Well-behaved is overrated: The silences and gaps that make history

Despite its over-saturation on t-shirts and coffee mugs, I have always loved the feminist feel of this statement: women who want to leave a mark on the world must step outside of accepted and carefully crafted social roles to blow some shit up.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that not only has this quote has been hugely misattributed to the likes of Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, but it actually came from a research study entitled “Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” about Puritan women’s funeral rituals.

The author of that study — and the quote — is a Pulitzer prize winning Harvard professor Dr. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Dr. Ulrich is a historian of early America who pays special attention to the “silent work of ordinary people” which is a concept that has held a lot of meaning for me in the last few months.

The interesting thing about this quote is that it was initially written to call attention to the disappearance in history of women who led so-called “acceptable” and “normal” lives, rather than a rally cry for women to break boundaries. For Dr. Ulrich’s research, she hit significant roadblocks in finding even the most basic information about women who lived on our continent during Colonial times.

While you might hear about sensational witch hunts in some of these communities, history — as recorded by primarily by men — simply chose not to document and celebrate the lives of a significant portion of the population. They were deemed incidental and less critical to our shared narrative than the men who lived beside them were — and, of course, that doesn’t even begin to account for the gaps in historical records and storytelling around Native Americans and enslaved people at that time.

As Black Sheep, we too are explorers of knowledge and history. What I want to encourage all of us to do is to pay special attention to where we find these silences —where the faces, names, stories and experiences are missing are in the research we do and the data we collect. Just because we don’t see a certain group of people doesn’t mean that they weren’t there and powering the world, we just need to go deeper bring those voiceless and story-less people back into the fold.

When we look to what could and should be for our community, a deep understanding of our shared past and all of its intricacies is important indeed. As forward-thinking activators, we are also seekers of ghosts, we are finders of the forgotten, we are celebrators of the cast aside and forgotten. As Dr. Ulrich says in “Yards and Gates”: “Most people assume that history is what happened in the long ago. Historians know that history is an account of what happened based on surviving evidence — and that it is shaped by the interests, inclinations and skills of those who write it…. History is not limited to what we CAN know about the past but also by what we CARE to know.”

At Black Sheep, we care to know a great deal. We have no patience for narrow vision or one-sided narrative. We dig, we prod, we poke holes. And, while we are eager and proud to disrupt the status quo believing that “well-behaved sheep seldom make history” so too must we be passionate excavators of those “silent people” who did indeed make history, but whose impact has been long ignored through generations of subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination.

Women, people of color, indigenous people, people with disabilities and the huge array of humanity that has historically been ignored or actively pushed down —these are communities worth discovering and re-writing history around as we pen, design and build the campaigns that help serve us all in the future.