Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Laura Ulrich rewrites history, using an overlooked diary written by a midwife 200 years ago. In 1928, Virginia Woolf (in A Room of One's Own)complained they we don't know how women in the past spent their time. We don't, and it's extraordinary how much a little bit of information about these women can change the way we think about society, women and history. The brilliance of this book lies in its ordinariness. Martha Ballard's life is not described in such detail because of anything she did that was unusual or exceptional. She was an ordinary women who worked hard and raised her family like so many have done. No, the fascination comes from the fact that such women (and their impact on society and social change) are usually invisible to us. Sometimes, as a modern woman, I find it hard not to despise many of the women you read about in history books: pathetic, passive, ignorant, helpless, victims, or Great Heroines. Martha Ballard is just like a woman we might know today: bossy, sensible, often (I would imagine) fairly stubborn. She had great influence on the society in which she lived. It's a mistake to think that this book is only for feminists or history buffs(as some have written) just because it's about a woman. It involves a qualitative shift in the way we think about history, and as such it demands our respect. This is one of the most important books I have read for years, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Thanks to gifted historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, I hear the voice of Martha Ballard as she goes about her productive, meaningful life in late 1700s Maine. I also feel her shining, transcedent spirit nearby as I read. Martha's diary is filled with the cycle of neverending chores that still characterize the lives of women today. As caretakers, we cook, launder, clean, over and over again. Martha's diary also opens our eyes to the lot of our earlier sisters as they lived through (if fortunate, they lived) an 18-month to two year cycle of pregnancy, birth, and lactation.

Martha ministers to them both in body and spirit; and the entire, closely bonded community of post-colonial wives and mothers is depicted in her story.

"I returned home at 10 hour morn, find my house alone and everything in Arms. Did not find time to still down till 2 pm." How this still resonates as women try combine work in the outside world with the unrelenting demands of domesticity!

Kudoes to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for this brilliantly edited, extremely necessary part of American history---a woman's life as told by observant, compassionate, hard-working Martha Ballard. Ulrich has included statistics of maternal and infant mortality that cause one to question the wisdom of the "heroic intervention" style of obstetrics that came later: Martha experienced only about a 4% loss rate, which stands up impressively until the days when antibiotics reduced the mortality rate to insignificance.

We've heard stories of how our great-great-great-grandmothers rose before dawn, plowed the lower forty, baked biscuits and then raised a barn, all before noon. A Midwife's Tale seems to confirm this. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich draws upon a remarkable document, the diary of a New England midwife, Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, who recorded the details of her daily life between 1785 to 1812. Ulrich deconstructs Ballard's laconic entries to reveal the complex routine of a woman who kept a household for seven people, ran a cottage textile workshop, and served as midwife at the birth 816 infants during her 27 years of practice. (There were male physicians in the community, but they rarely intervened in this woman-dominated ritual unless there was a breech or still-birth to be dismembered.) Ballard's ministrations, in fact, went far beyond birthing to the practice of general medicine. She could apply poultices, lance abscesses, expel worms, induce vomiting, stop hemorrhages, bring down a fever, and - all else failing -- gently close the eyes of the dead. In this way, writes Ulrich, the midwife "mediated the mysteries of birth, procreation, illness, and death."

With the help of collateral documents, Ulrich fills out Ballard's entries to give a more complete view of society in a milling village of the early 1800's. She also tracks Ballard's personal fortunes from the height of her prestige into eventual decline. The author takes pains to point out how much of this misfortune was inevitable (the elderly of any era are of necessity pushed from the center to the circumference of society) and how much was due to the hand dealt by fate: Martha had her daughters before her sons; the girls married and moved out, leaving their mother the care of three rather loutish males. The episode underscores how necessary a reliable pool of labor was to the running of any rural household; southern families had their slaves; northern families had their daughters. Historian John Lewis Gaddis calls this book "an exercise in historical paleontology [that] succeeds brilliantly." Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history.

I have read "A Midwife's Tale" so many times that it has fallen apart. I went on Amazon to see if I could find a hard copy to replace the one I wore to pieces. When I saw the reviews, I decided to put my two cents in. I was also compelled to puchase the video based on this book. The video did an excellent job of translating the book to video and putting a voice to Martha. Although I was intrigued by the concept of a complete diary of a midwife, I was not prepared for the impact it would have on me. As an alternative health care provider, I often use herbs to help patients and have actually assisted in the delivery of 3 babies. I am an older woman that has raised my children and now have grandchildren. Martha's life parallelled mine in so many ways. She had a hard time finding help, her children were less then obedient, particularily her eldest son. Premarital sex was rampant. Her husband seemed to often ignore her. He was perfectly happy in jail while she froze at home while her children neglected her. Her faith in a God carried her so many times. I began to casually start reading chapters whenever I was having a particularily difficult day, thinking to myself, "I wonder what challenge Martha overcame this chapter?" She touched my life in such a tender, loving, healing way even though our lives were seperated by 100's of years. I wonder if she ever thought who would read her diary in the future and what an inspiration she would be? I offer this book as a gift of a wonderful woman's life.

Please disregard the 2 stars in the rating. It is a 5 star book. The system automaticaly put 2 stars and would not let me change it.

I can't say enough about how wonderful this book is and how much I enjoyed reading it. This book would be a wonderful gift for anyone in the medical profession. It is a fascinating account of an amazing woman facing the challenges of life in early Maine as well as the every day facts of life necessary for survival. She contributed immensely to life itself as she was the midwife to hundreds of, if not more, women and the birth of their children.

For myself, I used it as a genealogical tool because that is the area of the country where all of my ancestors came from. It is facinating to know the trials and tribulations as well as the joys of our ancestors.

Priscilla Paul

Memphis

Ulrich's book is a moving account in an underexplored area of American History--the lives and economies of early American women. This book is a double triumph--Martha Ballard kept a detailed diary for almost three decades and Ulrich rescued the dairy from oblivion to create a luminous work of scholarship. This book was moving and engaging beyond almost any work of history I have ever read. Nothing else I have ever read has given me a better feeling of what it would be like to live as a woman in those days. What a triumph!

In A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich finds a character who is at turns heroic, strong and exceptional. Yet, it is in the mundane details of Ballard's life as recorded in her diary that Ulrich finds her real value for a history of 18th century America. Historians had looked over Ballard's diary before, but they had never quite known what to do with the virtually endless trivia it recorded. However, Ulrich notes in the introduction that "it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies." (9)

Ulrich takes the diary as a starting point, as a kind of organizing principle, for a deep excavation of 19th century American life. Beginning each chapter with a series of entries from a specific period un Ballard's life, Ulrich skillfully weaves in supporting materials - legal documents, diaries and memoirs of Ballard's contemporaries - to perform a deft exegesis of the diary text. By deconstructing the ordinary details of Ballard's life in this context, Ulrich succeeds in constructing an extraordinary story.

Ballard was a unique and important figure in her community of Hallowell, Maine. Her vocation as a midwife and healer gave her a considerable amount of prestige among her neighbours, as well as access to their lives at an extremely intimate level. And by assembling the wealth of minutiae about Ballard's daily life and work, Ulrich has succeeded in constructing an extraordinarily rich and intimate account of life and society at the northern reaches of the United States in the 18th century.

To a great extent, A Midwife's Tale deals largely with the domestic dimension of that society but, Ulrich points outs, social and economic life was experienced largely within the home at the time. Though there were clear divisions between masculine and feminine economic activity, she writes, "In both realms, training was communal and cumulative, work was cooperative, even though performed in private households, and the products remained in the local economy." (79) As a wife and mother, Ballard produced garden produce and linen cloth with the assistance of her extended family, to trade with other families in the area. Though she traveled largely in a community of women, her social and economic experience frequently overlapped with masculine activities - in trade and in the operation of her family's mills.

It is in these interstices, and in the complex and gendered relations of power that Ulrich's work is particularly rich. Though, as a woman, she did not participate directly in the political life and masculine economy of Hallowell, as a midwife and healer, she interacted with the men who occupied those social spaces, and their families on a daily basis. The family was the central organizing unit of Hallowell society and Ballard's privileged position gave her access to how those families - and thus the society - were constituted and structured.

Though Ulrich's book manages to cover an impressively wide and rich territory - from the nature of 18th century household economies, the limited, but real power that women could deploy through maternity, to the complex legal and social obligations that knit the society together - the most revealing parts of the book deal with the interactions of social and scientific medicine and the medicalization of childbirth. She notes "In the diary, the transition to medical obstetrics is a far more complex process than appears in secondary literature." (180) Ballard's experiences underscore just how complex that process was, with the protean relationship that was at times an alliance and at times conflict between the social healer and the professional physician.

If A Midwife's Tale has a flaw, it is even more trivial than the endless rounds of teas Ballard recorded in her journal. Despite her highly nuanced treatment of gender in the domestic and economic life of 18th century Maine, Ulrich burdens her work with a not-entirely-necessary epilogue that tries to connect Ballard's practice to her heirs Mary Hobart and Clara Barton, who rebelled against the gender roles of the following century to establish themselves as medical practitioners. While Ballard might well have been an inspiration to these "pioneers," the epilogue seems to reduce the complexity of her story to a prologue to a more traditional women's history. Nevertheless, though this is a burden, it is a light one.

I found comfort in Martha. The coming and going of her days passing between my fingers with the turning of the page. I had the good fortune to find this book at the very time I returned to college. One of my classes is an American History class. I spoke to my professer and told him that while he did a fine job telling the facts, Martha filled me in on the "gossip". She made the words and events real. I found the reading of this to be a pleasure,I shared her with anyone who was willing to hear my "Martha" fact of the day and hit a sorrow at realizing the end of the book ment the end of this fine women. Can one grieve and feel a loss for someone unknown that died so long ago? In a way I did. Read the book and keep the spirit of her and all the others alive!

Nearly a decade after this book won the Pulitzer Prize, I still recommend it frequently to anyone interested in women's history, Early American life or Maine history. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich uses the diary of an 18th century midwife in the Maine woods as her primary resource to weave a vivid picture of what life was like just after the Revolutionary War. As an academic work, there are 45 pages of footnotes at the back of the book, but they were so interesting I used two bookmarks while reading!

Perusing a personal diary (portions of the diary are included
in the book) which contain sentence fragments and short
descriptions of the day's activity, Laurel Ulrich's book,
"A Midwife's Tale: The Diary of Martha Ballard," is a
fascinating reconstruction in the life of Martha Ballard,
a midwife who, during the Revolutionary War, is
characterized as a feminist in her own right. By choice,
many women left their homes to join their husbands to help
fight the war; others were driven away by Brittish soldiers;
but Martha Ballard, unaffected by the War and American
Politics, resided at home with her husband, family, and
friends. Incredibly, Ulrich writes in narrative style that
Martha Ballard had performed in 27 years more than 800
deliveries in and around Hallowell, Maine, produced and
distributed drugs, prepared burials and dissections, at a
time when medicine was in its infancy. This is a true story
of a woman who had been independent, strong, and productive
throughout her life. In the environment surrounding
Martha's world, "A Midwife's Tale" also portrays a 'women's
community' that characterizes an almost perfect social and
economic ideal of their time. The winner of numerous
prizes, historians, history enthusiasts, and feminists will
find this 352 page book (not including endnotes and index)
a wonderful and interesting read.