Book Review - a Midwife`S Tale
Frank Buonomo
Readings in American History: Colonial to 1815
Fall 2010
Book Review of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich`s A Midwife`s Tale
A Midwife`s Tale is a meticulously researched, highly readable analysis of an eighteenth-century life in context. To understand eighteen-century America through one woman`s eyes, historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich spent eight years working through Martha Ballard`s massive dairy. Twenty seven years worth of seemingly mundane jottings. The author`s goal was to connect Martha`s dairy and her work as a midwife to her world. By cataloging diary entries and cross-referencing other documents that mentioned the people Ballard encountered and events she experienced on her constant travels as midwife and healer, Ulrich painstakingly recreated Ballard`s world. In 1785, America was a rough and chaotic young nation, and Maine its remote northern frontier. That year, at the age of fifty, Martha Ballard began the dairy that she would keep for the next twenty-seven years, until her death. At the time when fewer than half the women in America were literate, Ballard faithfully recorded the weather, her daily household tasks, her midwifery duties (she delivered close to a thousand babies), her medical practice, and countless incidents that reveal the turmoil of the new nation. This was a time marked by dizzying social change, intense religious conflict, economic boom and bust, life threatening diseases, domestic violence, changing sexual mores, and debtor`s prison. The end of monarchial rule, evolving governmental structure, religious fragmentation, changes to the family system, economic flux, and massive population shifts resulted in a time of uncertainty and insecurity. Each of these social issues touched Martha and Ephraim Ballard and are reflected in one way or another in Martha`s daily jottings.
When Martha Ballard began writing the diary, the Revolutionary War had been over for just a year. The states, still a
Readings in American History: Colonial to 1815
Fall 2010
Book Review of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich`s A Midwife`s Tale
A Midwife`s Tale is a meticulously researched, highly readable analysis of an eighteenth-century life in context. To understand eighteen-century America through one woman`s eyes, historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich spent eight years working through Martha Ballard`s massive dairy. Twenty seven years worth of seemingly mundane jottings. The author`s goal was to connect Martha`s dairy and her work as a midwife to her world. By cataloging diary entries and cross-referencing other documents that mentioned the people Ballard encountered and events she experienced on her constant travels as midwife and healer, Ulrich painstakingly recreated Ballard`s world. In 1785, America was a rough and chaotic young nation, and Maine its remote northern frontier. That year, at the age of fifty, Martha Ballard began the dairy that she would keep for the next twenty-seven years, until her death. At the time when fewer than half the women in America were literate, Ballard faithfully recorded the weather, her daily household tasks, her midwifery duties (she delivered close to a thousand babies), her medical practice, and countless incidents that reveal the turmoil of the new nation. This was a time marked by dizzying social change, intense religious conflict, economic boom and bust, life threatening diseases, domestic violence, changing sexual mores, and debtor`s prison. The end of monarchial rule, evolving governmental structure, religious fragmentation, changes to the family system, economic flux, and massive population shifts resulted in a time of uncertainty and insecurity. Each of these social issues touched Martha and Ephraim Ballard and are reflected in one way or another in Martha`s daily jottings.
When Martha Ballard began writing the diary, the Revolutionary War had been over for just a year. The states, still a