Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich ‘72, ‘93HD (born 1938) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor at Harvard University. Her scholarship focuses on American history (specifically that of early New England) and women’s history. Ulrich has authored several acclaimed books, including A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (Knopf Doubleday, 1990), which won a Pulitzer Prize and inspired a PBS documentary. After receiving her undergraduate education at the University of Utah, Ulrich obtained a master’s degree in English from Simmons, followed by a doctorate in History from the University of New Hampshire. She received an Honorary Doctorate from Simmons in 1993.

According to a New York Times book review of Ulrich’s Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Knopf Doubleday, 2007), “Her study of wives and mothers and daughters as they were remembered in funeral eulogies, the sole record of women who lived and labored in silent obscurity, illustrates a critical point. Much of what is characterized as female ‘misbehavior’ is a matter of voice — of a woman insisting she be heard, paid not only attention, but also the respect due a being as fully human and necessary as a man.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison, Harvard Magazine, 1999.