A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785 - 1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

In 1785, at age fifty, Martha Ballard - housewife, midwife, healer - began keeping a daily Diary. She wrote her last entry in 1812, shortly before her death at seventy-seven. In the twenty-seven intervening years she attended 814 deliveries in and around the Kennebec River towns of Hallowell and Augusta, Maine. Martha Ballard's diary coolly notes her adventures - setting out in "a doleful storm," or waist-high in snow, making perilous river crossings, riding miles alone through back roads ("the hors Blunderd & I fell & hurt me") to help usher infants into the world or treat a variety of ills from the colic to scarlet fever. She records at the same time the comings and goings, pleasures and conflicts, of the household (her surveyor-miller husband, her children before their marriages, usually a hired girl) and her town. She succors her husband in debtor's jail. She helps her daughters with their babies. She worries about her violent son. She manages a bevy of weavers, brews beer, makes vinegar from pumpkin parings, pulls flax, barters, doctors her cow and lamb, cooks, bakes, grows twenty kinds of vegetables and fruits and countless medicinal herbs - the roster of work accomplished is luxuriant and dizzying - and rushes off in the black of night to her midwife's task. This rare and remarkable journal - few women of the time left any written testimony - brings us closer than we have yet been to the texture of ordinary life in pre-industrial America. Here is a woman who has her hand on the pulse of her world, assisting at its births and deaths, doing its work and jotting down the "dailyness" of life that escapes the conventional historian. Everything is here, from the quilting bee and the kindness of neighbors to incest and murder. Here are the ways of marital relationship, of raising the young, of growing old, of sexual behavior - the accepted and the scandalous - of working and earning, of religious devotion. A Midwife's Tale is crowded with stories, people, reality. It fascinates. It is a revelation.

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