On this morning’s Diane Rehm Show, Rehm talks to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich about the phrase she coined, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” which is also the title of Ulrich’s new book. Rehm and Ulrich discuss “how different groups have tried to appropriate it, and why certain women make history and why some get left behind.”

“I felt like it just happened,” said Ulrich about where the phrase came from. “I was working on an article on Puritan funeral sermons, called Virtuous Women Found, and I was trying to give these virtuous women a history. I was thinking about women that fit the sterotypes of the 17th century… went to church even when it snowed, never spoke up, did the right things… the stereotypical kind of thing that were celebrated in those sermons, and what i say is when people who really hold up the world–literally–are celebrated they are idealized into anynomity. They have no history beacuse they have no individuality, they just become icons. And a lot of my work has been devoted to break through those stereotypes and find real women.”

Rehm also talks to Ulrich about changes at Harvard regarding the role women now play at the university. Ulrich is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning A Midwife’s Tale.

You can listen to the interview at WAMU’s Web site.

Ed Sikov talked with guest host Susan Page on the Diane Rehm Show about his biography, Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis. In addition to chronicling her rise in Hollywood, the book explores her upbringing, relationships, and studio battles.

From Sikov’s Web site: “Dark Victory is a twenty-first-century rethinking of this titanic actress, whose centenary will be in 2008. Treating her films at least as acutely as she herself did–and often more admiringly–Dark Victory traces Davis’s rise to stardom at Warner Bros., her powerful drive to wrangle and oppose, her bitter disappointments and sporadic moments of public triumph, her four failed marriages, and her strategies for continuing her career in the face of age and changing popular tastes. It covers Davis’s films on an equal footing with her personal life because she believed in her work and her work was terrific. Dark Victory takes that belief as a starting point. She wasn’t just a star but a gifted artist who changed the face of acting. This book respects her talent.”

You can listen to the interview here.