Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for, big, tough ladies molding history with their strong, womanly hands, but every time I hear those old ’70s hosannas to “dangerous women” I don’t think of Emma Goldman, I think of Squeaky from the Mason Family and Ilse Koch and about how Eleanor Roosevelt somehow managed to be a historical bad-ass while maintaining the ability to say “please” and “thank you” and about how the whole dangerous-woman-are-great! spin is patronizing anyway—and it is for those deeply feminist reasons that whenever I hear this:

Well-behaved women rarely make history.
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich^*

I want to say this:

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
—Oscar Wilde

But that’s not the point. The point is: Most Dangerous Women, a children’s play, will happen this Wednesday at MOHAI, featuring the 7th and 8th graders of Seattle Girls’ School playing historical figures like Aung San Suu Kyi. Which sounds nice. And not at all dangerous. And way too late to have made it into this week’s theater calendar.

(^* Did you know that the utterer of this bumper-sticker wisdom is Mormon? And teaches at Harvard? And that the trustees of Brigham Young University smacked down a BYU proposal to have her speak at the BYU Women’s Conference?)