxymoronic” (147).

I admire the deftness of this analysis. Still, as a birthright member of the Thatcher debating society, I cannot leave it at that. Rust’s essay depends on a stylized contrast that I first posited in an essay published in the Journal of American History in a forum on “Self and Subject.” I raise that point simply to acknowledge that historians, too, are interested in the self and to counter the far too common assumption that historians are engaged in a mindless quest for objectivity. Historical monographs and personal essays are both literary constructions with rules and conventions. One is neither more nor less constraining or more or less authentic than the other.

I’m sure Rust knows that, but there were points in the essay where she seemed to assume that historical writing is a kind of straitjacket. That has not been my experience. In fact, I ended my essay by writing, “At a critical point in my own life, history empowered me. It sent me to school, taught me a new way of being a writer, and gave me a critical perspective on my own dilemmas” (“Pail of Cream” 47). The latter point seems to me the most important. I remember a motto posted over the entrance to the tiny library in my high school: “A person wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.” I too recoil at...