If anyone told us how to girlboss and do it well, it was Leslie Knope—but she is a rare case of the good girlboss. A term used for a woman who succeeds in a male-dominated world (whether through work or just life), “girlboss” has since been turned into something to define some women who will happily step on the heads of others to get what they want. That’s not what Leslie Knope taught me, but things change with time, as has the beloved girlboss quote “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
The quote itself has often been attributed to women in history who were “infamous.”—your Anne Boleyns or your Marilyn Monroes. The reality is that the quote itself is pointing out that women, throughout history, have been forced into being less than their male counterparts and forgotten.
A very thorough TikTok by user “bookrvws,” also known as Kristen, talks a lot about how a historian from the ’70s wrote the quote in her journal piece about women during the colonial age. In an academic paper by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which was included in American Quarterly in 1976, the quote first made its appearance. And while it is often attributed to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she was dead before it was ever written down.
The quote itself is more about every woman having the right to be remembered and less about women needing to “misbehave” in order to be “important” enough to be valued. This is not a dismissal of any particular “type” of woman but just proving that the quote, without context, can be taken to mean something completely different than originally written. Learning the actual history of it mixed, with where we often see it displayed, shows the importance of context.
Look up quotes before you print them on tote bags
You can walk into the Strand bookstore and see this quote everywhere. If you type it into Etsy, there is a sea of shirts and wall art with it displayed, all meant to call women to action but refusing to look at the deeper meaning behind its message. Every woman deserves to have her story told. That’s what Thatcher Ulrich was saying with her paper. Instead, it has been adopted to make women fight back, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but does miss the point of what she was saying.
Those women who were forced into submission, who had to do whatever they were told in order to survive? They don’t deserve to be lost to history just because they didn’t fight the system. Women deserve to have their voices heard no matter what, which is saying something when you see how the quote is often used in history and who it is credited to. The reality is simply that every woman should have her story told and I think that Leslie Knope would agree with that. Girlboss your way into knowing where the quote you love actually come from.
(featured image: NBC)
