A Midwife's Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - review

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A Midwife's Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, is a historical monograph that follows the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary entries from 1785 to 1812. Martha was a midwife, who resided in Hallowell, Maine, and delivered 816 babies during her practice, from 1785 to 1812, which averaged forty births a year. Her diary opens for historians an unparalleled glimpse into the past in which they can relate its context to the larger themes occurring during the eighteenth-century. "Through the daily entries of the diary, we can see the eighteenth-century was a time not only of political revolution but also of medical, economic, and sexual transformation."1 "It was also an era where a new ideology of womanhood connected domestic virtue to the survival of the state."2 Martha's diary reveals what was lost and what was gained during the transformation of the eighteenth-century into the nineteenth-century. She illustrates the communion between women and men in the economy and the complimentary roles they played in order to sustain the town. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich interprets Martha's diary by researching a wide range of sources and puts it into a format in which we can easily read. Such sources used to reconstruct and support the events described in the historical monograph include, Sewall's diary, Ephraim Ballard's maps, wills, tax lists, deeds, court records, town-meeting minutes, medical treatises, novels, religious tracts, and fragmentary papers of Maine physicians.3

Ulrich organizes the book in a unique pattern. At the beginning of each

chapter, she puts ten of Martha's dated entries and then proceeds to explain what

they mean, why they are significant, and how they tie together with the values/themes of the era. "In the dairy entries, the author did not change the spelling; however, she did add periods and capitals in order to structure the sentences, and kept the diary entries numbered the way Martha had in order to preserve the flavor of it."4 She also included maps of Hallowell, a picture of the diary, and graphs, in table format, for important statistics. In order for the reader to understand the importance of the entries, the author explains the situation that Martha was writing about and the surrounding factors of the era, which make the entry important for historians. Between the different explanations of the events, the author examines the historical debate on the different beliefs held during the eighteenth-century. The statistics on birth rates and survival rates for both infants and
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mothers compare different records of midwives, and reinforce Martha's mastery at her craft. Yet, the greatest source is Martha's daily diary. The dairy is important because unlike most literature about midwifes and daily life, it is a record kept by a female and ties birth with ordinary life. Martha's diary tames midwife stereotypes held by male ideology during the eighteenth-century and gives the reader a first hand look into the duties performed by a midwife. Through Martha's diary, the social construction of childbirth in every day life is shown. Her entries show the importance of a midwife and ...

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