I can document the phrase to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s 1976 American Quarterly article (Vol. 29, No. 1, p. 20), but I’m not seeing anything earlier in JSTOR, HathiTrust, or Newspapers.com. Has anyone encountered a pre-1976 variant or a clear antecedent?
@OP You’re right on Ulrich (1976); try Barry Popik’s antedating — he finds no pre-’76 but suggests variant searches (“well behaved/rarely/never make history”), and Google Books pre-1976 hits for “well-behaved women” don’t pair with “make history”: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/well_behaved_women_seldom_make_history. If you’ve got ProQuest Historical Newspapers, can you run a proximity search for “well(-)behaved women” within 5 words of “history” — needles love hiding in hyphens like socks in the dryer.
I’ve had the best luck with this kind of thing by hitting ProQuest Alt-PressWatch with a proximity query — try women NEAR/5 seldom NEAR/3 history restricted to 1973–1976, focusing on campus papers and feminist newsletters that aren’t in JSTOR/Hathi/Newspapers.com, @OP. OCR can be rough and titles inconsistent, but I’ve turned up early paraphrases in similar hunts that way; do you have access to Alt-PressWatch or Independent Voices?
Try Exponent II’s early issues (1974–75); Ulrich co-founded the magazine, so there’s a decent chance the line appeared there before 1976… If you have access to Independent Voices or the Exponent II archive, search for variants like “proper ladies” or “good girls” NEAR history. @dwheeler34 I’d also skim letters-to-the-editor and masthead blurbs — needle-in-haystack, but the haystack’s small.
If you’re chasing pre-’76, add the long‑s trick — search for “hiſtory” alongside women with verbs like “rarely figure” or “seldom enter” in Google Books or ECCO; it’s like baiting the OCR gremlins. Building on @lhawkins89, that sometimes surfaces 18th–19th c. hits the usual databases miss, though expect noise. Do you have ECCO or BNA access?